Texas A&M students will be able to download free copies of Autodesk Revit, Inventor, Civil 3D, and Viz — next generation products from the company that makes AutoCAD, the building industry’s market leader computer-aided design software.

The Web site can be accessed at http://architectsrule.org

“Autodesk Revit is a fantastic product that employs a ‘building information modeling’ (BIM) approach in contrast to the drafting-oriented approach of AutoCAD and many other CAD systems,” explained Mark Clayton, executive associate dean of the College of Architecture. “Using BIM, a student creates walls, doors, windows, roofs, stairs, and other elements that correspond directly to the real world of architecture. The software generates plans, section, and elevations automatically. It also automatically produces bills of materials and quantity estimates. ”

Revit goes a long way toward integrating design, construction and operations using a single seamless database. At the 2006 Rowlett Lecture, the Beck Group spoke about Revit as a key tool in their integration of design and construction. Also, last January, Mark Sturges, Jerry Jackson, and Jason Steele from Autodesk and Clay Starr from RTKL gave a presentation about Revit to the College of Architecture.

“I incorporated Revit into an ENDS 105 section last fall and ARCH 652 Facility Information Technology this spring,” Clayton reported. “The software is challenging, but extremely powerful. ”

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Texas A&M is included as a premier partner because of the College of Architecture’s longstanding collaboration with Autodesk. The college negotiated a university-wide site license for Autodesk products over eight years ago. Then recently, with the new notebook computer requirement for incoming students, the college arranged for Autodesk to provide students with the option of purchasing personal copies of AutoCAD, Architectural Desktop, Autodesk Viz and other software for very low prices. The software is available at

http://archone.tamu.edu/college/people/
students/computer_requirements.html

Other U.S. universities participating in this pilot program include: Arizona State, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Iowa State, Montana State, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Northeastern, Penn State, Stanford, University of California (Berkeley), University of Colorado (Boulder), University of Illinois (Urbana Champaign). University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), University of Minnesota, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Texas (Austin), Virginia Tech, and Yale.

Worldwide participants include: Cambridge University, Oxford University, Athens University, Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology – Mumbai, University of New South Wales, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and Sydney University