Revit Model: A Case Study

Ahern recently completed a project for a large hospital that required an as-built Revit model. Revit is an Autodesk design and documentation software application that is used by most architects utilizing building information workflows in a cooperative and universal environment. The vision of the hospital, architectural, and engineering firm that Ahern worked with on this project, was that the as-built from all of the disciplines would be delivered in a fully integrated model using a single file format. This would be accomplished with the Revit model.   

The Ahern team partnered with the architect and engineering team early on in the design phase of the project. It was Ahern’s responsibility to utilize the fabrication software within the normal AutoCAD environment to assist in the system designs and to produce the construction document sets. After producing the construction document set, Ahern took the modeling information in AutoCAD through the coordination and construction phase of the project.

When it came time to complete the as-built phase of the process, Ahern’s team coordinated a work flow to move all of the information from AutoCAD to Revit.  In recent years, there has been a fairly large advance in how various software formats are able to communicate with each other. The 2016 version of Revit allows for the fabrication software that is used in AutoCAD to be used in native Revit as a fabrication part, but not all of the parts and information would be able to be transferred from AutoCAD to Revit. Ahern’s team was able to transfer about 99% of the over 60,000 items pertaining to the job to Revit. Ahern did need to fill in the gaps from the items that were not transferred.

After the transfer from AutoCAD to Revit, Ahern set up the Revit model so that it would integrate with the other models produced by the architect and engineer.

• All of the items in the model needed to be assigned to a work set. This would assist in how the views would display.
• All of the items needed to be assigned a level. This would insure that the elevation would be accurate on each item.
• All of the items that had asset tags needed to have that information added to the item. This was done so that in the future the model could be integrated into a building automation software.
• All of the schedules needed to be completed.

This is the first time Ahern had to complete this type of model. With hard work and dedication, a high quality fully integrated Revit model derivable was produced.

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