Bim Exchange for Revit issue

[Anonymous]

A customer is trying to export a model for use in Revit. When he goes to the Environments tab -> BIM Exchange and the dialog opens...  He has no option for RFA files... Only ADSK. Not sure what is going on. 

Any ideas?

Thanks

[pcrawley · Accepted solution]

You can export as ADSK and bring that into Revit.  That's no problem.  (It's not very useful, but it works.)

If you want to create a Revit family file (.RFA) then you have to:

1. Create a single part (assuming it's an assembly) by deriving or shrinkwrapping
2. Open the resulting part and select the "BIM" tab
3. Run through the "Check Revit Features" and "Recognise Revit features".  During "Recognise Revit features" you get the fun task of rebuilding all the features that Revit doesn't recognise.
4. Finish "Recognise Revit features".
5. Hit BIM Exchange - and .RFA will be an option.

It does work well - but Revit is a very poor relation to Inventor in terms of modelling capability, so your resulting RFA model may look a bit like a Lego brick when you're done!

It appears as though the idea of a .RFA file is for it to be as small (filesize) as possible.  I guess this because it could be used thousands of times in one Revit model, and unlike Inventor where it just references the file, Revit creates one huge model file that contains everything.  So, keep it really simple!

[pcrawley]

I just remebered this video too from the great guys at Cadline in the UK.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b77aqqEnq5I

[Anonymous]

PC-

Thanks for the replies.... I didn't even think about the possibility of him having an assembly open. I'll go through these steps with him... 

Thanks for your help-

Jess