Thursday, August 30, 2007

Convert to 3D Solids is so ABS 2007

First things first, I had this great idea, I wanted to write up a procedure for creating parametric parts in AutoCAD MEP, but I never seem to get around to it. So What do I do? I decided to write a teaser in this Blog, forcing the next thing I write on to be parametric parts. The down side is it didn't work. I still haven't been able to settle down long enough to get it done. But, don't lose heart, I haven't given up yet. It's on my to do list if that means anything.



That being said, here is something completely different.



I had the good fortune to have Chuck Mies and Ed Deal from Autodesk in my office the other day and we were talking about sharing AutoCAD MEP data with a Revit Architecture model. I have always converted my duct and other ABS objects to 3d solids, saved as a SAT file and finally imported them into a giant Revit family for my architects using Revit. Ed had a take on things that I had not tried. Ed suggests individually exporting duct, pipe, cabletray, whatever to IFC, then importing those IFC into your Revit model. My favorite benefits from using Ed's method is that Revit will recognize the individual components for interference detection and at least for me, the file sizes are smaller and the files faster. Give it a shot and comment back your results. I would love to hear how it works for others.

1 comment:

David Kingham said...

I just tried this out and it worked fairly well, it converts all the parts into Revit objects, which makes navigation much smoother than importing the dwg. It doesn't maintain the colors unfortunately.
This makes my previous post obsolete http://bimmanager.blogspot.com/2007/03/importing-abs-files-into-revit.html
And solved Laura's post here
http://bimx.blogspot.com/2007/02/ifc.html

Of course it's all pretty useless for either of us anymore because we just use NavisWorks instead.