The latest versions of AutoCAD products include the ability to overlay Navisworks files, so you could take a Revit model published to NWD and reference that in. Possibly a little easier than exporting to DWG, since its likely you need the NWD anyways.
If your employer is going to use AutoCAD, then you can do quite a few things for quantification/tracking in AutoCAD products, depending how much customization you want to do. An easy, old-school method would be to create a proxy data holder block with various attributes, which can then be pulled through Data Extraction. Drop one of those in for every piece of concrete you need to track. Volume isn't directly available, but can be had relatively easily using programming with LISP or dotNET. One of the overlooked advantages of AutoCAD products is the flexibility - while it lacks the focused capabilities of products like Revit or Inventor, it can be adapted to a wide variety of situations.
If you are going to fly by the seat of your pants, expect friction burns.
"I don't know" is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.
The real question is, do you have to create Isometric drawings for the pipe spools? If so, then Plant3D is your answer. If not, then Revit could be an option. I would be also asking how many pipelines and when was the last time you saw Revit do a Plant Project.
Revit would be good for smaller building type of MEP projects, but its not the tool for doing a Water/Wastewater Plant.
Tomislav Golubovic
Technical Specialist - Plant and Infrastructure
Autodesk Australia / New Zealand
Autodesk, Inc.
Autodesk ANZ YouTube Channel
Both programs are quite good in their respective fields. However the implementation is so different that trying to use them together at the same time is problematic. So you might end up faking boxes in Revit to approximate where piping would be, and boxes in Plant3D to approximate where the structure will be. Implementing changes to them would be part of the weekly coordination meeting. We do similar things with compressors and similar equipment, which is typically modeled in CATIA - there's no practical way to get them directly into the plant model, so they get roughed in with shapes that are good enough to do the job.
If you are going to fly by the seat of your pants, expect friction burns.
"I don't know" is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.
I just need a working solution to building the concrete models in Revit (Company chosen platform) and the piping and equipment in plant 3D (other company chosen platform).
From this I need to give our estimators a report containing all piping, equipment, CONCRETE (cubic yard), steel, etc...
L.Duff
OK, I understand your pain. The last project I worked on was a Desal project, and we had a similar issue, so we just had to convert files on a daily basis between platforms.
I see two options for the Revit side
a) You will need to convert the concrete (Revit) models to basic AutoCAD, maybe daily, twice a day and XREF them to Plant3D
OR
b) Export the Revit models to Navisworks and use the new functionality inside AutoCAD to attach the Navisworks file into the Plant model and use that to run your piping.
As for Plant3D to Revit, you'll need to run the EXPORTTOAUTOCAD command (again, daily or twice a day) so that the Revit users can see what the latest Piping models are doing. If you're handy with LISP or VBA or .NET then you could easily automate this.
This way you see what each discipline is doing, and you still get the functionality of Plant to do your Piping Isometrics and get the BOM's. Revit will continue to do the Concrete and you can get quantities from there.
In a collaboration sense you would use Navisworks to bring all the models together (natively) and then you would Clash them and see where the issues lie.
This is genuinely what we did on our last project, but we had Revit, and a non Autodesk Plant software to collaborate with. We had a couple of physical machines and virtual boxes to do these conversions at least once a day. I used to be the CAD Admin and wrote VBA scripts for a lot of the above work.
Tomislav Golubovic
Technical Specialist - Plant and Infrastructure
Autodesk Australia / New Zealand
Autodesk, Inc.
Autodesk ANZ YouTube Channel
I haven't used this, but it looks like it may do what is needed to automate the Revit/AutoCAD exchange.
https://apps.autodesk.com/RVT/en/Detail/Index?id=appstore.exchange.autodesk.com%3artvxporter%3aen
Bottom line, you're not going to produce one report with all of the information. I know w/ww don' use isometrics now, but we are seeing a pretty big push for them trying to move to more piping industry practices like isos.
Plant would be the tool, as it does the Piping Model then makes the Fabrication Iso's that are typical to a Plant project. Plus you can make the views and if the model updates you can choose to update the Ortho or make a new one.
Tomislav Golubovic
Technical Specialist - Plant and Infrastructure
Autodesk Australia / New Zealand
Autodesk, Inc.
Autodesk ANZ YouTube Channel
@Anonymous wrote:
Thank you for the quick reply Tomislav. We are mainly design, not build, so I was more interested in the capability of tying into P&IDs for a project - something MEP does not have, along with the Revit suite. It does not, however, from the conversation here, seem to be easy to tie in Plant3D into structural / civil design. Am I correct in thinking that?
Ta, P
You are correct in your thoughts of P&ID tieing in with Plant3D, that's the idea of the software. As for tieing in with Structural, there are two trains of thought. One is, if you are using Revit, then you will need to export the Plant model to AutoCAD and the Revit file to AutoCAD and XREF the two, and do that on a daily, or twice daily basis, depending on how often you want the opposing disciplines to see each other. If the structural group is using Advance Steel, there is nothing to be done other than XREF'ing the two DWG files together, and each discipline will see the latest SAVE, and the XREF balloon will appear asking to reload the XREF's
As for Civil, its the same workflow, except you will have to put the Plant model as an XREF to Civil3D and move it to the proper coordinates and scale it, as Plant works in mm and Civil works in m (meters). The opposite will happen for Plant3D and Civil, scale and move the Civil model to match the 0,0 that the Plant model will sit in.
Of course all the disciplines can be tied together inside Navisworks for Clash Detection etc
If you want a good workflow, have a look at the Autodesk ANZ YouTube channel, in particular the Tech Day playlist, we built a whole project using all the Autodesk products and it explains the workflows. The playlist is at 2015 Technology Days
Tomislav Golubovic
Technical Specialist - Plant and Infrastructure
Autodesk Australia / New Zealand
Autodesk, Inc.
Autodesk ANZ YouTube Channel