Hello
I am having some issues importing a SDNF into Revit Strutural. You will have to forgive me, my knowledge of the package is limited at the moment to simple zoom and pan and importing the sdnf into revit, but I have spend a bit of time in Revit Structural and know the basics of that quite well.
Some background - We have been reverse engneering beams and columns in a software package called Leica Cyclone, where we fit shapes to a point cloud, for about 10 years now, and we normally export the solids to autocad, and they come thorugh as 3d solids. I have been using sdf files or sdnf file as they are called here, with a lisp file for bringing in the centerlines of the beams in a layer named after their size so they can be then traced in the clients package. This linework has also been going to analysis packages for finite element analysis.
I happened to come accross the fact that revit structural imports this SDNF file type so I thought I would give it a go. Ths has the potential to be a big thing for us, as Intergraph (who invented the format I believe) dont support it in their piackages. After changing the units from Meters to meters it imported straight in and looks great.
Well most of it does, I am having problems with the rotation of the beams and colums. My understanding of the SDNF format is the main line under the size is the z axis tranformation and then the two coordinates of the ends of the beam.
What I am seeing is the importer seems to be drawing the beams based on the two ends of the line and the z axis not the vector at the start of the postion line in the file, so some of my beams are comming in rotated up to 45° wrong, or in some cases upside down.
eg
"310UC137" "A36" 0.0 0 0
-1.000000 0.000000 -0.000487 -3.003993 102.047239 85.214246 -3.008849 102.054703 95.193080 0.000000 0.000000
-1.000000 0.000000 -0.000487 zaxis transformation
-3.003993 102.047239 85.214246 start point
-3.008849 102.054703 95.193080 end point
This should put in a beam very close to 90° going almost vertical (because it is real life not design this happens a lot, the real world isn't always perfectly square), but instead the beam is rotated about 31°. This follows the change in postion of the end points.
Has anyone seen this before? Is there a solution or is this a bug in the SDNF importer.
This post is really directed to Autodesk people, but they dont really give a person to contact for help with the extensions pack.
P.S. I'd post the revit file but with only one beam in the file it is larger than the allowable limit on the forum.
Thanks
Phill
