Revit 2020 and Dynamo versions

I recently installed Revit 2020, and the incorporated Dynamo install has changed significantly to previous years.

Well, it seems to have installed Dynamo 2.1 with Revit 2020, and I am please to report that it left earlier versions well alone.  I had Dynamo 1.3.3 installed in Revit 2017, 2018 & 2019 - and all of those appeared to be intact.  There is some more information on this here.

 New Feature:  Integrated Dynamo Revit 2.1 into Revit 2020

On the Autodesk Blog and Youtube channel are a whole bunch of videos about new features - this included one about Dynamo, entitled "Integrated Dynamo Revit 2.1 into the Revit 2020 release".

As of  15 April (USA) or 16 April (Australia), the video has been removed - I believe that is because its description about supporting Dynamo across multiple versions of Revit is a little confusing.

What the original Autodesk release Video  said is:

• "You will not be able to update or use a different version of Dynamo with Revit 2020."
• "This will greatly simplify the installation process and versioning for Dynamo Users."
• "With this unified experience, you will have Dynamo 2.1 installed at launch and this is tied to Revit."
• "As the product team release updates for Revit, this is the only way Dynamo will receive updates."
• "Running any version of Dynamo other than 2.1 will be unsupported moving forward." 
• "One version of Dynamo will not be supported across multiple versions of Revit."

The last two item are the contentious and confusing ones, and hopefully will be clarified in the near future.  The implication was that you would have to upgrade all of your graphs to Dynamo 2.1 to run under Revit 2020 - hopefully this is not the case.

Whatever the outcome, this is a big change to how Dynamo upgrades are managed.  In the past it was very difficult for users to manage the different versions on different Revit versions - let us hope that this will greatly simplify the process in the future.  I think this will be a really good improvement to the install/upgrade process for Dynamo.

Dynamo / Revit Version Compatibility

No doubt we will still have an overlap period of a few years while we switch to the new system, where we need to keep an eye on which Dynamo version is supported by which Revit.

John Pierson has created a very useful chart to keep track of this, over on his Sixty Second Revit blog.

It appears that any Dynamo graphs created in version 2.02 should still run under Dynamo 2.1 (in Revit 2020).  Anything created in Dynamo 2.1 might work in earlier 2.xx versions, but no guarantee - apparently graphs created in 2.1 do open in 2.02 (Revit 2017, 18,19), albeit with a few minor glitches  see this forum thread.

What it may mean is:

• If your office still supports Revit 2016, you'd need to maintain Dynamo 1.3.2 versions of graphs.
• For any Revit versions from 2017 - 2019, these should still work (with the same Dynamo version, or 1.33 or 1.34)
• If you are lucky enough to be supporting only Revit 2017 and later, you have a choice of Dynamo 1.3.4  or Dynamo 2.02 (or later when available)
• We don't yet know what the last version of Dynamo will be able to run in Revit 2017.
• At some point you will need to move from Dynamo 1.3.4 to 2.xx - if you are thinking of rolling out Revit 2020, now is a good time to make that change.
• Once you have all your Revit versions running with Dynamo 2.xx installed, life should be easier - as you may only need to maintain one version of your graphs (TBC), even if the versions of Dynamo are slightly different. 
• It might be wise to develop the graphs in the older Revit version that you are using - say 2018, then they are more likely to be forward compatible than being backward compatible if you developed them in Revit 2020/Dynamo 2.1.
• All that . . .Until Dynamo 3.xx is released, when the fun starts again - but by that stage, Autodesk should be handling the issue for us!

Stop Press - Revit 2016

I have just heard some news that Autodesk subscription licences on networks will stop supporting Revit 2016 within the next month - ie. Revit 2016 will stop working on floating licences, even if you do not upgrade to Revit 2020.  This needs to be confirmed, but if it is true, then Dynamo support on Revit 2016 becomes immaterial!