Sasha Crotty
It’s been a while since we’ve posted a Revit roadmap, so with the release of Revit 2019.1 we felt it was time to give you an update about where we are and where we are going. Let us know what you think!
A few ground rules:
This roadmap may make statements regarding future events and development efforts for our products and services. These statements reflect our current expectations based on what we know today. Our plans are not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services or features and purchasing decisions should not be made based upon these statements. We do not assume any responsibility to update this roadmap to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the publish date of this roadmap.
To better explain the roadmap, we’ve grouped our plans by theme:
- Create – The act of model creation
- Efficiently create models that better capture design intent
- Engage in a delightful, intuitive, and contextual experience
- Model to higher degrees of accuracy and detail
- Optimize – Better buildings and processes
- Analyze, simulate, and iterate to optimize designs
- Work more productively with software that automates tasks
- Have more time to design with more reliable and efficient software
- Connect – Integrating teams and products
- Connect project teams with AEC-focused collaboration tools
- Enable multidisciplinary workflows to help deliver projects
- Extend BIM to all phases of the project lifecycle
We use themes, colors, and icons to keep track of the roadmap details.
Delivered with Revit 2019.1
Revit Idea Delivered with Revit 2019.1
Planned (Some features may be available for testing in Revit Preview)
Accepted Revit Idea (Some ideas may be available for testing in Revit Preview)
CREATE
The Create theme underwent a name change in this update of the Revit roadmap. We previously called this theme “Design,” but quickly realized that our interpretation of the theme went beyond design into fabrication and pre-construction. We wanted to explain better that this theme is about creating project data, no matter the phase of the project.
We’ve add some major projects to our roadmap for this update. We’ve decided that is time to start working on improvements to wall elements since walls are such a critical piece of the project. We are starting slowly with some more straight-forward improvements that have been on Revit Ideas, but behind the scenes will be working to make the data of walls more robust and better serve the future. Our goal is to reduce the need for complex modeling tools (like in-place or massing) and provide better data for quantities and materials as you design for better understanding of the impact of design choices.
For electrical engineers we’re excited to add a few commonly requested items, including improved arrow heads and multi-circuit control to the Revit roadmap. We are excited to start on this journey.
For structural personas, the major Revit 2019.1 rebar distribution improvement makes reinforced concrete detailing in Revit more versatile, addressing the complexity of structural concrete forms for buildings and civil structures. The structural roadmap contains functionality for higher fidelity modeling for detailing, fabrication, and construction of cast-in-place and precast concrete. The steel roadmap contains improvements that will make the design-intent model sufficiently accurate for fabricators to use in their bidding and steel purchasing decisions when coordinating with engineers.
OPTIMIZE
Through the Optimize theme we’re looking for opportunities that enable you to do MORE and do it BETTER. In other words, improving the ease and productivity with which you can work, while also helping you work towards delivering better buildings.
As part of our continued investments in making your day to day work more efficient, in Revit 2019.1 we released the ability to snap to and align section views. This functionality makes it a lot easier to document your design by placing your section exactly where you need it. A few projects we added in this area include the ability to Zoom the text in schedule views, so that it’s easier to read detailed schedules and work with higher resolution screens, also making it easier to create beautiful visualizations in Revit. This includes enabling materials with higher resolution textures as well as including more advanced physical materials out of the box.
We are also looking at enhancing our existing realistic views for better material display, lighting, and performance. We want you to be truly immersed in your design while working to interact with your design data and see the real-time impact on the quality of the space.
On the analysis side, we are continuing to work on a “path of travel” feature that allows you to see and calculate the shortest distance between two points. Allowing you to visually show the path a person would take to exit a building from a room or show the distance from your desk to the coffee machine (something we all might wish we can when figuring out where to sit). We are thinking of continuing then into analysis of large crowds of people so that you can better understand the impact your design choices have when a large group needs to move into or out of the project.
For MEP, Revit 2019.1 brings multiple performance enhancements. On the roadmap you’ll see a number of items aimed at providing a significantly faster and more complete workflow for mechanical system design and analysis. From better space/zone take off to the definition of key zone-equipment, air and water loop components and relationships in an analytical/schematic form which in turn provides the basis for systems simulation and analysis. To enable that we’re leveraging EnergyPlus through the OpenStudio SDK which provides an open script-based way to control systems simulation and analysis behavior thereby making it a highly customizable way to support a wide variety of needs.
Another important theme is modeling automation. A particular focus is automating the transition of structural models from design intent to a higher level of fidelity containing steel connections.
CONNECT
The Connect theme emphasizes the importance of connecting project teams and creating better multi-product workflows. Our goal is to improve the processes in which you collaborate and exchange information to get things done. In this area, we focus on building better experiences for sharing data across Autodesk tools, supporting industry standards like IFC and PDF, and giving project teams tools that allow them to work better together.
An example of this work in Revit 2019.1 is the Civil 3D Terrain to Revit Topography workflow we introduced with BIM 360 Document Management. This workflow empowers civil engineers and architects to work together by sharing a surface from the engineer and allowing the architect to add elements to the site. The big benefit is that when the site is updated with changes from the engineer, the architect doesn’t lose their changes.
We aren’t done with site workflows though. We are planning on continuing down the path of improving how architects and engineers work together with enhancements to the Civil to Revit workflow. We are looking at making Revit’s coordinate workflows simpler and easier to use. We also want to make this Civil Site workflow bi-directional so that the Architect can send their building footprint to the engineer and to improve the ability for Architects to grade sites with automated tools so that site proposals can be shared and worked on collaboratively.
We also are continuing to look at other workflows and products to make an open, collaborative platform by supporting linking and underlay of PDF files so that you can work better with data coming from outside of Revit.
In MEP Fabrication we are continuing to make improvements to fabrication modeling in Revit especially relating to connector behavior. A significant effort is also being made to enable better management of the fabrication databases on Autodesk Forge. This will enable wider sharing of fabrication content in controlled ways that will support Revit as well as enable an ecosystem of partners to meet specific fabrication workflow needs.
Structural workflows continue to be enhanced to connect design to fabrication for structural steel and precast. We are looking to better connect Engineers and Fabricators in a model-based process increasing efficiency and reducing coordination costs.
Further, we are pleased to see more and more of you starting to take advantage of the capabilities of BIM 360 Design. In Revit 2019.1 we introduced the new Revit Home which allows easier access to your Revit Cloud Worksharing models and replaces the start screen. While we were making these changes, we improved the central vs. local file experience based on feedback and aligned it more closely to Revit Cloud Worksharing. No more accidental central file edits! Next up on the Revit roadmap for Revit Cloud Worksharing is notifications letting you know if someone is actively syncing, the ability to easily upgrade your project to a new Revit version without needing to create a new project, and a continued emphasis on resiliency because we understand how mission-critical this service is to your work.
HOW DO I GET INVOLVED?
There are a variety of other discussions and work related to connecting workflows from design to fabrication and beyond. If you don’t see something listed here, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t on our radar. If you have specific suggestions for ways we can make the product better, we encourage you to submit them to Revit Ideas.
If you would like to provide feedback on these capabilities, we would be happy to consider your participation in our beta program (Revit Preview). Reach out to revit.preview.access@autodesk.com to request to join Revit Preview and we will review your request.
We continue to post updates periodically, and your feedback helps! Let us know what you think.
Thanks!
The Factory