In place mass Wall by face option gives error can't make wall face

[Anonymous]

Dear Revit'ers,

I have made a 3d model for a building in rhino made from single surfaces and imported that to revit via an acis.sat file using the ''in place mass'' option.

In revit I tried to make walls and roofs by face of these in place masses using the ''wall by face'' tool.

For most walls and roofs it works perfect, for some however it just simply states: ''cannot make face wall''.

I tried changing the surface normal direction but that did not work. I also tried cutting the parts that did not work in smaller parts and of these smaller parts most sub-parts the option did work on but again on a few of these parts it did not work.

It almost seems random, doesn't matter of the surface is double curved or single curved. It seems like every 5 walls it works perfect and the 6th it says ''cannot make face wall''.

Every advice is welcome.

Attached is the original rhino model, a revit model where i tried making the faces walls, and a screenshot of the error.

[Alfredo_Medina]

@Anonymous

Did you try also with the "Roof by Face" tool on those surfaces that failed with "Wall by Face"?

[Corsten.Au]

Try exporting that particular portion from Rhino again..

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

- I tried the roof by face as well, gave the same error on the same parts.

- I tried cutting up geometry in more parts and than the error would continue on some of the subparts but not all of them

- I tried reversing the surface normal

- I tried isolating the different parts in seperate files

- I tried exporting the rhino file into autocad > explode > safe as DFX file before importing into revit. Some parts that got lost in the sat file import were there but were not possible to use commands on.

- I tried exporting it as solid or mesh geometry instead of a surface but that did not work either.

After several other possible solutions one person of the revit technical support staff made this video:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/community/screencast/46423f84-ae39-4169-abdb-d677f2f15e79

- Turns out, most of the surfaces that gave that particular error was able to be solved by making the wall as thin as possible.

- Other complications are when surfaces overlap.

- Than some surfaces still did not work but the ones that were not too complex could be recreated in revit.

- For certain parts that still did not work it helped cutting out complex part like the notch for one of the domes.

- For the last parts i cut op geometry that did not work out the way I wanted by using that tool into many different segments. (a single wall into 186 parts).

All in all it doesn't work quite the way I hoped it would, but using all these solutions and work arounds i finally managed to recreate the whole model in revit. It might be easier to just not design any double curved surfaces in the future though.

[Anonymous]

To be fair, I haven't tried rendering it yet, still need to work on it for some while.

But I can imagine that a wall that consists of a large part and a few different sized smaller parts could create a weird pattern scale effect when rendering. But I'll get to that later :), There might be workarounds for that too.