I don’t know if this is true else where, but here in Denver, many government agencies are now starting to require the use of Revit files (i.e. Denver International Airport). Architects that work with them may need to convert to Revit even if they don’t want to.

Although, I am a long time Mac ArchiCAD user, I have to keep my options open. My former employer recently had to switch from ArchiCAD to Revit. They are running it on Macs using Parallels and seem to be pretty happy with it so far. They also happened to have a a turnover in staff and none of the ArchiCAD users were there anymore, making the transition less painful.

In addition to the clients, the large contractors and many larger architectural consultants are also on Revit. This makes the process of clash detection much less onerous that it would be in ArchiCAD (assuming the others are using Revit). I suspect that for smaller practices, the transition won’t need to occur. But, for many large offices that work for government clients, there may be no way around it. Unless, of course, someone forces the government agencies to not sole source the CAD platform.

On a critical side note from someone who has never used Revit, that user interface looks very clunky and awkward. The oversized ribbon across the top seems very wasteful of screen real-estate, and navigating the model appears to be quite painful with that translucent wheel that you have to click on. Also, repeatedly going to a zoom tool to get a zoom window seems silly. Can’t they just pan, zoom, and scroll using a mouse? I would hope that Revit would have a more intuitive user interface that that. I am used to ArchiCADs 3D navigation which is far and away the best 3D navigation of any program I have used. It’s like playing a computer game.

I don’t know if this is true else where, but here in Denver, many government agencies are now starting to require the use of Revit files (i.e. Denver International Airport). Architects that work with them may need to convert to Revit even if they don’t want to.

Although, I am a long time Mac ArchiCAD user, I have to keep my options open. My former employer recently had to switch from ArchiCAD to Revit. They are running it on Macs using Parallels and seem to be pretty happy with it so far. They also happened to have a a turnover in staff and none of the ArchiCAD users were there anymore, making the transition less painful.

In addition to the clients, the large contractors and many larger architectural consultants are also on Revit. This makes the process of clash detection much less onerous that it would be in ArchiCAD (assuming the others are using Revit). I suspect that for smaller practices, the transition won’t need to occur. But, for many large offices that work for government clients, there may be no way around it. Unless, of course, someone forces the government agencies to not sole source the CAD platform.

On a critical side note from someone who has never used Revit, that user interface looks very clunky and awkward. The oversized ribbon across the top seems very wasteful of screen real-estate, and navigating the model appears to be quite painful with that translucent wheel that you have to click on. Also, repeatedly going to a zoom tool to get a zoom window seems silly. Can’t they just pan, zoom, and scroll using a mouse? I would hope that Revit would have a more intuitive user interface that that. I am used to ArchiCADs 3D navigation which is far and away the best 3D navigation of any program I have used. It’s like playing a computer game.