Revit: intersections galore!

As I hinted at in my first entry, I've been taking a look at Revit. What I find appealing about it is simple: it knows that a wall is a wall, and a window is a window, not an arbitrary polygon construction. If I move a window, it moves the accompanying hole in the wall, which is one less series of clicks than it would be in Max! Recently, working on a mixed use development in China, I'd just gotten to a decent point in the model after 4 days, when a colleague with Revit (a lethal combination!) thought it would be easier to model it up in Revit and implement several changes that had taken place over the week. It took her a few days at most. Now I don't consider myself to be slow. I've worked in the 3D industry for over 5 years, and have worked on jobs with deadlines from an afternoon to a month. I've never been called slow at doing anything 3D related, so I was a bit disconcerted that what had taken the better part of a week, had been done in Revit in a few days.

Before I go calling Revit miraculous, I will point out that an architect with Revit and a 3D guy with Revit are two very different things. While an architect is concerned with the structure and design of the building, i'm very much concerned with the geometry and quality of model that Revit gives me. Many a time I have received Revit and Sketchup models and the like that have been an absolute nightmare to clean up. Once you get past broken polygons, there's the matter of two polygons being in the same plane. No renderer out there doesn't want to kick you in the balls when it comes across these, and while there are tweaks like ray bias, it still gives you a retarded result - it just looks a bit different. So when I decided to take my learning of Revit a bit more seriously, I approached it with a view to work cleanly as I went.

After doing the Getting Started tutorial, there are 3 things I'd really like to find out about:

- The walls on the ground level are flush with the upper level's floor - the top of it, not the bottom. Not only is this physically impossible, it produces all sorts of intersection errors in a render. Am I meant to apply a secondary slab or finish on top of the structural slab for floorboards or whatever? Or does just that top face have a different material applied to it?

- Similar to the above, the first floor slab sticks out to form a balcony. In doing this, it busts through the side wall, and just at that junction, the top of the lower wall and top of the slab are in the same Z plane.

- How do I go about joining walls? My building might be made of 50 different pieces, but the majority of them I'd be quite happy to have as single solid pieces. This comes into play when using the rounded edges shader in Mental Ray/VRay/miscellaneous renderer.

Here's a screengrab showing the first two points - the tops of the ground walls and the level 1 slab:

Oh god not another blog

I'm afraid so. I finally have a decent amount to say on the matter of architectural visualisation and related topics, that hopefully help other people along the way. Such topics as Why modelling architecture in Max sucks, Revit: The Next Frontier, and VRay: Today's release is Mental Ray's next feature list or variations thereof to come!