Remaking CAD objects necessary

[Anonymous]

We are an office furniture manufacturer that purchased the Revit software in order to offer our customers our products in the .rfa format.  We have hundreds of products in CAD & various other 3D formats.  We've been told we would need to remake every one of our products in Revit from scratch.  However, I've been able to import our CAD files and work with them in the software but I was told that because they weren't made natively in Revit that they're essentially useless.  Is this true and if so, what sort of training would be required to move forward?  Can't we just add the dimension information to our previously made items within Revit?  We've been quoted thousands just to make a portion of our library into Revit families and we've already spent thousands leasing the software thus far with no success.

Please direct us if possible.

Thank you

[jeremytammik]

Sorry to hear that this issue is troubling you.

I always recommend generating all such libraries completely parametrically from scratch.

That would have meant, way back then before you created any CAD content at all, defining a programmatic way to generate that CAD content from a database of parametric definitions and lists of dimensions of all your library parts.

I have been recommending that approach (mostly in vain) for about four decades now.

The people who listened to it back then are very happy now that they did.

They are all too few.

Most people go and implement CAD content by hand, over and over again, every time the system changes.

Well, so be it then.

If the content is generated programmatically from a database of rules and dimensions, you can simply implement a new content generator for each system that you wish to populate. The database content driving it remains unchanged.

Back to your issue at hand:

If you have tested using families based on the imported CAD geometry in Revit without problems, then that is obviously a feasible option.

However, you really need to test that this really works under all circumstances.

For instance, if you are a chair manufacturer, try using your CAD-import-based family in a hospital or airport with thousands or tens of thousands of instances.

That may cause problems.

Furthermore, it might not be easy to equip the CAD-import-based parts with all the dimensions that drive their different sizes, aka family types aka symbols.

Here is a recommendation to think twice before importing CAD into RFA:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2016/09/avoid-cad-import-in-rfa-aag16-and-endtrip.html#2

On a completely different note, please be aware that this discussion forum is dedicated to programming Revit using the Revit API.

Therefore, you cannot really expect any good answers to a question such as yours relating to product usage and content creation here.

You should try one of the non-API Revit product support discussion forums instead for that:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-api/this-forum-is-for-revit-api-programming-questions-not-for/td...

The people there are much better equipped to answer your question than us programming nerds.

I hope this clarifies.

Thank you for your understanding.

Good luck finding an efficient and viable solution for your task!

Best regards,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

@jeremytammik

Thank you so much for your reply,

Your post along with the provided links will help me rationalize to the company why we need to create the content natively.

I'm essentially a one man band over here and re-making all of the thousands of items from scratch, especially when coding

is not my forte, is not a feasible option.  

I greatly appreciate your reply!

[jeremytammik]

I summarised my recommendation for readability and future reference:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2017/01/happy-new-year-c-crypto-and-content.html#4

Happy New year!

Cheers,

Jeremy