Breaking Bad…BIM Habits Webinar Recap
UNIFI Labs is the industry leader not only for their BIM content management platform but for the number of attendees they get for each webinar they host.
The most recent webinar on July 26th covered bad BIM habits and how they can affect your team’s efficiency, velocity, and collaboration. UNIFI had chosen this topic because many designers do not realize they have these BIM problems within their organization. Therefore, it is best to solve them immediately or before they occur.
They had UNIFI’s own Karen Pierce, and Adam Simmons create a presentation going over the top 6 bad BIM habits, then discussed the solutions for these problems.
The top bad BIM habits the audience learned about were:
Treating Revit Like AutoCad – Revit is a brilliant program; it is data rich and can schedule almost everything. With that in mind, many people will still insist on writing the information manually, tagging things with a text note, etc., which creates extra work that does not need to be completed. The solution to the problem is to take full advantage of BIM. Make sure you use Revit’s tools rather than writing the data manually.
Improper Modeling Techniques In Place Families – In-place families are executed within the project and can reference the existing elements. They are generally used to represent elements unique to a specific project. That being said, many still find it challenging to decide when to use an in-place family.
You should avoid using an In-Place Family if:
-You use it more than once (even if it is just twice)
-You can reuse it with a few parameters
-You need to schedule something more than “1 unit.”
If the list above does not apply, do not be afraid to make the extra click and make it into a family. You should directly model in context to the model and create system category content with modeling tools while creating your family.
View Specific Element Overrides – Applying overrides by element should be used only sparingly and as a last resource. When changing the appearance of elements, it should only be when all other options are not available or not worth the time to set up. To avoid this bad BIM habit, make sure you take the time to know how to edit visibility and ALWAYS use temporary hide, not permanent.
Not Using View Templates – This biggest issue we see with Revit users, even though they use view templates, is that they change the settings of a template defined by the BIM coordinator. Did you know that the setting change is effective on the view you are working with and on all the views to which this template is assigned? If you forget to restore the changed settings, all views assigned to this template will be modified according to your changes without being approved by the BIM Manager. A way to solve this problem is always to use a temporary view template.
Duplicating Family Types And Not Naming Properly – Everyone has all seen the term “Naming Convention” used in relation to BIM, and everyone has also all seen people talking about what one is, but when it comes down to the “Why,” it goes relatively quiet. And the “why” is something that gets asked a lot. Not naming family types or families properly leads to the user’s inability to find the content and not understanding it. You must follow project standards, differentiators, and descriptions to ensure you do not have this bad BIM habit.
Not Paying Attention To Model Or Content Health – The two main issues with not paying attention to model health or content health are the issues that come with CAD links and imports and issues ignoring Revit warnings. Warnings protect the integrity of the model and your data. Not all warnings affect performance; less serious ones are only there to inform the user. When confronted with thousands of warnings in a file, you need a timely resolution strategy. This is why UNIFI’s project analytics is the perfect solution; it gives you the necessary visibility to detect and correct model issues before they cause significant problems.
To learn why these bad BIM habits are the worst and to go into more detail about them, you must access the recording of the “Breaking Bad…BIM Habits” webinar in the form below. UNIFI Labs hopes you enjoy the webinar and pat yourself on the back for getting ahead of bad BIM habits; you’re one step closer to making your organization the best you can be. The next step would be implementing UNIFI Labs, the industry-leading content management platform that can save each of your designers an hour a day and save your firm thousands of dollars annually. Start your free trial today at Get Started with UNIFI – UNIFI (unifilabs.com).