AutoCAD VS Revit – Why is everyone turning to Revit?

So you know what’s the basic difference between AutoCAD and Revit it’s the difference between a knife and a potato peeler.

Yes, a knife will peel a potato it will also cut the meat it will cut the rope and occasionally it will bring mayhem to your enemies.

On the other hand a potato peeler will not cut the potato it won’t cut the rope and it’s pretty useless as far as self-defense goes, but it will do one hell of a job when it comes to peeling potatoes, it will make it fun enjoyable and you’ll just ask yourself why haven’t you started using it a lot earlier, so before this becomes a late-night infomercial about potato peelers what I’m trying to say is that AutoCAD is basically a general purpose drafting software that a whole host of engineers use and architect structural and engineers or MEP specialists are just one of those engineers that use this tool so what I’m trying to say is that AutoCAD is basically a knife.

Revit is basically a purpose-built tool for creating project documentation necessary for a building to be built because of this Revit works much better as a tool for producing project documentation, AutoCAD basically works with vectors which is a fancy way of saying the lines and these lines are really done well they’re not done but they’re not smart the geometry they’re just dead geometry and on the other hand what Revit uses is smart the geometry elements use in Revit are kind of created to mimic real-life building elements so what does this all mean well let’s look for just a basic example let’s look at the wall as it is the most basic element in building construction in AutoCAD you would first need to kind of put some lines to create a boundary of this wall then you would need to some additional lines just to represent all of the layers of the wall and the OT of that problem caches to represent the materials used but that’s not enough then you would have to kind of copy this around all over your building and then that’s just the beginning of the story that’s just the graphical part you would need somebody to come in and calculate all the areas of the wall if you want to paint it or just to calculate all the paint materials and other materials you will need to calculate the volume of the walls you know how much brick you’re going to be using for it you would need somebody to create all of the Excel spreadsheets and calculate all of the weights of different segments of this wall that you have then you need to import it in some structural calculation program and you will need to give somebody calculate all of the structural attentions inside of this wall, so basically at the end of the day you have just a bunch of different documents a bunch of different files in different versions of files they turn that are really not connected in any way they’re not linked up they should be linked up they should work together but you’re not so whenever you decide to create a change in the project base if you want to move some wall make it shorter perhaps somebody needs to physically go in and update all of the Excel spreadsheets and then update all of the structural analysis so basically this is very prone to user error or human error.

On the other hand Revit works much more efficiently so basically in Revit you need to create a new wall type and this is where you place all the materials which basically add up to all of the layers of the wall then you just say how much these materials will cost what’s their weight what are their thermal efficiency and your primitive done you just need to pick two points on your drawing and just place that wall and whenever you change that wall, all of the information on all of your calculations as far as building costs efficiency analysis, structural analysis, everything will automatically update because everything is linked up because it’s in one file so you’re just working with one singular file that holds all of these different kinds of information work well even the graphical information and all of the information as far as calculations and all the text and all of that stuff basically non graphical information so when you’re working in Revit unless you made some initial mistakes while just inserting data into that single wall type, you really have no chance for user error nobody needs to update all of the different files everything is inside of one file so there’s no possibility for human error and the building’s aren’t just built by architects that are not really just designed by architects they’re built by a whole host of different professions so you’ve got your architects, you’ve got your structural engineers, you’ve got somebody who – that does all the thermal analysis you’ve got somebody for an MEP specialist perhaps and a bunch of different professions so you’re always working with a bunch of different people and Revit allows everybody to work inside of a same file so this again eliminates chance for user error and also eliminates a chance for clashes so whenever you’re building a building and you’re just designing it in AutoCAD usually you would have some templates that you kind of share around to all of the engineers working on this building and then there’s a possibility that they might place something maybe an electrical engineer and an MEP specialist places a something in the same place and then if they don’t figure it out before building is based arts being built they’re going to get a situation where on the job site they’re going to have a clash and then they need to fix it and it costs a lot more to fix something when you’ve already started building the building then in the initial like design phases and as far as all this teamwork goes AutoCAD only allows one person to work in one DWG file at a time when Revit allows multiple users to use the same file at the same time so it’s a lot more efficient so you’re probably asking yourself why doesn’t everybody just learn Revit immediately? why does anybody learn AutoCAD in the first place? well Revit is a very complex software so you need a long long time to really understand it and learn it so when people are just in school for most of the school work you don’t really need to use all of the revit features you’re probably only using like 10 or 20% so for most people it just makes more sense to use AutoCAD at that time but then when they finish school they quickly start realizing that all the other 80% of Revit features are actually quite useful in the real world and that’s when people really start getting into Revit and start learning it.

At the end of the day I’m not really saying that AutoCAD is a bad software I’m just saying when it comes to a building design and getting just all of the project documentation for buildings, Revit works much more efficiently and that doesn’t mean that AutoCAD is a useless piece of software it’s actually an amazing software and a lot of different professions use it and it will stay alive for a long long time and it will be used for a long long time because it’s just so versatile and just anybody who needs any technical documentation or graphic technical drawings will need to use AutoCAD and it is simple enough for anybody to learn it in quite a quick time so I suggest you learn it even if you don’t plan on using it all the time or any time but you really need to know it because a lot of a lot of experts still use AutoCAD mostly so in order to be able to collaborate with those people you would need to have some basic understanding of how AutoCAD works and it’s quite simple to use so there’s really no excuse for not learning it.

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