[Radiance-general] REVIT to Radiance pipeline

[Jack de Valpine]

Hi Rob,

So this is interesting. I have been working with Revit for awhile now, 
both in terms of taking Revit models that clients have developed as well 
as using Revit for developing models from scratch. By far the best 
workflow that I have worked out is to use Revit->Max Design->Radiance 
via obj export from Max Design and obj2rad in Radiance.

There are a couple of workflow options from Revit to Max that are pretty 
tightly coupled in the software. There are also a variety of scripts 
already developed for exporting from Max to obj format in a variety of 
ways. The presumption here is that people who use Revit are in fact 
using one of Autodesk's Suites, such as the Building Design Suite which 
at one level includes Max. If you are using Revit within a suite via 
Autodesk subscription the cost for moving up to get access to Max is 
incremental.

In my mind the big challenge for workflow from Revit to Radiance is the 
fact that glass in Revit is modeled as a volumetric object (eg it has 
thickness). There are work arounds to this that leverage Revit's Family 
system however they are not without their catches. In brief, a Revit 
model that is going to be exported for use in Radiance must give careful 
consideration to how glazing elements are handled through a set of 
customized families that allow for extracting selected faces from the 
glass to create the surface glass geometry that Radiance requires. Again 
this can be done with some thought to modeling methods in Revit and 
coupled with an export pipeline that includes  Max and exporting to obj 
format.

Another issue that requires some thought is managing lights that are 
deployed in Revit, which would be nice to manage as instances in 
Radiance. There are some similar strategies that can be used with 
careful thought to using the Family model in Revit.

This has been something I have been thinking about doing a blog post on, 
so perhaps this would be a good time assuming I can find the time....

As far as writing a custom exporter from Revit, I think this would 
really be dependent on what the desired functionality would be. If the 
functionality is really one way geometry export then, I think the 
(annual) incremental cost for upgrading from the standard building 
design suite to the premium suite is ~$250.

Best,

-Jack de Valpine




On 11/12/2015 9:35 AM, Shakespeare, Robert A. wrote:
> At the last Radiance Workshop, there was some discussion regarding 
> converting REVIT models to Radiance, with materials and named surfaces 
> parsed into readable .rad datasets.  As REVIT has essentially become 
> the architectural industry modeling tool, the pipeline to Radiance is 
> an important one.  It seems that the latest version of Sketchup has 
> some challenges with the very helpful su2rad, written quite awhile 
> ago. I heard that others were using some other pipelines, perhaps 
> integrating obj2rad, etc.
> I would appreciate your sharing conversion pipelines which interface 
> with the MOST CURRENT releases of REVIT, SKETCHUP, etc. Hopefully a 
> generous and expert code person would consider writing a direct REVIT 
> plugin for this purpose. There might be modest financial encouragement 
> to fill this gap. I do realize that it may be short-lived as AutoDESK 
> releases are moving targets, yet to engage the full Radiance tool kit 
> for lighting design and analysis on REVIT generated models, will keep 
>  Radiance on the forefront and accessible to a broader audience.
> Appreciatively,
> Rob Shakespeare
> shakespe at indiana.edu
>
>
>
>
>
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> Radiance-general at radiance-online.org
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