adding mechanical components to Revit project

[ydesleurink]

So, I am completely new to Revit, while working with Autocad, Inventor and Solidworks daily.

We make facade maintenance equipment, like window cleaning systems and such. We often get asked by our clients to supply them with Revit-friendly models of our components, so they can fit them on their buildings within Revit. 

Again, I am completely lost in Revit and therefore hope someone here can help me a bit.

The question is then quite simple: how do I go about this, converting mechanical Solidworks-files to a library of components that can easily be plugged into Revit?  I have already been messing with IFC's ofcourse, but I can't get them to behave as smoothly as, for example, just placing a piece of furniture (from some autodesk family) on a certain level.

Any help is appreciated! 

[alan.johnson7YLND]

Not much experience with Solidworks but you could try export from Solidworks to dwg then load the dwg into a Revit wall based family. You can then see if it works as is, or re-model the objects in the family using the forming tools like extrusion, blend, sweep etc.

[RobDraw]

I use third party families on a regular basis and families based on imports are not very good, usually. You are going to have to learn family editing in Revit in order to provide families. Once you do that, you will probably find that it is easier to make the families without importing anything than it is to figure out how to get the imports to work well enough. If you don't want to go down that route, provide your usual content and let your clients make the families by importing. There are a lot of places doing specialized work like you that provide a number of formats but no Revit families.