Product portfolio to families, AutoCAD and Revit

[tuomas.einamoV2MEV]

I am working to produce 3d cad-material of the products my company manufactures and sells. The demand requires that there's 3d dwg and Revit families of the products. Our R&D uses PTC Creo and straight conversion to 3d dwg is not an options. I was planning to model everything in AutoCAD and then use the 3d dwg files to build the Revit families. 

Today I found this page with best practices for modeling Revit families. This line got me questioning my approach to the task:

"If starting with a DWG or SAT file, these should only be used as a reference for the creation of native Revit geometry, and then removed from the family. Imported data can cause performance issues in Revit models."

Is the Revit modeling engine really so different from the one AutoCAD uses that it would be worth to model the families again in Revit? I will most likely have to do all the work by myself and modeling our complex products twice is a huge task. 

[MetalFingerz · Accepted solution]

Hello @tuomas.einamoV2MEV ,

It will depend on if your families are parametric and if the imported .dwg make the families heavy and/or slow. If negative for both then it's "ok" to just have families from imported .dwg, it's not the best but unless you have the skills to remodel them or want to pay for those services, it's the minimum acceptable state for a family. Importantly, if you remodel your products in autocad and strip all the unnecessary or inside geometry beforehand, the import in Revit should be fine.

Now if your families have to be parametric (needs to be resized, have graphic options or have specific behaviors) or require some sort of intelligence (needs MEP connectors for example), it would be best to remodel them even if it's with a very low level of detail. Similarly and depending on the type of products you manufacture, the file size of the resulting .rfa file needs to be taken into account. More than 1mb for some pipe fitting is too much but acceptable for a window with plenty of options.

So my advice, would be that if your products are complex, first try to understand the minimum acceptable geometry for your product to be recognizable and to work as a 3D model and then remodel them directly in Revit. As you say, it's would be a waste to do the work twice. But if your products are simple (geometry wise), a .dwg import would do the job as long as the file size is not too big.

[RSomppi · Accepted solution]

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@tuomas.einamoV2MEV wrote:

Is the Revit modeling engine really so different from the one AutoCAD uses that it would be worth to model the families again in Revit? I will most likely have to do all the work by myself and modeling our complex products twice is a huge task. 

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Start in Revit. The export to AutoCAD will be a far sight better than .dwg imports in Revit, much better.

[barthbradley · Accepted solution]

Do it in both.  Go to BIMObject and look at what other manufacturers are doing. Many provide DWGs, RVTs, Type Catalogues, Lookup Tables, ADSKLIBs, PDFs, etc. for their products.     

[tuomas.einamoV2MEV]

The products (dental units and imaging devices) my employer manufactures have some emphasis on the esthetics and this is also something I am trying to implement in the families. Most of the parts have complex curved surfaces that aren't really straightforward to model. 

I think I will model the most simple one with both, AutoCAD and Revit and compare the effort vs. benefits of each method. I will anyways have to learn to model also with Revit. 

I would straight up do it all with Revit but I managed to get some usable dwg solid parts exported from Creo that have pretty complex geometry (modeling wise, not huge file size difference). 

Thanks to all for your input, this was really helpful.