Thursday, February 21, 2013

KMN

I work for one of the most prestigious and stable architectural firms in Orange County. I am the staff Revit guru, a position that allows great freedom and flexibility in determining how I approach my work. Currently, I am working with two other team members on a multi-family housing project for Brookfield Homes, a leader among home builders who have embraced Building Information Modeling.

We have two or three weeks remaining before the first CD submittal, with a lot of annotation and detailing still to to do. This is our first Revit 2013 job. Our client has expressed a desire to move to the built in keynoting system; previously we used generic annotations and note blocks. We are using Steve Faust's Keynote Manager on a 30-day trail, while waiting for approval on a site license.

In spite of all these conditions, when my project manager approached me yesterday with a request to use "dumb keynotes" as in CAD, I actually agreed!  I was immersed in another aspect of the project, and had not really considered the problem. I even created an instance-based symbol to be used in conjunction with blocks of text. Near the end of the day, when I paused to consider my accomplishments, I realized to what I had agreed. My first reaction was "KMN"

As with many firms in the housing industry, most of the work here is still being done in CAD. I recently I made a presentation to the staff here, extolling the benefits of BIM. which was entitled, "It's Not Rocket Surgery".

I quickly went to work, importing some notes from previous projects into the new keynote text file database. This morning I showed it to my PM, who is now on board. When he said, "I didn't know where to start" I realized I had failed to give the proper level of support for a new process.

2 comments:

  1. Good Job Jay! Always looking for the best solution.

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  2. Great Jay, I have been using Keynote Manager for over the last year and he just keeps making it better and better. I helped a firm out on a multi-unit 3-story complex using all keynoting text for all modeling on sheets and detailing. Project manager made some changes to materials and other items and Viola! change the keynote text database, reload in revit ----> poof it's all upddated. Gotta love Revit and Keynote Manager. I still use Steve's free version 11.0, although I did try out his version 12.0 (which is a easier to use than 11.0). I am going to get his 12.0 version as I need to support his efforts for making editing the keynote text database file easier for everyone.

    Yman (Chris Yearick) (Revitguru since Revit was 3 months old) Does anyone remember when revit was 3 months old; what year? and what version was it? Quiz of the day :)

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