[Radiance-general] import to Radiance

[Jack de Valpine]

Hi Jia

Not sure why you want to go fbx to 3ds with the converter. 3ds is an old 
format that has limitations to geometry that may impact your model. You 
should be able to go to obj and then import the obj into Rhino to do 
what you want (such as fix normals and export a "good" obj). For obj2rad 
you want the object to have material names assigned.

Layers and materials are distinct methods of organization. If you are 
working with Autocad and going to Radiance, layers are the principal 
method of organizing your geometry. If you are working with Revit, 
materials are the principal method of organizing geometry (unless you 
want to work on a per object basis).

If I recall correctly, it has been awhile, if you export from revit to 
dwg, then certain family categories will get compressed onto one 
representative layer. Depending on what you are doing this may loose 
critical geometry differentiation that you need to have. And it is a 
really big pain to try to edit the resulting autocad model to recover 
such differentiation.

-Jack

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



Jia Hu wrote:
> Hello:
>  
> Thanks for your advice. I almost forgot FBX Converter because I used 
> it to convert the FBX to OBJ and always get "vn" 0 0 0.  I try that 
> again, and find if I convert FBX to 3DS and then import 3DS to Rhino, 
> it works at my first glance! and also contains correct material names  
> though in one layer.
>  
> Revit could directly export DXF (2007) and DWG (2007) by layers (the 
> materials seem missing), which can be imported to Rhino to get OBJ. 
> As Christopher and Jack said, it was required to reorganize layers 
> (e.g, in revit) before DXF/DWG (is any difference for the two?) is 
> exported.  I will also take a look at other ways Lars said.
>  
>  The layers for DWG/DXF format in Revit are organized according to its 
> categories and family types. I tried to customize and reorganized 
> some layers based on the default layer organization and it may 
> be acceptable for not complicated geometry.
>  
> Thank you all.
> Jia
>  
>  
>
> On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Jack de Valpine <jedev at visarc.com 
> <mailto:jedev at visarc.com>> wrote:
>
>     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 <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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