The Toilets Overflow - Autodesk Answers Back

The reporting of the AEC Q&A session held recently at Autodesk University (see Dec 4 post on CAD Insider) seems to have generated a fair amount of controversy. One issue seems to about toilets. More specifically, the issue raised was a follow up remark about overly large model sizes in Revit:

But 500 toilets in Revit is 500 separate copies of the same toilet! There is something wrong with the database structure.

Though not directly addressed at the Q&A session, Autodesk followed up to say:

"That is not accurate. Content, regardless of whether it is 500 toilets, tables or doors are all treated the same in Revit. Once the first piece of content has been added the addition of new instances of the same content has minimal impact on the database. "

It seems like the AUGI blog lit up after the post, with several criticisms of the Autodesk responses at the AU session. This, in turn, raised some hackles at Autodesk. Autodesk has supplied "better" answers to some of questions asked at the AU session.

What about data interoperability? Many Autodesk products cannot read each others' native formats?

"We know that interoperability is very important to the AEC industry and we are actively working on improving it significantly. Our goal is to understand the workflows that customers need supported and insure that they can transfer not only their data but the intelligence behind that data. Even though it will be a long term project we plan to show significant incremental improvements as we work to solve this industry problem."

File size is a big issue in Revit. What are you doing about that?

"BIM by its nature requires larger file sizes to store the wealth of information that is captured during the design and construction of a project. In fact, enabling large distributed team to effectively work on complex projects is one of Revit’s highest priorities. This is a multifaceted issue which we are actively working to solve. We have virtually eliminated the RAM memory limitations associated with large files with the release of Revit 2009 64-bit which is available today through Autodesk Subscription. This has taken memory access from the limit of 3 GB in a 32 bit environment to over  16 GB of memory access in a 64 bit environment. We continue to make strides in performance and usability which address other facets of this question. We have also continued to provide information to our users to help them transition to BIM when structure and approach their large projects."

Will there be Revit for the Mac?

"As you know, currently the Mac is not a platform that is supported by Revit, but we know a number of people who have successfully used Revit on the Mac. Mac is an interesting platform. We are investigating issues around using Revit with virtualization on the Mac. We are also looking at the demand and issues requited to provide a more seamless experience. Currently the majority of our users or PC based and we will continue to concentrate on that market segment."

Comments

[Justas]

I have two major questions. Will there be Revit for the Linux? Will there be one file format for all BIM programs? Simple user should not care about standards, exporting - importing loosing - not loosing data. Simple save and open the same project with different program or connect to central file with different program.

[Balazs]

He probably meant 16 EB, which is the address space of 64 bit addressing (2^64).

[Heath Rugg]

check this out: http://www.lonelyengineer.com/

- Heath

[ralphg]

"...over 16 GB of memory access in a 64 bit environment."

What does "over 16GB" mean?