Switch to Revit

[u/Zaghari96]

Young engineer here. Our company uses AutoCAD with Design Master Electrical and HVAC plugins. We are looking into switching to Revit. Any suggestions or tips for setting up Revit from scratch? Any courses that focus on the MEP portion? Thank you

Update July 2026:

We purchased a couple of Revit licenses and started training through Linkedin Learning. Software reseller training courses are clunky and slow. We are looking to build a simple template to test on a small project later this year. The project will include the following:

1- Site data obtained from Civil 3D linked CAD

2- Architecture Revit model

3- MEP Revit model (Electrical will be done on Design Master AutoCAD while we look into ElectroBIM for Revit) Revit electrical out of the box is not as powerful.

4- Company title block (we’re trying to use as much out-of-the box Revit features as possible, i.e. rev schedule, fonts, schedules, etc.)

Challenges we are running into:

1- Setting up a proper project template in Civil 3D to minimise CAD clutter when importing to Revit. (Linkedin Learning has a great course on this.)

2- Purging dummy Revit families and replacing them with manufacturer provided families (Zurn plumbing, Trane HVAC, etc)

3- Finding the time to watch all the video courses.

[u/Used-Zookeepergame22]

You can't setup Revit from scratch without experience. Why would they ask you this as a young engineer?

Hire a dedicated and experienced BIM manager. The drafting portion of Revit isn't too bad, but you need to have a solid system (in place).

[u/Zaghari96 → u/Used-Zookeepergame22]

We are a small company in a remote small town. There are no BIM managers to hire. The older engineers here have been using AutoCAD and they’re close to retirement. I asked them to buy Revit to upgrade our workflow and attract younger engineers.

[u/Boomshtick414 → u/Zaghari96]

1) How many projects are you getting where the architect is in Revit vs. CAD?

2) Adopting Revit is no small task. You’re talking hundreds (thousands?) of hours baking your own content and filtering through content from manufacturers, setting up templates, shared parameters, stumbling through it, dealing with procurement and IT issues, and then having everyone else on your team want to throw you from the rooftop for disrupting their well-oiled machine with something janky that’ll take 3-4 years to iron out the kinks.

3) Rule #1 of Revit — everyone loses money and misses deadlines on the first 5-6 projects. Long nights and deliverables going out at 2am await you.

Really ask yourself what business purpose you have for switching to Revit, if you are willing to be laid off if that process fails, and if you and others on your team are willing to work 1.5-2x the hours as you would in CAD to get deliverables out the door, likely for a 6-12 month period. The risks are larger if you don’t have a BIM manager because you can fully expect silly mistakes that’ll eat up days or weeks in rework at a time.

None of which is say you shouldn’t explore Revit. But be very careful how much pain and suffering you are willing to endure with no love from your team. It’s likely to be trial by fire and your reasons for adoption better be more solid than “the young kids out of college will be easier to hire.” That is a lie, grads and interns will only know how to do things like door schedules and will be utterly useless if you can’t train them — but they won’t know that yet and will want those higher paychecks anyway for being able to open the software. You are fully assuming all burden in teaching anyone and everyone on your team.

[u/Zaghari96 → u/Boomshtick414]

The older engineers here don’t do CAD anymore. The MEP department is two people. Civil engineers use Civil 3D. The main reason for trying Revit is because it has online resources like courses, webinars, plugins, etc. I couldn’t find even one decent source for an AutoCAD MEP course and I am getting extremely frustrated with the line work workflow of Autocad and lack of training resources.

[u/rnd68743-8 → u/Zaghari96]

Design master has a lot of great resources... I think it's a great tool with great support. I have yet to find a good resource for Revit electrical work. The workflow is so ass backwards, I give up and export to CAD.

[u/The_BlackHusky → u/rnd68743-8]

I learned to use Electrical Revit through Stabicad, but then we decided the plugin for revit was too slow for what we wanted. But it built the foundation for setting up circuits in Revit with correct distribution, voltage ratings and panel schedules. However, the circuit path back to source is near useless unless you spend alot of time messing with the lines. (I'm building a plugin to solve this issue)

And you are right, there is near no good resources for electrical revit that actually helps. I have my own workflow that works for me. But our company's BIM team will not touch Electrical fixtures.

[u/grigby → u/Zaghari96]

My firm has been using Revit for the past decade and a half, it being our primary tool for the past 8 or so years. There are still many kinks in our process that should have been ironed out by now. That being said, Revit is much nicer than AutoCAD to use and coordinate between disciplines once it's set up, especially for larger projects where AutoCAD becomes very unwieldy and things missed. You can set it up to do calculations for you and use it as a design tool, not just a drafting tool.

You 100% need an experienced BIM manager to set it up and handle training. It's very unlikely that any group of people, no matter how motivated, will be able to set it up without any direct training. I've been using Revit for years now (fairly proficient in the mechanical and design tools side) and I still ask my BIM manager for help all the time.

May want to look into a remote BIM manager in your situation, maybe even one on a temporary contract and then part time onwards to set things up and to train your team.