During the Autodesk University in 2011, where I went as a speaker, I reported to the Autodesk team a bug I found in Revit 2012. Revit has many bugs, but this one was particularly annoying, because it came out during the class I had for my students at the University of Hong Kong.
The problem is simple – a Wall with vertically edited layer does not show properly in section when mirrored or drawn in the opposite direction, as shown on the image below. Both Walls are of the same type (3.4_44CON_ve), yet look different in section.
I was promised that the bug would be reported to the right people/team for solving. In the next version Revit 2013 the bug was still doing very well, so I reported in again on the AU 2012. Very nice sales people from Autodesk apologized, that it had not been fixed and said that this time they would personally follow the problem to ensure it would be solved. The result was that nothing changed in Revit 2014 as well. I knew that Autodesk is generally not doing great in the area of customer support and their product improvement, but this left even me a bit surprised. So I contacted one of the vice presidents of Autodesk, whom I had had once a pleasure to meet in Hong Kong. I wrote to him a long letter complaining on the slow development of Revit in general and giving the above little bug as an example of poor quality of their service. He acknowledged the problem, contacted me with “the right people”, who apologized again and promised to put my bug at the top of their list of priorities. I may be naive, but I believed them again thinking that intervention at such a high level must bring some results. Oh, how wrong I was… Believe it or not, but nothing changed in Revit 2015. Morover, upto this date (12 Feb 2015) we have already had six so called “Update Releases” of Revit (kind of intermediate upgraded versions) and the file with my lovely bug attached to this post (link below) behaves the same way when opened in this ultra-upgraded Revit 2015 Update Release 6 as it behaved back in 2011.
I think it makes sense now to start taking bets how many more years will it take for one of the largest software companies in the world to fix a little bug in its flagship BIM application, which had been reported to them for four years. Anyone?
If you have had similar experience with Autodesk or would like to share your own bug found in Revit, please use the link above to write your post.
Please use the link below to download the file with my bug in Revit 2015.
Mirrored wall with split layers problem 2015