Revit is not Rhino

Hello, this is Isma! 👋 

I saw a LinkedIn post from Roubana El Sayed, and I found what she said smart and clear.

“Not everything needs to be modeled in Revit, and sometimes, adding too much detail can actually make your life harder.”

The post

It brought me back to a project I worked on over the past year.

We were designing a lot of organic forms — shapes that looked like rock formations, nature-shaped shells, wooden bridges...

Working on these designs in Rhino felt like home.

Not just because of the parametric power of Grasshopper,
but because NURBS and SubDs are the right tools for this kind of geometry.

Some of these designs were simply not possible to model in Revit.

And even if someone told me it was possible,
it would be extremely painful and inefficient to build them in Revit.

That brings me to the point of this post:

We had to deliver the entire project in Revit.

But this wasn’t a typical project.

One strategy we explored was to simplify or express the complex geometry — the parts Revit struggles with — in 2D drawings or keep them in linked Rhino models.

That way, the detail lives where it works best, without forcing Revit to do something it's not built for.

I’ll talk about a specific case in another post.

You might have ideas of your own about how to approach this kind of workflow — and I’d love to hear them.

Have a great week!