From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

Introducing building information modeling (BIM) - Revit Architecture Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2020: Essential Training for Architecture (Metric)

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Introducing building information modeling (BIM)

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- [Instructor] So I know you're likely anxious to get into Revit right away, but before we do let's talk about a few high-level concepts first. For starters, just exactly what is BIM? Well as you may know, BIM stands for Building Information Modeling. And this is a term that's been in the industry for many years now and it was actually coined by Autodesk several years ago. It's used to describe the process of creating virtual models that represent actual building facilities. Now Revit is often highly touted as purpose-built for Building Information Modeling, and this is certainly true, but if often leads to some confusion that somehow Revit and BIM equal the same thing. Revit and BIM are not the same thing. Revit is a tool to help us achieve BIM, and BIM is actually a process that we follow to create building model data that is essentially two things, coordinated and computable. Now, these are the two most important tenants of BIM in my opinion. If all the parts and pieces that make up your BIM project are fully coordinated with one another, and don't require any manual updates to keep them in sync, and if you have a robust and rich data source of information that can be used both internally by the system and exported out to the project team to do meaningful computations then you have BIM. Now some of those computations might be things like energy analysis or calculating structural loads. You might want to do a lighting analysis or heating and cooling. Any of these things become possible when you have a rich and robust BIM. Now there's lots of different ways you can achieve BIM and Revit is an excellent tool to help us achieve this because it does many of the things that I've described natively. Now it's important to understand that 3D is not the only component that makes BIM, BIM. Often when you hear BIM in the same sentence you'll hear people talking about 3D and you could be left with the impression that in order to be BIM you have to be 3D and somehow if you have 3D then you automatically have BIM. Now don't get me wrong, 3D is very important. If your primary goal is to perform clash detection between, say your structure and your mechanical systems, or if you to make sure that your stair tower fits in your overall architecture, 3D can be pretty important. If you need to do a visualization, and do high-quality renderings and so forth, then 3D is going to be pretty important. However, 3D is not the only aspect that makes BIM special. Remember that it's B-I-M, and I think the "I" in BIM is sometimes even more compelling that the M, so think about cost estimating tasks, or specification writing, or calculating energy loads, or doing a heating and cooling analysis. All of these things require data and the data is what we mean by the I in BIM, so when you have all of this data, instead of manually computing all the various things that we need to do to get proper design, why not let the computer do what it does best, compute stuff. So that is what the I in BIM is all about. So again, let's not focus on just modeling, modeling is certainly important and compelling, but let's also think about the I in BIM, the information. So if you've got these two together in a fully coordinated package, in a way that Revit gives us, then that's when we've got a fully implemented BIM solution. So with that introduction in mind, let's go ahead and jump into Revit.

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