I appreciate both SAB & CGRAHAM's professional feedback and I agree 100% with there take on the role of both SketchUp and Revit in the area of building design.

My advice to anyone starting out in architecture... is learn Revit for Construction details and onging management of the building. SketchUp should only be used for concept designs, presentation drawings & mass modelling complex components for use in Revit.

I found this good explanation on the difference between CAD, Revit & SketchUp in the book "Introducing Revit Architecture 2009".....

@unknownuser said:

In 2D drafting CAD, you draw two lines (objects) to represent a wall.

In Revit, the task of creating a wall is presented in the form of an interactive tool name "Create Wall". This wall has properties like width, height, bearing or nonbearing, demolished or new, interior or exterior, fire rating, and materials (such as boards or brick). The wall interacts with other walls to automatically join geometries and clean up connections, showing how the walls will be built. Simiarly, if you add a door, its more than four lines and an arc, it's a door in plan and elevation. Adding it to the wall automatically creates an opening in the wall in all views where the door is visible. The tools available for walls are specific to walls, allowing you to attach walls to roof and floors, punch openings, and change layered construction of the wall. Again, all of these interactions are not just properties; they are focused on specific tasks associated with architectural walls.

BIM is more than a modeler. Other software packages, like SketchUp, Rhinoceros, and 3ds Max, are excellent modelling applications. However, these modelling applications don't have the ability to document your design for construction or leveraged downstream. This is not to say these tools don't play a part in a BIM workflow. Many architects use these tools to generate concept models, which can then be brought into a BIM application and progress through design, analysis and documentation.

Just following on from my comments before. SketchUp is great for doing presentation drawings in Architecture. Say for example you needed to do a perspective drawing of a commercial building around a city block. To Mass model a scene like that in sketchup is very easy and effective. You can add entourage, trees cars and create a wonderful scene extrememly quickly. You can then output the perspective line drawing as a jpeg and bring it into a software package like photoshop to add colour and more details. Architects may print out the line drawing add colour and details by hand and embellish even more details than scan the drawing into a package like photoshop for more processing. There is a great book called "Color Drawing" by Michael E. Doyle that demonstrates this process throughout his book to great effect. Now a BIM tool like Revit would be much more difficult in doing something like this quickly. SketchUp's free flowing nature is certainly an advantage here.

So SketchUp definitely has its own advantages over more expensive packages like Revit for jobs in the design process. I also agree with other earlier comments... "that SketchUp is a great tool for someone starting out and trying to learn the basics of architecture and design". Its a great educational tool!

However, over the years I've seen many Ruby developers attempt to add BIM like tools to SketchUp. Since discovering Revit, I now see its almost a pointless exercise because you don't want SketchUp to act in this way. Its much better to keep SketchUp the way it is, simple and effective for what it was primarily design for mass modelling and sketching.

For construction schedules, Revit is ideally suited. If an architect was modelling a commerical building they you just wouldn't attempt all the construction schedules using a package like SketchUp. It would be either Autocad or Revit.

The great thing about Revit is it is specifically designed to make this task even easier than Autocad if you know what your doing (the software can be difficult to learn). Because of the parametric nature Revit is much more powerful than Autocad for ongoing changes in the construction details. It also has very powerful rendering capabilities built in.

In saying all this, I don't work as a professional Architect. I'm still learning the profession. So therefore others might have a much better understanding than me in the professional arena.

I've been working on a new attribute reporter plugin the past couple of weeks. See web interface screenshot below. Basically it will display lists of all the key/value pairs for assigned to that selection within the model, listed by dictionary type.

I don't believe any other plugin exist that manage attributes in this way. The only two I know of only allow you to look at attributes one entity at a time, not in groups or the whole model.

It has a nice dhtml interface. It can sort columns either numerically, alphabetically or even by date. It can switch quickly between dictionary types , this way you get a better insight into all the attributes and dictionaries hidden in the model. The plugin also creates a temporary dictionary call Entity Info, which list every type of entity in the model, and tells you whether it’s a face, edge or Component Instance etc. It also tells you the entity id and gives every entity a row id, so you can click on the table row, and the entity will be highlighted in the model so you know where it is.

I bet some people don’t know that plugins like Podium and SubDivide and Smooth use hidden attribute dictionaries, that assign values, to lights, reflections & creases. This tool can give you an overview of what entities have these attributes attached to them, and you will be able to edit those attribues or remove them. I know when I’ve been playing around with plugins like podium and even Subdivide & Smooth plugins, its hard to remember what reflection you assigned and where it was. This plugin should help you find those attributes easily.

One think problem I’ve found is the way attributes are handled using the current tools are limited. The attribs.rb edits or creates values into a string only, this is a big drawnback of an otherwise great plugin.

Anyway, hopefully I might have something to release thru smustard in a few weeks.