Plays it up
The building assembles in the order it gets built: slab, structure, walls, openings, roof, then the inside. Watching it go up is how a layperson reads a building.
A client signs off on drawings they cannot read. Lintel reads the architect's Revit model and plays the building up in the order it will actually be built, records what changed between one revision and the next in plain language, and walks them through the rooms before anything is poured. It is a way of showing, not another set of documents.
Residential architecture runs on documents the client cannot read. A plan, a section and an elevation are a complete description of a building to anyone trained to read them, and close to meaningless to everyone else. So the client nods along, signs the drawings, and forms a picture of the house in their head that nobody has checked.
That picture is where variation disputes come from. Not from bad faith, but from the gap between what was drawn and what was understood. The wall that came out, the window that moved, the ceiling that is lower than imagined: all of it was on the drawings, and none of it was seen. By the time it is visible on site it costs money to argue about.
The model that answers all of it already exists. The architect built it. It is just locked inside software the client will never open.
The building assembles in the order it gets built: slab, structure, walls, openings, roof, then the inside. Watching it go up is how a layperson reads a building.
Two revisions side by side with a wipe between them, and a list in the client's language: wall removed, window widened. Each line carries the model element behind it.
Saved viewpoints through the finished rooms, with the room names and areas taken from the model. It answers what it will feel like, not just what it is.
The build-up is only honest if the stages come out of the model rather than being hand-authored
to look good. They do. Setting generateMasterViews: true on the translation
produces a 3D view per Revit phase, rooms included, and a companion file lists every non-empty
phase in model order along with the levels. That is the raw material a staged sequence needs,
and it comes from a documented flag rather than a scraping trick.
So the import screen opens by telling you what it found, and just as deliberately, what it did not. A consultant's linked model that will not appear. Rooms that are unavailable because the flag was not set. Naming the gaps is the feature: a tool that quietly drops half a building is worse than one that says which half.
Ten stages, in construction order. The client scrubs the timeline and the house assembles. Stopping on a stage lists the elements entering at it, by their real categories, so an architect looking over a shoulder can see it is the model and not an animation of one.
The ladder is ordered, not scheduled. Revit holds no construction programme, so Lintel labels stages by stage and never by date.
This is the screen that settles arguments. A wipe across one frame with the existing condition on one side and the proposed on the other, demolished work greyed back and new work solid. Beside it, the changes in the client's language, each one carrying the element category and ID underneath as the audit trail.
The pairing is the whole point. "Wall removed between kitchen and dining" is what the client understands. The element ID under it is what makes the line defensible six months later.
The last question a client asks is not what the house is, it is what it will feel like to stand in it. Saved viewpoints run through the finished rooms, with the room names and floor areas read from the model rather than typed in.
The research behind this turned up as many limits as capabilities, and they shape the product more than the features do. A tool that overstates what it knows about a building is worse than no tool, because the client believes it.
| Question | Answer | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Build-up ordered by phase | Yes | A documented translation flag produces a 3D view per Revit phase, rooms included, with the phase list in model order alongside it. |
| Dated construction programme | No | Revit holds no programme, and none survives any export route. Stages are ordered, never dated. Showing a week number here would be inventing one. |
| Works from an IFC export | Degraded | Phase data does not survive IFC, and demolished elements are dropped by the exporter's status filter, which removes the change view entirely. The native path is the real one. |
| Includes consultants' linked models | Not by default | Linked geometry does not appear in the generated master views, so a model reaching the set through links shows gaps. The import screen names them rather than hiding them. |
| Runs without an Autodesk partnership | Yes | The viewer, authentication and file APIs are free to use. Only translation is metered, and a residential model sits inside a small monthly allowance. |
Lintel is a concept. It has been researched against Autodesk's published APIs and its open-source exporter source, and the capabilities and limits set out above are drawn from that reading, but nothing here is a shipped product and no part of it has been sold or deployed. Every project, client, practice, address and figure shown in the screens is invented. Autodesk and Revit are trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. Lintel is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by Autodesk, and the name is used only to say which file format is read.
The model already answers it.
The architect built it. Lintel is the part that shows it to the person paying for it.