topic Re: Revit to 3DS Max interior design in 3ds Max Forum

Revit to 3DS Max interior design

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 00:16:58 GMT

Hello,

I am a revit user who is envious of the amount of 3D models (furniture, luminaires, stuff) available for 3dmax users. After many painful attempts of trying to import 3D .dwg files into revit, I decided I want to bring my revit model into 3DS MAX.

So far, I have tried linking a fbx file into 3DS max. How do I go about adding furniture and lights? If I have a multi-storey house, is there a way I can isolate floors to work with like I would in Revit.

I've searched youtube and forums for the right direction but they all lead me to rendering and animation tutorials.

I would like to focus on the interior design aspect of my building before trying to render. Is there any tutorials out there that can teach me how to do this?

Thank you in advance,

Jane

Re: Revit to 3DS Max interior design

JamesClarke3D — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 15:14:45 GMT

Adding furniture: To add models from other files you'll either "Import" other file types, or "Merge" objects from other .max files. Over time you'll likely build up a library of assets to work with regularly, some key purchases (model/texture libraries) early on can help jump start this process.

Adding lights: For this I assume you mean "light objects" that cast light on your scene, versus modeled light geometry (if geometry - see previous item.) To create lights that illuminate your scene: Command Panel, Create tab, Lights group - create away 🙂 Exactly what types of lights is going to be scene / renderer / workflow dependent (photometric vs not, etc.)

Isolating floors: Lots of different ways to do this, it just depends on how your scene is arranged and what your workflows are. Tools to organize and work with your scene include: hiding and unhiding objects individually, temporarily "isolate" your selection, save custom selections of objects as "selection sets", use layers to organize and turn different pieces on and off, etc. There's no section box that works like it does in Revit though.

The folks over at cgarchitect.com do this stuff all the time, so it's worth a stop over at their forums.

Re: Revit to 3DS Max interior design

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 18:44:54 GMT

Hey! Thanks for getting back to me.

Can you elaborate from " it just depends on how your scene is arranged and what your workflows are."

Are you refering to the 3D view of the Revit model?

This is all so strange to me so I don't have a workflow at the moment.

Does 3ds max layers work similar to sketchup and autocad?

Re: Revit to 3DS Max interior design

JamesClarke3D — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 19:06:29 GMT

So the thing with 3dsMax is, there's tons of different ways to do the same thing, and what some people consider "their way" to do something, someone else may have something different based on what type of projects they work on, etc. So to some extent it's just a scenario of, you'll figure out what works for you as you go. You'll develop your own workflow.

And yes, certainly much of it comes down to your Revit model, and then beyond that how you choose to structure things in Max. Once you start doing things in Max, you'll likely notice 'side effects' of choices you made in Revit, what objects are connected together or not, mitering wall corners, construction methods of how you built things, etc. I don't really know Revit, but I know Revit models I get can vary based on who I get them from, meaning who actually did the modeling, etc. You also have options of are you bringing in FBX, DWG, or RVT directly, and if you are linking then do you combine by material/family/ no combining, etc. These choices will vary based on how you want to manipulate the objects after the fact. Some people like to combine into material so it's quick and easy to do material assignments and there are less objects in your scene. Sometimes people prefer to nto combine so they have more flexibility to manipulate things individually. And these choices matter because if you chose to combine objects in Max based on material, you likely wouldn't be able to easily isolate into a single floor, because all walls on all floors would turn into one object. So that's what I mean by - depends on scene arrangement and workflow, there's lots of options, you get to pick one (or more) and see what makes the most sense for your situation.

Yes, layers in Max work similar to SketchUp and AutoCAD. Each object can only be assigned to one layer, a layer can have a layer color assigned, visibility turned on/off. You can also have nested layers (layers inside of other layers) but that's only in the last release or two. I tend to rely heavily on layers to organize my scene, versus some of the other things I mentioned like selection sets or scene states, but that's just my preference. When you start getting into more complex projects, there's also the ability to split things into separate .max files and combine them back together with the xref scene tools.

Re: Revit to 3DS Max interior design

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 23:09:35 GMT

One more question, my concern i is when I need to prepare for presentation sheets how do I go about making floor plans and sections in 3ds max. Can the furniture be transferred into revit? Ideally, it would be most convenient to use Revit sheets but I don't know if that is possible if the furniture is from 3ds max.

Re: Revit to 3DS Max interior design

JamesClarke3D — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 15:34:26 GMT

Yeah, that's more Revit specifics than I really know unfortunately. Not sure what/how Revit sheets would come into play. Sure you could export geometry from Max and import into Revit once you've set everything up, but then the question on materials comes into play, and it sounds like from your first post that's the sort of stuff you were already trying with the painful dwg imports.

My expectation for how things are setup currently is that you'll be doing renderings in 3dsMax to create images for presentation purposes, but no idea how any of that would or could go back into a Revit model, afaik it's typically separate parallel processes going on.