Import CAD furniture or rebuild in Revit

[cekuhnen]

Out of curiosity,

what is best practise in this case:

importing simplified furniture SAT models from Rhino

or

rebuild a simplified model in Revit?

I have a lot of problems to get materials onto imported CAD and also noticed that all Revit furniture tutorials I find are just building them in Revit.

[constantin.stroescu]

• In my oppinion ,is better to rebuild it in Revit in order to be able to use Parameters and to have the posibilty to make schedules of parts of this pieces of furniture...
• If you intend to use the family only as part of an architectural layout then you can use imported entities .In this case you will use the family as it is , the single parameter that you'l can use could be Material (if the original file -.dwg has layers for materials). Such are cars , chairs...they are standard and do not need any other changes except materials....

[cekuhnen]

Hi Constantin,

thank you for your quick reply.

We basically do furniture design and were curious what architects / interior designers would need.

I have read that CAD imported models can slow down Revit significantly. While what we think we only need is to bring a basic model into Revit so the designer can later calculate the amount of furniture pieces and add them together so they can have $ number.

I assume it is possible in Revit to calculate the amount of used chairs for example?

[constantin.stroescu · Accepted solution]

1.  I am an architect and from my point of view the best way is to have furniture objects made in Revit with parameters. For instance , we have a table and when inserted into Project , parameters allow us to have different dimensions, materials,controling visibility of components schedules for components of every piece of furniture (if we use Shared Parameters in Family) . Usually I prefer to make these family myself in order to control how parameter work...
2. I use also Furniture Families made by others and many of them have a  CAD model as base (usually .dwg). Not an Imported CAD  ,but a Furniture Family that use a CAD imported file. In this case is important that the .dwg file to be structured by layers ( separate layer for each material) in order to be able to change later materials in Family Editor. These Families based on a .dwg file can also be scheduled and totalized number and price....but not for components...These objects can not be modified by dimension. They are inserted simple as they are.. For a simple  architecture layout can be enough......
3. One important observation is that many producers that have made .rfa files , made them with to many details....For architecture use , this is not a good point. Over detailing increase useless  the dimension of the Revit file .  A good choice could be to have two .rfa files...One a simplified volume and the second could be a detailed one . This simplification can be obtained also by using visibility options and parameters , but the file still remains big...
4. Refering to point 1. and 3 : Sometimes too many parameters can be a bad solution ....they increase the project useless...