Delivering the BIM Promise - Cadalyst AEC

Revit's 2009 offerings aim to realize the potential of building information modeling.

May 8, 2008 By:Heather Livingston

With its 2009 Revit product line, Autodesk's goal is to fulfill the potential and promise of the building information model (BIM), according to Rick Rundell, AIA, director of product marketing for Autodesk Building Solutions and fellow Cadalyst contributor. Through the acquisition of some key applications, Autodesk is leveraging Revit to provide AEC users with a full spectrum of analysis tools that can not only enhance collaboration across building disciplines, but also deliver a project with greater accuracy, speed, and efficiency.

"We spent the last few years making tools to capture building information and design information productively and easily so that they are very capable of producing the documents that architects need and putting in capabilities for collaboration and workflow," Rundell said. "We'll continue working on those things of course, but now that we have those things well established, the real focus is moved to enabling better design decision making through analysis."

The Offerings
On April 16, the company announced that it was shipping its 2009 product line for BIM, which includes Revit Architecture, Revit Structure, Revit MEP, AutoCAD Civil 3D, and Autodesk NavisWorks. According to the company, Revit Architecture 2009 includes sustainable design and energy analysis capabilities to assist with quantifying energy consumption and recycled content, among other measures. "The area that we have focused on is supporting sustainable design," Rundell explained. "Some of the most powerful things that can be done there have to do with quantifying the amount of energy that a building will consume, how lighting in the building behaves, and the material content — the same [information] that cost estimators want to know." Autodesk also reports that Revit Architecture's Mental Ray high-performance rendering engine also provides photorealistic images (see image) with greater ease and speed.

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