Make linking IFC's more stable

[Hauk-Morten]

Linking IFC's currently works spotty at the best of days. This is a fundamental part of the MEP workflow, it needs to just work. Please find one or multiple ways to not show this error. 

I am an HVAC engineer, and so I depend on the links from the architects and structural engineers (in my town, usually from ArchiCAD and Tekla) to engineer our things. And loading that link works 1/3 times. We're struggling with this. Every. Single. Day. I am an experienced Revit user. I am what's called a "super user" in my company. I am the one the average Revit-capable engineer gets forwarded to when the first Revit-expert they called couldn't help. I write macros in C#, I write Dynamo-scripts, I use the RevitPythonShell on a daily basis as a working tool. I manage BIM360/ACC Projects. But I am not capable of simply loading an IFC link reliably. In my honest opinion, that means it's too hard. Please, Autodesk, I depend on this every single day, and so does almost every other engineer in the entire buildings division of every major consulting engineer firm. Please, don't bother making new features of any kind before you get IFC-links working reliably, or at the very least give us error messages we can work with!

And yes, we've tried deleting collaboration cache and deleting the IFC.RVT-files. We've tried many things, many times, and one thing that works perfectly one day or for one person, just won't work the next day or for other people in the project. Each new attempt takes hours, and then it's just the same the day after.

[matt.arsenault_adsk]

Hi @Hauk-Morten - Apologies for the difficulty with linking IFC files into Revit 2022. Over the past few major releases, we have done a substantial amount of work for both import/link and export of IFC files with Revit. Have you had a chance to try these releases to see if your issue still persists? 

Additionally, we plan to move this thread away from Revit Ideas, and place into the Revit Forums, so we can help you further investigate the issues you're having with Revit 2022.

[Hauk-Morten]

This is good news. I will attempt to get consensus in my current project for upgrading to Revit 2023, one of the other involved firms haven't been ready to upgrade yet.

That beeing said: Actually, I don't think this belongs in the Revit Forums. My idea was not for Autodesk help me solve my single, current problem. My idea was for you to find and recreate all of the 10's of differents problems that occur on a daily basis for many people. Granted, it's a big task to find all of them, but the number of times, and the number of different errors we've encountered with this gives the impression that you didn't find even the most common ones. Does anyone in Autodesk currently have licenses for the most commons versions of ArchiCAD and Tekla intended for testing? Do you have large scale, complex testfiles created in their software to try to get Revit to accept their IFC's? The answer to those questions should be two resounding yes, but feels like no. The IFC exports from ArchiCAD passed the IFC certification, and most of f the time their IFC's read just fine in Solibri, so I assume there's a limit to how bad their files can be despite that Revit can't read them.

[matt.arsenault_adsk · Accepted solution]

When it comes to linking in IFC files, we would recommend Revit 2024.2 at the earliest, Revit 2025 would be better. I mention this as we fundamentally changed the geometric processing engine for linking and importing IFC files to resolve all the unstable geometry issues in earlier versions. You can learn more in this blog post. 

When it came to moving this to the forums versus ideas, we chose to do so as we firmly believe we've addressed the problem at hand related to stability of linking IFC files in our latest releases. For us, we now see this post as an opportunity to investigate the issues you're having more directly. We'd be happy to investigate this issue if you were willing to share the sample IFC files with us so we can try and re-produce in 2022 and test the newer versions. 

Additionally, I agree with your idea to make error messages more transparent to help users understand why the issue is occurring not that it occurred. This idea and your feedback has been shared with the development team.  When it comes to testing we do extensive testing with a number of IFC files from various sources, and in particular the error message you received is an uncommon error we have not seen with IFC files. For this reason, we wanted to shift to forums to hopefully help resolve for you and get to the root of the problem.