Autodesk Intros New Revit 2018—Strengthens Multidiscipline Design

Autodesk this week has announced the latest version of their flagship BIM application, Revit 2018. The focus of the new version is strengthening support for working with AEC disciplines and extending that to fabrication and construction.

Revit 2018 adheres to the public roadmap published by Autodesk in the recent past. The roadmap defines forward-looking themes that help guide and prioritize development of Revit features and functionality with input coming directly from end users via the Revit Ideas Page.

The Benefits of Subscription Model

Autodesk as a company is wholly committed to its software subscription model with benefits coming to users at a more frequent pace than the traditional delivery model. Revit 2018 builds on new functionalities that came to Revit 2017 in dot 1 and dot 2 point releases.

Multidisciplinary Role

With this release Autodesk took Revit 2018 firmly into a multidisciplinary direction, delivering new tools that help designers and engineers provide more accurate design intent models and give detailers the ability to develop models to a higher level of fidelity for fabrication and installation purposes.

01 – The Dynamo Player is now more integral in Revit 2018.

“Revit 2018 is optimized to be part of a foundational BIM portfolio that serves the major design disciplines of architecture, MEP, and structure, and the major material trades with MEP, steel, and concrete,” says Autodesk vice president of BIM products Jim Lynch. “This enables designers, the trades, and contractors to model with greater levels of detail that can help drive the fabrication process more seamlessly.”

Key New Features

In Revit 2018 Autodesk has integrated Dynamo Player, which was previously released with Revit 2017.1. The player software executes scripts created in the Dynamo graphical programming interface, making it easier for users to apply scripts that can extend the Revit model behavior.

Revit 2018 also adds the power of global parameters, helping embed design intent int a model to also apply to radial and diameter dimensions and equality constraints. There is also new coordination model linking letting users employ a Navisworks file as an underlay in Revit, making it easier to coordinate with outside teams that might not be working in Revit.

02 – Autodesk Revit 2018 adds many new engineering and engineer-centric new features including graphical constraints for rebar in 3D views.

A long-time user request has been including Schedules and adds parameters for links and groups, helping users to understand better and quantify a project. This too is now included in Revit 2018.

Integrating Better with McNeel’s Popular Rhino

Architects use McNeel’s Rhino modeler for advanced formed buildings and Autodesk’s Revit 2018 now supports direct Rhino file import along with SAT file import. This will go a long way to linking a common conceptual design environment to Autodesk’s popular Revit.

For Engineers

Revit 2018 advances in many ways for MEP and structural engineers. There are additional controls for steel connections, better workflows for engineering to steel detailer collaboration, helping reduce errors and increasing accuracy with estimating and detailing.

Here are some of the top-level highlights with new engineering or engineer-centric tools:

• Revit users can create steel connections between column, beam, and bracketing using any Revit family, including custom user-defined
• Steel Connections for Revit add-in brings in more than 100 new connections
• New abilities to place rebar accurately into curved or complex concrete shapes
• New SAT file and Autodesk InfraWorks
• Fabrication modeling improvements—model fabrication-ready elements
• Early stage energy requirements can be captured for user-definable space and building types
• Many more engineering improvements

New Multi-story Stair Object

Revit 2018 also introduces a new multi-story stair object that allows architects to more easily create large and complex stair systems.

New railing tools allow designers to accompany railings for an entire stair tower in just one click and propagate edits from one instance to all in a given height group. But Autodesk took this tool a bit further and has enabled the tool to work against topography objects and so it can be used to model fencing, road barriers, or outdoor handrails.

Also for architects, Revit 2017.1 introduced the ability to model in perspective views, and this greatly helps in performing modeling tasks of all kinds but including using the new railings tools.

Availability

Active subscribers to Revit, suites containing Revit or the AEC Collection get access to all updates released during their subscription term and can access the new 2018 release starting today via their Autodesk Account now.

Revit 2018 is available globally for subscribers to Revit, or via a subscription to the Autodesk Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Collection.  Revit 2018 is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.  Availability, pricing and related cloud services vary by country.

More information on new features in Revit 2018 is available here.