Jeff,
Totally agree, you have to use the right tool for the right job and one that is going to do it the most efficiently. In my sitaution our work can range from a simple new office fitout...(where SU excels) to a 5 star hotel that has a consultant design team of 10 and upwards.Having the structural engineer, surveyor, geotech engineer HVAC, electrical and hydraulics engineers all working from the same BIM model is key for us. Since I dont use revit but I employ Architects and technicians who do, SU has become my pencil and yellow trace on streoids. It allows me to quickly test design ideas and share them with the team.
For me, teaching myself Revit is just not a good utilisation of my time, As much as I would enjoy it since I come from a drafting background, I am better off employing people who have been using revit for many years. As a conceptual tool I think using revit would be like wading through mud compared to how quickly I can use SU. The models I do ( which I call in the office concept models) do infact have quite a lot of detail in them. Some models go through various phases of development over many months. As I mentioned in a previous post, its a real shame that all of this hard work in SU cant be leveraged through export to Revit to kickstart the detail design process. My feeling is the first time I will able to do this will pay back on any programme I purchased to perform this task probably 10 fold. Unfortunately, SU can only export a dumb block into Revit but Rhino / VisualArq also exports retaining all parametric features of components.With the cost of a Rhino and VA licence running at approx. NZ$1,600.00. I would give myself a 6 month phase in period of SU to Rhino, payback would be within the first year and just get better after that.
![:smile: ๐](https://community.sketchucation.com/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f604.png?v=ortm2mm07uk)
So for me, I will still use SU but only when it suits the job at hand like you Jeff but I think the development of SU has stagnated somewhat, either that or my expectation for the programme and where it was heading were ill founded
I feel it could be the beginning of a messy divorce for me SU.
![:disappointed: ๐](https://community.sketchucation.com/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f61e.png?v=ortm2mm07uk)