[Radiance-general] import to Radiance

[Jack de Valpine]

Hi Jia and Lars,

A few thoughts here.

FBX
I think that if you are going to use fbx in your workflow from Revit, 
unless you are using Max, you will need to use the FBX Converter, to 
process the fbx to some other format, such as obj. Note though that the 
FBX Converter does enable you to process fbx to older versions of the 
fbx format. Perhaps with some experimentation you can determine which of 
these might work with Rhino's fbx import capability.

DWG
The problem that I have noticed with dwg exported from Revit is that the 
layer organization is vastly simplified, so that while the geometry will 
all be there, it may not be broken out by layer the way you want and 
trying to reorganize the geometry in Autocad is probably impractical. 
FBX on the other hand does maintain correct material associations with 
the type of work flow that I have outlined previously. NOTE however that 
for some simulation purposes a model in dwg format and layering may be 
perfectly sufficient!

REVIT
I think it is pretty obvious that Autodesk would like to achieve some 
level of vendor lock-in across their product family (I think that for 
the most part they have been successful in this regard looking at their 
acquisitions and product offerings). Thus, all the pains (over the many 
years) that we have had to deal with in trying to get usable geometry 
out of applications such as Autocad and now Revit. I agree that there 
are other good solutions for modeling that are probably more open in 
terms of their import/export formats and other functionality. However, 
my observation is that more and more architectural design firms are 
moving towards Revit which I have to say actually produces models that 
are reliable and reasonably well organized, to the extent that I feel 
that we can actually make use of client produced models. I think that it 
make a lot of sense to figure out how to leverage this model data from 
Revit for simulation purposes, to do otherwise is impractical and 
missing how the architectural design process/industry is evolving.

Regards,

-Jack de Valpine

-- 
# Jack de Valpine
# president
#
# visarc incorporated
# http://www.visarc.com
#
# channeling technology for superior design and construction



Lars O. Grobe wrote:
> Hi Jia!
>> I asked this question in Autodesk Discussion Group and they say "FBX 
>> from
>> Revit 2010 is only compatible with Max 2010. It doesn't work like
>> earlier versions of FBX where other programs could open it."  So the 
>> problem
>> is that current Revit uses a new version of fbx while Rhino seems to 
>> use an
>> old one.
>>   
> Sounds familiar to anyone who has been using Autodesk-products before. 
> Once you save your data in one of their formats, it is basically gone 
> - formats are changing with every release and are hardly documented 
> anywhere.
>
> Still as another hint, there are two attempts to get access to at 
> least some data in dwg files. One is still in development:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/
>
> They have not published their recent updates to the code, but aim at 
> some rather ambitious parsing library for dwg.
>
> The other attempt is support for 3d-dxf in Blender:
>
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.4/Py/Scripts/Import/DXF-3D
>
> The idea here is to ignore dwg (which is changing too often and has 
> terrible documentation if any) and instead rely on dxf. They recommend 
> the use of another external tool to convert from dwg to dxf in case it 
> is required, which works perfectly fine also using wine on Linux.
>
> Still, as a note from my side: if Revit does not support any export 
> out of Autodesk formats at all, and the application is generating 
> models for simulation - may be Revit is just the wrong software for 
> this? There is a lot of great, relieable modeling software out there 
> developed by companies playing fair and not locking users away from 
> their own data... I cannot imagine to spend money on a modeler that 
> does not support any standard format (e.g. step or iges would be a 
> must and would already solve your problems).
>
> Cheers, Lars.
>
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