During a recently held BIM for Professionals course held exclusively for a retail bank, I was made aware that some of their designers use the Revit LT suite. To illustrate the usefulness of the platform for their endeavors, I used both Revit and Revit LT to illustrate the differences between them.

Clearly Revit LT is better than AutoCAD (their current solution) at scheduling quantities, but to what extent does Revit LT fall short for their specific requirements? This is not my first retail client doing store design, so I have a good understanding of the types of issues they might face in their production environment.

Intelligently they are using Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inventor for product design and transforming their designs into Revit families (Revit is a BIM platform and not meant for manufacturing). Bills of material are easily generated in Fusion and inventor, but in Revit, there is a long and involved process of managing non modeled elements of a family.

Here are some Revit LT limited technologies are prominent compared to Revit

Exporting family types allow one to create a comma delimited text file where parameters may be populated and managed in Excel. When reloading the families any new values that were read into by virtue of referring to the text file.

The text file must be stored in the same directory as the family.

Dyno is not available for Revit LT. Instead of using family types to read in the information, a dynamo script can easily be used to input the information from excel.

Embedded schedules are not available for Revit LT. This means you can not set up a quantity schedule for a category and embed it in a Room or Space schedule.

One cannot model an element in place. There is a workaround, but if this will impact productivity, then it is best to acquire Revit instead of Revit LT.

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If you need help adopting BIM or Revit in your supply chain, please contact Micrographics so we may be of assistance.