Newforma Add-in for Autodesk Revit

Newforma announced the release of their eighth edition on January 18th (won't be released to customers till the beginning of the 2nd Quarter of 2011). Among the highlights was one that I thought was a nice development for Revit projects.

Building Information Management and Spatial Index activity centers
New Building Information Management and Spatial Index activity centers provide project teams with a spreadsheet interface for editing sheets, spaces and properties from a Revit building information model. Bi-directional synchronization is provided through the optional Newforma® Add-in for Autodesk® Revit®. (features of which are further described here below but via a link on their site)

...snip
Room and spatial data management
Connect room and space planning spreadsheets with live Revit models to enable programming and Revit modeling staff to work asynchronously on a coordinated project room and space program.

Punch list integration
Connect space and system elements in the model with the Spatial Index activity center in Newforma Project Center to provide a consistent, unambiguous framework for the location of punch list and site observation items throughout the facility.

Document control and revision management
Connect sheet planning worksheets with the live Revit models to manage the revision and distribution of all record document deliverables derived from the model.

Resolution of design problems
Link action items and markups created in Newforma Project Center to building elements in Revit to track and more efficiently resolve design challenges with other disciplines.

Discoverable design-process audit trail
A by-product of a Newforma-enabled BIM process is a discoverable project audit trail that links building elements in Revit to a decision trail of information, emails and documents that support the final outcome.
...snip

The room and spatial data connection sounds particularly interesting!

Starting a Project - Two Pieces of Advice

There are lots of things to consider when starting a project. Doing so with Revit is no different. Here's a couple comments that will save you some trouble later.

Number One - Forget about True North!

Revit has a bias or assumption that you are going to ignore True North when you start out, probably because you don't have a survey yet. Sustainable design demands that you think about True North for proper sun orientation but let's just pretend for a moment that you are more interested in making it easy to document the building than its sun orientation. This means that Revit has assigned every plan oriented view (stock templates) to Project North. Model your building so that it is easy, horizontal or vertical as opposed to at 45 degrees. Don't worry about True North because you can define the True North orientation quite easily later, using a couple different approaches.

Number Two - Model separate buildings in separate files!

It is quite literally a major pain in the back side to move a building in a project after a significant amount of work has been done. There are some things that are unavoidable but changing the position of an entire building is a trivial matter when they are separate and linked into a master site file. Use the site file to organize separate building relationships. If they change, move the building, update the building's shared coordinates and move on.

The poor sap who didn't do this is now spending several hours trying to select every last little thing in a multitude of views to reposition their building while you are sipping a drink at happy hour at the Marriott with a few dozen friends. Here's a video that summarize these two points.

Forewarned is at happy hour...or soccer practice...or the archery range...