Parametric Products

[maberry]

I deal with custom casework where custom is required for as-built field conditions.  Height, width, and depth are only a few of possibly hundreds of conditions that need to be parametric.  Currently we engineer these cabinets in AutoCAD 3D, whereas there is a spreadsheet driving the parametric drawing.  All of canned data is stuffed into a SQL database.  Our customers also need manufacturing data coming from the drawings, so I am a little confused about how we should interface with Revit.  I see that it is possible to import from AutoCAD, but don't see that thee is a standardized way to provide information about the products such as manufacture, item number, size, price, etc...  We built a small plug-in that allows us to bring over a corrisponding spreadsheet with such information, but there must be some unobvious and standardized way to deal with customers where families / libraries in Revit just aren't practical.  For reference, www.microvellum.com.  Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

[jeremytammik]

Dear maberry, I would hope that your AutoCAD workflow involves a custom plu-in of yours which reads all these hundreds of spreadsheet or database parameters and generates the appropriate geometry from it automatically. Similarly, you would implement a Revit add-in which reads the parameters and generates a family definition from them using the Revit Family API:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2011/10/families-guide.html

The blog includes a pointer to the ADN Family API training material plus couple of samples showing how to generate and load families programmatically.

I hope this helps.