When discussing BIM, it’s impossible not to mention REVIT. Although the two are often considered synonymous, it’s important to clarify that BIM and REVIT are distinct concepts. The relationship between them has been thoroughly explained in the editor’s article Is REVIT BIM, so I won’t repeat that here. Instead, today I want to share my personal experience with REVIT training.
When it comes to REVIT Training, many people immediately think of software tutorials—and that’s true to some extent. REVIT is indeed a software application, and that fact cannot be denied. However, if you only approach REVIT as a tool to learn software operations, you are missing the bigger picture. Simply mastering software skills does not equate to grasping the BIM concept that REVIT is designed to support. Why is that?
REVIT is a suite of software developed by Autodesk specifically for Building Information Modeling (BIM). It assists architects and engineers in designing, constructing, and maintaining buildings with improved quality and higher energy efficiency. Autodesk Revit integrates the functionalities of Autodesk Revit Architecture, Autodesk Revit MEP, and Autodesk Revit Structure into one application. A key feature of REVIT is its use of templates and the family concept.
The project template file plays a crucial role in the design process. It enforces standardized settings that simplify design work, significantly boosting designer efficiency while ensuring adherence to design standards. The project template defines the initial state of a project. Each version of Revit comes with several default template files, but you can also create your own. Every new project based on a template inherits all the families, settings (including units, fill patterns, line styles, line weights, and view scales), and geometry from that template. A template is a systematic file that reflects years of accumulated design experience.
Mastering and effectively applying these skills through training alone requires significant practice and experience—it cannot be fully absorbed in a short course. The reason many people fail to fully embrace the BIM concept after REVIT training lies in the core feature of REVIT: parameterized components.
Parameterized components, also called families, form the basis of all building components designed and used in Revit. They offer an open graphical system that allows you to freely conceptualize designs, create appearances, and express design intent with increasing detail. You can use parametric components to create complex items such as detailed furniture and equipment, as well as basic building elements like walls and columns. Importantly, this doesn’t require any programming or coding skills.
The Revit family library is a categorized database that organizes countless families based on properties, parameters, and other attributes. As projects progress and industries mature, organizations develop their own specialized family libraries. These libraries can be directly accessed in future projects, where parameters can be adjusted to suit specific needs, greatly improving efficiency. In this way, a Revit family library represents a form of intangible knowledge capital, and its quality reflects the core competitiveness of the related industry or organization.
From my experience, a few days of software training alone is insufficient. During training, you may learn how to operate the software, but deeper application depends on your own practice and understanding. REVIT should be seen as a tool to foster a new way of thinking—not just as software to operate.
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