The architecture, engineering, and construction industries have undergone a transformation thanks to Autodesk Revit, the industry-leading BIM software. The management, building, and design processes are simplified by its cutting-edge characteristics. The incorporation of Chat GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) gives a new level of intelligent workflow automation, substantially increasing the productivity and efficiency of Revit users.
This article explores the benefits and practical implementation of Chat GPT in streamlining Revit workflows.
Real-time Collaboration
The ability to enable real-time collaboration among team members is one of the main benefits of combining Chat GPT with Revit. In the Revit environment, Chat GPT functions as an interactive chatbot to facilitate fluid communication. Team members can communicate within the Revit interface itself to discuss design modifications, feedback, and other topics without having to transition between multiple platforms or applications.
This enhances communication and accelerates decision-making, reducing time delays.
Automated Design Changes
It is now simpler to automate design modifications within Revit because to Chat GPT’s natural language processing capabilities. The desired updates or corrections can be easily specified by users through the chat interface, and Chat GPT will translate and integrate those changes to the Revit model. Repetitive manual tasks are no longer required, which lowers human error and frees up valuable time.
Automated design changes enable rapid iteration and exploration of design options, empowering designers to experiment and iterate efficiently.
Intelligent Recommendations
Within Revit, Chat GPT is able to evaluate the user’s concept of design, understand project constraints, and provide intelligent suggestions. Based on specified parameters, Chat GPT can offer optimized design solutions, material selections, or construction system components by utilizing its machine learning capabilities. This helps to enable data-driven decisions and improves the design quality.
The intelligent recommendations help designers navigate through complex design challenges more effectively and reduce time-consuming trial and error.
Query & Solution
Revit users often face queries regarding software tools, functionalities, or troubleshooting. Chat GPT can act as a virtual assistant, providing instant responses to queries raised through the chat interface. Users can seek assistance on Revit tools, commands, or understand best practices by interacting with Chat GPT.
This reduces dependency on external support channels and empowers users to resolve issues within the Revit environment, minimizing disruptions in workflow.
Workflow Optimization
The integration of Chat GPT may additionally enhance Revit operations. Chat GPT is able to understand repetitive user actions that repeat themselves and offer automation methods. For example, it can find frequently used design templates or create libraries of standard components, making the tedious process for designers simpler.
Additionally, Chat GPT can assist in managing clash detections or running simulations, ensuring a smoother workflow and improved productivity.
Finally, the integration of Chat GPT with Revit introduces a new era of smart workflow automation. The enhanced collaboration, automated design changes, intelligent recommendations, query & solutions, and workflow optimization capabilities empower Revit users to streamline their tasks, boost productivity, and focus more on creative design explorations.
Conclusion
As the technology evolves, Chat GPT’s potential to increase efficiency and provide insights will be a valuable asset in leveraging the full potential of Revit for efficient BIM-based design and construction processes.
For effective teamwork and information sharing in infrastructure projects, Autodesk InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 3D interoperability is essential. A cloud-based tool called Autodesk Docs can make this workflow easier by acting as a central center for data sharing, collaboration, and project management. Here is a description of how to use these tools in combination as well as their advantages.
Process Overview:
Project Setup:
Begin by setting up your projects in Autodesk InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 3D.
Data Exchange:
Autodesk InfraWorks can be used to create conceptual designs and preliminary models. These models can be imported into Revit and Civil 3D for more detailed design and analysis.
InfraWorks to Revit:
Export the InfraWorks model as an .RVT file or use the “Export to Revit” feature, which converts the InfraWorks model into a Revit model.
InfraWorks to Civil 3D:
Export the InfraWorks model as a .DWG file that can be imported into Civil 3D for further design and analysis.
Collaboration with Autodesk Docs:
Autodesk Docs provides a cloud-based platform for document management and collaboration. This is where you can store, share, and manage the design files from InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 3D.
Uploading Files:
Upload the InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 3D design files to Autodesk Docs.
Version Control:
Autodesk Docs helps manage version control, ensuring that team members work with the most up-to-date files.
Collaboration:
Team members can collaborate on the same project using Autodesk Docs, reviewing designs, making comments, and suggesting changes.
Syncing and Updating:
As the project progresses, updates and changes are made to the design models in InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 3D. These updated files can be synced with Autodesk Docs, keeping everyone on the same page.
Data Extraction and Analysis:
Revit and Civil 3D models can be further analyzed and detailed within their respective environments. These models can also be used for construction documentation, visualization, and more.
Benefits:
Efficient Collaboration:
The interoperability between InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 3D, along with Autodesk Docs, streamlines collaboration among different disciplines and stakeholders in the project.
Version Control and Data Integrity:
Autodesk Docs ensures that everyone is working with the most recent versions of the design files, reducing the risk of errors due to outdated information.
Cloud-Based Access:
Autodesk Docs allows team members to access project files from anywhere with an internet connection, enabling remote collaboration.
Reduced Redundancy and Duplication:
Instead of recreating designs in different software tools, the interoperability workflow reduces redundancy by allowing models to be shared and updated seamlessly.
Enhanced Visualization and Analysis:
InfraWorks provides a high-level visual representation of the project, while Revit and Civil 3D offer more detailed design and analysis capabilities, creating a comprehensive workflow.
Streamlined Documentation and Reporting:
Revit and Civil 3D models can be used for generating construction documentation, reports, and visualizations, aiding in project communication.
Time and Cost Savings:
By streamlining data exchange and collaboration, the interoperability workflow can lead to time and cost savings throughout the project lifecycle.
In conclusion, the implementation of Autodesk Docs as outlined in the methodology for interoperability with Autodesk InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 2024 presents a robust and comprehensive approach to enhancing collaboration, efficiency, and accuracy in the realm of infrastructure design and construction. By leveraging Autodesk Docs, teams working on projects that involve InfraWorks, Revit, and Civil 2024 gain access to a centralized and cloud-based platform that streamlines the exchange of crucial project information and documentation.
Individuals residing in major countries spend over 90% of their lives indoors, within buildings that receive limited exposure to daylight. Research highlighting the benefits of daylight on health, happiness, and productivity, suggests that we should be more concerned about the effects of this environmental factor. It is appropriate, therefore, that many countries have requirements and standards to ensure that buildings, and their inhabitants, receive adequate access to daylight. Yet, despite widespread recognition of its importance, for many architects and urban planners, it is both a time-consuming and often frustrating process to understand daylight on their sites. Introducing daylight potential analysis: enabling you to visualize daylight potential in context with the surrounding buildings and environment, in just a few seconds. Meaning you can make fast, smart decisions that enhance daylight on your site.
Autodesk Forma’s daylight potential analysis
Daylight potential analysis simplifies the process of meeting daylight requirements, providing architects and urban planners with quick, valuable insights into the daylight performance of their projects. The analysis’s result provides a Sky Component score that can be used as the base to identify areas with less-than-optimal daylight, as well as those sections where it might be impossible to achieve reasonable daylight conditions. This function also highlights façade areas with inappropriate levels of light that could be modified to improve housing quality.
The analysis function of Forma uses the CIE Standard Overcast Sky Model to predict the light conditions on building surfaces. The Overcast Sky Model represents a heavily clouded day in September and is commonly used in daylight simulations. Considered a conservative representation of light conditions, this model is relevant independent of changes due to the sun and other weather conditions.
Running the analysis
To access the analysis in Autodesk Forma, navigate to the Daylight Potential option in the Analyze menu on the right panel. Open the Analysis Area Selection menu at the top of the right panel and continue to select one or more site limits or zones. This will define the area where the daylight potential analysis will be computed.
How to interpret the analysis results
The result of this analysis, shown as a percentage score, is a Sky Component measure of how much light reaches the facades from the sky. For different points on a building, the Sky Component score indicates how much light would shine through a window placed at those specific points. For daylight falling on vertical facades, the sky component is referred to as Vertical Sky Component (VSC).
The daylight conditions are usually regulated by a component called Daylight Factor, which is computed based on the daylight reaching interior spaces through windows and room layouts in the presence of an overcast sky. Given the inter-relationship between VSC and the Daylight Factor, VSC can also be used as a predictor for daylight conditions.
The table below shows expected daylight conditions for different ranges of VSC scores.
Vertical Sky Component (VSC) default thresholds – For points on facades
Daylight conditions
VSC ≥ 27%
Conventional window designs are usually satisfactory
15% < VSC < 27%
Larger windows/changes are usually needed in the layout
5% < VSC < 15%
Difficult to provide adequate daylight
VSC < 5%
Achieving reasonable daylight is often impossible
Analysis results are divided into color bins using the thresholds from this table. For the darkest areas achieving reasonable daylight is often impossible, while for the lightest areas daylight conditions are usually satisfactory. The maximum score for VSC is around 40%. As for non-vertical faces, the Sky Component scores can go all the way up to 100%.
Additionally, the inspect tool can be beneficial in understanding the Sky Component values for specific points on the building. To enable the Inspect Tool, navigate to the icon on the top right corner of the 3D canvas. You can then proceed to select specific points of interest to be examined.
What is the difference between Forma’s sun hours analysis and daylight potential analysis?
The daylight potential analysis feature works on the basis of how much of the day sky can be seen through the windows and does not take into consideration the sunlight or sun rays. On the other hand, the sun hours analysis works by measuring the number of sunlight hours at different points on the ground and on the building’s façade. If you are building too dense, or have balconies or overhangs above the window, this will negatively affect the amount of daylight in the apartment and can be analyzed and rectified using Forma’s daylight potential analysis.
Powered by Forma’s daylight potential analysis, you can quickly explore a large number of options, and enhance both business and environmental outcomes. Leveraging the effective combination of data-driven insights and compelling visuals, you can not only arrive at informed decisions, but also get all the stakeholders on board right in the early phases of planning. Forma’s analysis capability has therefore significantly simplified the process of designing healthy and high-quality living spaces.
Next to the six-lane highway that bursts westward out of the Holland tunnel, a humble 80-year-old, four-story development is nestled among the sparkling new high-rise condominiums in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Holland Gardens, one of Jersey City’s five public housing complexes, could soon look a lot more like its modern neighbors. After a public-private redevelopment plan was pushed forward this month, the site will be transformed into a 631-unit mixed-income development that preserves public housing and adds affordable senior units, homeownership condos and market-rate apartments.
The entrance to Jersey City Housing Authority’s Holland Gardens, built in 1944.
Photographer: Patrick Spauster/Bloomberg
The plan to replace Holland Gardens represents an innovative process for financing and designing ways to preserve public housing, and aims to avoid the pitfalls of previous redevelopment projects. The blueprint — which could become reality in as soon as four years — emerged from years of community engagement, and will include new amenities, retail outlets, services and community space. While some tenants and local leaders are excited, others aren’t so sure. The rebuilding requires involuntary relocation with a promise of a right to return when the project is completed.
As cities across the US struggle to fund repairs and maintenance for aging public housing, Jersey City’s approach to mixed-income development and community engagement could hold lessons for other city leaders. The project’s success may hinge on how the city manages the relocation process.
“It’s hard to do this well, even with the best of intentions, which it looks like they have,” said Susan Popkin, senior fellow at the Urban Institute and an expert on community engagement and public housing redevelopment. “I am all for anything that preserves public housing at this point; we’re on the verge of losing all of it.”
Falling Apart
Residents and the city agree on at least one thing: Holland Gardens is in desperate need of repair.
The five-building, three-acre development, built in 1944, “has just fallen apart,” said Ty Matthews, one of the resident leaders at the complex. Matthews has lived in a 750-square-foot (229-square-meter), three-bedroom apartment in Holland Gardens with her family for a decade.
“We have mold and every two weeks there’s no hot water,” she said.
As Holland Gardens has deteriorated, the neighborhood around it has changed dramatically.
Downtown Jersey City boomed, growing its population by nearly 60% from 2010 to 2020. The surrounding Hudson County produced housing at over the twice the rate of New York City from 2010 to 2018, attracting numerous new residents and businesses.
While the median household income for Jersey City public housing residents is around $24,000, in the census tract surrounding Holland Gardens that number is now $111,000. And though 64% of Jersey City public housing residents are Black, Black households now make up only 15% of the surrounding tract.
At Holland Gardens, the city and the housing authority saw an opportunity to preserve public housing while leveraging Jersey City’s hot housing market to create additional affordability. On top of the 192 units of public housing, they’re adding 74 affordable senior units and 28 affordable homeownership units.
“What I think planners have recognized, and particularly in places like Jersey City, is that mixed-income communities are the best for giving people an opportunity to move into better economic situations for themselves and their families,” said Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop.
To address critical disrepair, tearing down public housing has become a regular practice in US cities. A 2010 study by the Department of Housing & Urban Development estimated that the US is losing 10,000 units of public housing each year to disrepair. Under the Choice Neighborhoods program and its predecessor, Hope VI, public-housing redevelopments often ended up with fewer public housing units than they started with. Since the Faircloth Amendment, passed under President Bill Clinton in 1998, housing authorities cannot legally create new public housing unit; the best they can do is a one-to-one replacement.
Other financing mechanisms, like the controversial Rental Assistance Demonstration program, shift tenants to vouchers they use on site while generating funding for rehabilitation.
Holland Gardens’s planners have consciously steered away from those icebergs. The plan sidesteps the strings attached to federal programs by bringing in market-rate units while rebuilding all existing 192 units as public housing. Jersey City Housing Authority will remain as the owner, with an operating agreement with a private developer.
The complex adds a street grid to the site and includes four buildings: a senior building, a for-sale condominium building, a retail and community building and a residential tower for all the public-housing units and market rentals. “It’s going to be indistinguishable whether you are a market-rate or an affordable resident,” said Vivian Brady-Phillips, former director of the Jersey City Housing Authority.
A courtyard at Holland Gardens, a three-acre development that’s currently comprised of 192 public housing units.
Source: Patrick Spauster/Bloomberg
Some residents have spent their whole life in Holland Gardens and aren’t eager to leave. Zoey, who preferred to go by her first name only, grew up in the development with her mother, who has been living there since she first moved to the US 55 years ago. “This is home. They’re like family here,” said Zoey.
Others are more optimistic.
“I’m looking forward to the transition and coming back to something bigger and better,” said Matthews. “Why wouldn’t you want something better?” said Olivia Smith, another longtime tenant.
Facilities and services at the new development, which will include a new branch of the Jersey City public library, incorporate what residents asked for in the community engagement process, an approach that planners described as “placemaking.”
“The fact that we’re preserving all of the public-housing units, and that we’re adding home ownership — I think that’s what’s really unique here,” said Brady-Phillips.
“This vision was always co-created,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that residents didn’t have concerns or trepidation, but it reflects priorities that residents raised.”
Even so, experts warn that community engagement processes don’t always reach all residents.
“Charrette processes tend to attract the resident leaders, probably more of the older residents,” said Popkin, referring to the act of involving as many stakeholders as possible in a development plan. “It ends up not representing the whole community because it’s very formal.”
That can mean that when projects start, some residents still feel blindsided by the process, said Brady-Phillips, who emphasized the importance of starting the dialogue early.
Right to Return
Ishmael, who also declined to include his last name, has been living at Holland Gardens for 10 years. For him, the most pressing concern was the promise of a right to return. He said he went to some of the meetings with the housing authority but found the uncertainty about relocation frustrating.
“I don’t know where they’re going to put us,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re going to come back.”
Residents will have several relocation options, and the city is providing counseling services to help each family figure out its best option. They can move to another public housing development, access a housing voucher on a private apartment, test the private market temporarily or take a cash payment and give up return rights.
It’s unclear if everyone will be able to get what they want. Extra public-housing slots are limited, some residents will have incomes too high to qualify for vouchers, which are already hard to use. Meanwhile, the local rental market is getting expensive fast.
Return policies have a messy history in public housing redevelopments, and tenants can fall through the cracks. Urban Institute’s Popkin said that because construction takes a while, some residents don’t end up returning. Mandatory relocations can be stressful for tenants, particularly the elderly and those with health issues. Some 43% of the heads of households in all of Jersey City public housing are over 62 years old, and nearly half of them have a disability, according to 2021 HUD data.
Zoey’s mother, for example, has limited mobility after fracturing her spine. “[She’s] not leaving until they drag [her] out of here,” said Zoey.
The housing authority has said it won’t review credit scores or income requirements for returning residents. Those policies are two best practices that researchers have identified to make redevelopments easier on residents.
“The biggest test for me is making sure that the existing Holland Gardensresidents exercise that right of return and come back,” said Mayor Fulop.
When Chicago redeveloped 11 public housing sites around the turn of the century, residents rarely returned, opting instead for vouchers on the private market or staying put in other public-housing developments.
In the throes of a national housing crisis, other cities might look to Jersey City’s blending of public, affordable and market housing as a blueprint for how to finance their own ambitions while preserving public housing. Recently, New York City’s council speaker proposed building new apartments in between public-housing towers, moving tenants next door, and replacing buildings falling into disrepair.
“It’s a very, very complicated and difficult environment because there isn’t a lot of support at the federal and state levels to build new public housing,” said Mayor Fulop. “So you gotta be creative.”
Please join us for a LIVE Webinar “What’s New in Archibus V26.1″ which will be released in the following days.
Thursday, 29 April 2021 at 11:00 AM (EST)
Here is why you don’t want to miss this webinar:
Hoteling Self-serve Booking Tool Enhancements:
Limit the number of days to book ahead,
Enable health checks before check-in,
Check ahead who else has booked a desk on day & time,
Search and book workspace near your colleagues.
Other Enhancements in V26.1:
Workplace Accessibility: Allow users with visual or hearing impairments to navigate the workplace
Space Console Query Search: Find what you need by building your own query
Reports Central: Easily build and personalize reports and charts
Archibus SaaS version provided on the Cloud (for new users)
Upon registration you will receive an email with the Webinar’s URL. It makes sense to register even if you can’t make it on Thursday to receive a link to the recorded webinar if you registered and couldn’t attend.
