Revit Rebar Tool

Hi Mehmet, thank you for the interesting overview. I would love to hear more details on the workflow you created and the tools you are using, especially anything that you implemented yourself using the Revit API. Cheers, Jeremy.

Wow! Getting a comment from my personal Hero feels great and is very encouraging!
Thank you Mr. Tammik!



Here's some backstory:
I'm a Senior Architect and (by choice) a BIM manager. Throughout my career I usually worked for the General Contractors and mostly on large-scale projects. Things are a little bit different when the project is around or above 500.000 m² (5mil ft²) and being able to do BIM boils down to numbers.
Number of Revit licenses and people you could get from the management.

It's a little bit harsh but let me explain:
To be able to do BIM you need people to collaborate based on their professional and modeling skills. In a large-scale project you can't solely rely on the Contract to get the resources you need!
You have to prove it. And prove it fast!
The contract may well say "all drawings should be prepared with the BIM authoring tool."
But there's always an ongoing negotiation both with the client and inbetween GC Joit Venture.
And these negotiations are led by not technical or process minded people but by numbers minded people.

Every GC probably has a Cad-House in a country with low labor costs. Before you even know an innocent whisper comes to your ear "Let's do BIM models for coordination and drawings in Cad".

Normally I shouldn't mind this. But in real life it means "We'll give you less resource, expect all your deliverables like MTOs, QTOs, RDSs etc. and guess what! you have to create all the views/sheets and export them for Cad-guys to annotate! Of course you have to track all DWGs and changes/variations"

Let's put it this way:
By abstraction I can utilize anyone in our process. I also divide my M3 and M2 files(3d and 2d models) according to BS 1192:2007.
So with a few hours of training anyone can be producing sheets without the risk of ruining M3s.

For a project I roughly need:
10-15% top modelers. (Complex geometries, materials/types according to specks, families etc)
35-45% trade people decent modelers (Be it DD or CD, what these people do really counts. Also their manhours cost the most. I put most of my efforts (and tools) into helping them do their job and model according to our Standards Methods and Procedures so they can further collaborate among each other.)
45-55% M2s (View/Sheet Production and drafting.)

So asking for annotation in Cad really means loosing M2 guys (mostly drafters) and instead trade people doing inefficient tasks.

In one occasion similar to above, Architects were modeling structural concrete and exporting for Senior Structural Drafters and Engineers. These drafters had 10-30 years of experience and were really good at what they were doing! But they only knew how to draw 2d in AutoCad.

For BS 1192:2007 authority reasons and for efficiency I had to get them involved in BIM. Their managing Engineer wasn't very fond of the idea so the talks stuck at how they had special tools and methods to draw and calculate rebars!

I knew I couldn't make them model rebars in Revit in a short period of time. Even if I could they probably wouldn't want to! (It's quite hard to push people out of their comfort zones)

I found myself, an architect, trying to understand their rebar tools and procedure.
At the end I did a better tool for Revit with the API :)
It does a lot of stuff under the hood. Mostly mimicking their procedure so they could start using it immediately.
Uses shapes and formulas from BS 8666:2005.
I feed the shapes as family so if you need a new one you don't have to update the code.

The video is from a project we've used the add-in for production. Does not show the whole workflow or every aspect of the tool. If there will be interest I can capture more videos.

And those guys and their department are using Revit now..