Newbie needs help exporting data for all objects in the design

[Anonymous]

Hey there, I hope someone can get me started down the right path or even point me to a few topics to look into.

I'm new to Revit, and thus I am in way over my head here, still trying to learn the terminology and everything. I'm a pro with Unity and C# and I do a lot of VR development there. I am tasked with working on a plugin to extract mesh data from any Revit file to use in Unity to build the meshes dynamically. The Unity stuff I have down, but I need to be able to export the data for all the 3d objects in the Revit file. It's hard to articulate in Revit speak since I'm so new to it. 

Use: I want to be able to run this plugin and have it break down all objects in the design in an organized way - i.e. per floor, per room - and capture all the vertices of the floors, walls, windows, etc. Then I would save that data to a txt, xml, json or csv file that is organized in a hierarchy (per floor, per room, per object type, etc) and has information about the mesh object (vert location of each element in world space would be a great start) so that I can import that into Unity and rebuild the meshes there. 

I know you can "easily" export FBX files, but I need this to be quick and easy to use, and I really just need the data for the objects (vert locations of the object, material, texture info) so I can recreate on the fly. 

Does anyone know how I would get started or what this is even called? I can't even describe what I need in Revit terms, I'm so sorry!

Thanks for any help anyone is willing to give me,

-ss

[jeremytammik · Accepted solution]

Dear Ss,

Welcome to the Revit API.

Sounds like a super cool project.

What you want can be easily achieved using a custom exporter:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/about-the-author.html#5.1

Before looking into that, I strongly recommend you work through the Revit API getting started material:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/about-the-author.html#2

Good luck and have fun!

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Anonymous]

Awesome, thanks for your help Jeremy!