The New Release of Revit Architecture and a Viewpoint From Aconex

A few months ago, we looked at the highlights of Autodesk’s 2011 product portfolio launch webcast, which summarized the main enhancements in the 2011 versions of AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max. Subsequently, we took a more detailed look at Autodesk’s 2011 AEC solutions that were presented at the Autodesk AEC Technology Day, including enhancements to the Revit platform as well as each of the individual Revit disciplinary applications, Revit Architecture, Revit Structure, and Revit MEP, along with enhancements to AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, Navisworks, Buzzsaw, AutoCAD Civil 3D, and AutoCAD Map 3D. This month's product review takes a more detailed look at Revit Architecture 2011 and explores its wide variety of useful enhancements spanning across all areas of the application, including a concerted attempt to fix the interface issues faced by users in the last release and make the UI more modern, new tools and options for conceptual design, several productivity enhancements for design, documentation, and content creation using the Family Editor, improved display options and rendering speed, improvements in linked files and workset visibility control, and expanded API functionality.

Also on the agenda for this month is a Viewpoint article by Dexter Bachelder, Aconex VP Americas, who argues for the need to drive construction project success through neutral, trust-based collaboration. To consistently complete large-scale construction projects on time and on budget, AEC firms have to develop a collaboration strategy and mechanism that will work for all the stakeholders in a project, allowing them to operate efficiently with a level of trust usually developed within a single organization or team.

And finally, we will explore how worksets can be used to help improve the performance of large models in Revit. As pointed out in the review of Revit Architecture 2011, large file sizes still remain one of the key problems for Revit users, so this Tips and Tricks article is very relevant and shows how to use worksets to their fullest potential for large scale projects to handle them more efficiently.

As always, please continue to check out the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get a consolidated view of all the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, AECbytes

August 2010