Autodesk Revit is one of the premier BIM software technologies utilized in North America. Revit was originally created by Charles River Technologies founders Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis and later became known as Revit Technology Corporation prior to it’s purchase by Autodesk in 2002.
Revit was originally developed for Architects as a tool that adopted the parametric qualities of software products such as Pro/Engineer that were popular with the Mechanical design industry. Although Autodesk had several strong products and had mindshare within the AEC industry, Revit proved to hold too much promise for the future and was an obvious basis for further development. Autodesk further enhanced the platform to include Structural and MEP to create a platform where all of the trades could work collaboratively under the general Autodesk Revit ecosystem to further Autodesk’s vision of a technical platform for Building Information Modeling (BIM).
The Autodesk Revit software itself is a platform that allowed the user to create a design and steadily further the BIM model to ultimately allow creation of complete construction documents. Autodesk Revit allows creation of a full-fledged 3D model that can produce all of the typical 2D documentation such as details, elevations, floor plans and so no as a by product of the centralized model definition. Furthermore, it can utilize the data to create real time schedules and also incorporate a very sophisticated rendering engine to allow for photorealistic renderings and walkthroughs. More recently, Autodesk has furthered efforts to broaden the reach of the platform to include rendering in the cloud, and bringing design computation into the Revit environment with products such as Dynamo.
For the Building Product Manufacturer (BPM), the Autodesk Revit environment is a rich BIM environment backed by an industry stalwart aggressively developing their software to feature their own digital products. The potential for the BPM is to get their products noticed, specced and featured within the building projects created within the Autodesk Revit environment of which there are many and growing. By some estimates, Autodesk Revit has over 70% market share in North America. The standard Autodesk Revit installation comes with a generic library of content for the purpose of populating the building with simple building products such as doors, windows and light fixtures and so on. The strong promise and interest of the BPM community in filling this void with manufacturer specific content created the need for Autodesk to create Autodesk SEEK. SEEK is a website and service promoted by Autodesk to become the go-to repository for BPM content but also for setting the modeling standard for Autodesk Revit content.