Autodesk’s rollout of its 2020 software releases continues! Last month I introduced What’s New in AutoCAD 2020 for Govies, and we continue with a breakdown of what’s new in Autodesk Revit 2020.
Revit plays a critical role in enabling the process of building information modeling (BIM) on government projects. Many government agencies and organizations have already begun to use BIM for the AEC lifecycle and the GSA has established BIM standards and templates for Revit to further extend the use of BIM in the creation of high performance/high design buildings and through the building lifecycle management (BLM) phase.
If you’re already a Revit user, or considering it as part of your BIM process, you’ll be excited to know that the 2020 release includes over 25 new features and enhancements! As usual, the updates reflect requests from users submitted to the Revit Ideas page and other innovations that are designed to help users create, optimize, and connect.
I won’t get into all 25 updates, you can view them all here. Instead, I’ll explore some of the notable ones.
Connect 2D Data to BIM and More
Building on the “connect” theme, Revit 2020 is designed to smooth collaboration and project delivery by connecting data and people. In particular, Revit now supports PDF underlay so you can insert a 2D PDF into Revit from any source and snap to the PDF to model new elements based on the 2D data. This was the number one request among the Revit Ideas submissions.
Revit 2020 also supports Sketchup 2018 import which makes for a more efficient workflow to connect early stage design intent done in Sketchup to Revit.
Also new is Cloud Models for Revit. This feature allows you to save your non-workshared, local model to a selected project in BIM 360 at the click of a button.
Finally, for MEP, the new export fabrication data function in the Revit Extension for Fabrication add-in lets you generate CSV output to be used in spreadsheets or other data environments directly from Revit.
Create and More Accurately Capture Design Intent
In support of the “create” theme, Revit 2020 includes several new features that let you create more accurate and detailed documentation that more closely depicts your design intent. For example, improvements to the electrical design workflow let you model the connection of panels through feed-through lugs. This makes it easier for designers to create a better model of electrical distribution support systems to support analysis.
Revit also includes new electrical homerun wiring improvements, giving you more control over arrowheads and tick marks so you can create electrical documentation that’s easier to understand and use.
Another new feature allows you to create more advanced wall geometry like elliptical and curtain walls in your model.
Also new is the addition of higher fidelity modeling for detailing, fabrication, and construction of concrete. This includes improved rebar copy and move logic for more predictable behavior when copying and moving shape-driven rebar and enhanced multi-bar annotations for planar parallel freeform rebar sets and concrete faces.
There are also several steel connection improvements in Revit 2020, such as the ability to propagate steel connections so you can quickly add similar steel connections to your project. You can also automatically create structural steel connections using Dynamo. Finally, existing dimensioning and tagging tools have been extended to help you create more accurate and readable engineering drawings for structural steel.
Optimize and Automate
Many of the new features in Revit 2020 are designed to decrease the time spent on repetitive tasks while increasing high-quality output.
The new path of travel tool, for example, helps you easily calculate the distance and time it takes for people to move from one point to another in the model. This provides useful insight into how people move in a building or navigate a space to analyze design performance.
We already mentioned the Dynamo extension above, but now Dynamo 2.1 is included with Revit for a more unified experience.
Many top user requests have also been met including the ability to copy and paste legends across sheets and improved OR in view filters so you can focus on parts of your model with higher specificity. You can also schedule elevation of elements and use those values in view filters thus streamlining the ability to interact with elements in the properties palette.
These are just a few of the features and updates, check out the full list here.
