pulling a .rcm into Revit

[Anonymous]

Is there any way possible to do this?

Our company is new to bringing Point Clouds into Revit. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[loboarch]

Found on the insert tab of the ribbon.

Find help about point clouds here:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-D179BB6C-5528-498F-9413-00237092C2FA

[Anonymous]

This will pull in .rcp files and I have done that already.  The problem I am having is that the point clouds are very grainy and when you try to model in place the point clouds disappear.

I have created a couple of meshes in ReCap and I am trying to pull in the .RCM file into Revit and it won't let me.

Any help is greatly appreciated.  We are new to this whole process.

Thank you,

[Anonymous]

Resurrecting this thread for anyone who comes looking for an answer.

The short answer is that there is currently no way to bring an RCM directly into Revit or any other software, besides ReMake. An RCM is an Autodesk proprietary file made by the ReCap team (RCM = Reality Capture Mesh), then spun off into its own deal. The workaround is to convert the RCM into a format Revit can read; and it's kind of stupid. Here's the process:

• Open the RCM in ReMake.
• Export the file to an AutoCAD FBX (I recommend first decimating to reduce complexity)
• Open AutoCAD and do an FBXImport, scaling appropriately (I had to go 25.4 to 1)
• Save the AutoCAD file as a regular DWG
• Import the DWG into Revit

Now you have something to which you can apply materials, and therefore render, and is faster to maneuver. However, in a lot of cases, the reason people convert to meshes is because they want to play with 1 particular object from their scan. If this conversion process isn't worth the benefit, and you have access to the original scan, I recommend simply exporting that particular object as its own RCS, which you can directly import into Revit. It's still a Point Cloud, so no rendering and kind of slow, but the process goes from ~1 hr to ~5 mins. Here's the difference between the 2 - RCS on the left, dwg on the right:

[Anonymous]

Hey! 

Late to the party, but I found your reply helpful and this workaround DID work for me. 

However, I feel like I'm missing something here... I'm seeing promotional video's and posts from Autodesk which seem to imply that this process should be simpler... but I'm also not seeing any of the import or export tools for compatible file types within either Revit or ReCap Photo. 

See the links below for the content that's throwing me off... seems they're advertising ReCap's interoperability with Revit as a feature, but I'm not seeing the tools for it. 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/recap-forum/there-is-anyway-to-insert-a-revit-model-on-recap/td-p/793...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHpu2sH6ESk

Any new tips to add, since this post is over a year old?

[Anonymous]

No new tips.

In your first link they said you can import an RCP (i.e. the entire scan) into Revit, which is true, but not what this post is about. An RCM (i.e. a portion of a scan) import is still not possible. Furthermore, they didn't say you could import Revit into ReCap, only the other way around. The only model you can bring into ReCap is Navisworks.

The second link is in reference to a Revit feature that can recognize certain basic geometries from a scan as common objects, i.e. walls, floors, pipes, etc, then convert them to basic Revit geometry. It's great when it works, but don't think you're gonna scan a site and it will build a whole Revit model for you. It's very limited in scope and still a mostly manual operation.