St. Louis Revit Users Group: Second Annual Central States Revit Workshop

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Second Annual Central States Revit Workshop

Last Thursday and Friday (August 15th &16th) the Revit Users Group of Omaha Nebraska (RUGON) hosted the second annual Central States Revit Workshop. The event is a low-cost, high quality Revit focused training workshop, and as always the event was fantastic. I can't say enough about Carla Edwards, Todd Shackelford and the entire volunteer staff from RUGON who put this quality event together. The event features top quality speakers and presentations on a wide variety of Revit topics and this year included a 1/2 day session focused on BIM for owners to help educate owners on the advantages of using a BIM based approach on their projects.

Top quality speakers for this event included Steve Stafford, Paul Aubin, Brian and Desiree Mackey (with a special guest appearance from the BIMbino (Vienna, See picture), Steven Shell, Shawn Zirbes, Nathan Miller, Kelli Lubeley, and Jason Gardner and a host of others including several presentations from members of the RUGON committee. In addition, there were presentations from Brigitta Foster from the buildingSMART alliance on the National BIM Standards initiative and a presentation from Andy Jizba (Mayo Clinic) and Chuck Miles (Autodesk) on BIM from the owners perspective.

I attended some amazing presentations including a presentation from Desiree Mackey on a fully parametric design model that had engineering design data built into the families that would adjust the size of the footings, columns, walls, and framing members all automatically with a change in grid spacing or a level adjustment in height. (WOW!) Other great presentations that I attended included some every day uses for Adaptive Components and Intelligent Detailing from Brian Mackey, Driving Parametric Curves in Families from Paul Aubin, and using the DB Link add-in for Interior FF&E Data and Room Data Sheets as well as a great lab presentation on Lookup Tables from Kelli Lubeley. There were so many great presentations that my biggest problem with the conference was not being able to be in multiple presentations at once!!! (Where is cloning technology when you really need it!)

There were a few attendees from the St. Louis Revit Users group including myself, Aaron Gipperish from FGM and Josh Bender from M&H Architects. I hope next year we can have more representation from STLRUG, it is definitely worth the time and expense.
I wanted to give a special thanks to Carla Edwards, Todd Shackelford and all of the volunteer staff at the Revit Users Group of Omaha for taking the time and effort to put on this great event. This effort is definitely helping us here in the Midwest to become better Revit users and helping us embrace BIM technology for all of its advantages.

Chris