Revit 2010 is out! And it looks like I might be as well...

Revit 2010 is out. We were on the Beta Test, and have been very excited about it!

One of the two really big things for us in 2010 is Revit's newfound ability to model almost any form you can imagine. The new Conceptual Massing toolset is very impressive, and I see us leveraging it into more creative projects in the near future. The form above was modeled 100% in Revit, as was this form below!

The other thing that we're really excited about here at BWC is the new Family API. It's not visual, however it allows one to write little programs to directly manipulate and even create Revit Families. It's going to let us finally automate some of what we do here when exporting to the CAM tools for CNC production. It's also going to let us get into some programmatically-driven design within Revit itself.

There is one thing about this release however that I really don't like. And it ain't what you think (i.e. The Ribbon). My excitement with these new tools have thrown into rather sharp contrast where I am now in regards to the rest of the so-called "Revit Community".

See, I've participated for many years in discussions on AUGI.com, the Autodesk user's group forums. Which is pretty much ground zero for most Revit users. I've been too busy to do much there of late, however, there has been a lot of negative noise and fury there about Revit 2010.

My take on it is that a few people with some influence within the community reacted negatively to the UI redesign. Getting attention for that, some of them went on to kinda make it their soapbox and to spend a lot of (wasted) energy openly mocking it. Which got them more attention, and as such, got several others to join in, and now everyone is getting their turn to beat their chests about how horrible 2010 is. It can be amazing how just a few influential people's early opinions can cause a stampede of others simply echoing the same ideas instead of stopping and really thinking about things.

I know it's silly, but I always figured us Revit users were future-focused, practical, and embracing of change. Guess that was just some of us. While I feel sad that I no longer have much in common with a community I contributed a great deal to over the years, I guess that is the way things go and I'm going to put my energy towards something more useful instead.