Revit Architecture for model railroading

[Anonymous]

Dear Forum Members

I am a model railroad hobbyist on weekends, engineer by day (in oil and gas, not construction industry).  I am not an architect nor have I used Autocad in several years.  But I am interested in re-learning it, with the intent of using it to generate a 3D 1/87th scale model of a Victorian-style train station (St Pancras in London), then print the components (walls, roof, masonry arches, roof trusses, etc) on a 3D printer.  I want this to be a hgh fidelity model, which probably rules out traditional model building techniques that employ glued up trips and structural shapes of styrene.   

I understand this is a huge learning curve I am embarking on but I don't mind if it takes me a year to get good enough at Autocad to even start printing the first piece. 

Most of the 3D printing apps seem more suited at printing a solid object, or at least something that is one piece.  Since this station model would be a couple feet across when completed, this would not be practical.  I am writing to this forum because I see HSB Labs has a Revit Addon that breaks up a 3D model of a house into components and prints it out like a kit that you can assemble.  I think this is essentially what I need. 

I don't mind spending $1500 for a printer and $500-1500 for a software; however, purchasing a $6000 license for Revit is a little out of my budget for a weekend hobby project!   I know they offer it on a monthly subscription but I only plan to play with it on weekends and nights so that won't be too helpful.  I dont need to allow multi users to collaborate on this and I don't need the BIM capabilities of Revit.  Architecture and Autocad aren't much less expensive. 

I know there are free CAD products but the lack of manuals make it even harder for someone like me to get back in the game, plus you sorta get what you pay for on capabilities.  Maybe I'm judging 123Design too harshly, but in lieu of instruction all I've been able to do is make robots and simple locomotives, not detailed architectural models that are suitable for high resolution printing.  I don't know if Sketchup/Pro has these capabilities; I'd hate to spend $600 and my time and still not be able to accomplish what I want. 

Would any of Autodesks LT versions allow me to more affordably accomplish what I want or are too many of the 3D capabilities disabled on those?  Just need a decent 3D CAD program that has a good architectural element library (or allows me to custom design an element that is not in the library) and cleans up my rookie mistakes so I don't make a pile of plastic spaghetti on the printer :-).  Do I really need the capabilities of the HSB Labs program that breaks a model into components or will it work OK if I just carefully design each wall, truss, archway as separate drawings and hope I've measured correctly so they all fit together properly? 

I know this probably sounds like a ridiculous undertaking, but I am holding out hope that perhaps I have just made this more difficult than it needs to be?  Thanks in advance for anyone who is able to offer suggestions.

Chris

Houston TX

[L.Maas]

No experience in 3D printing. But Revit does not seem the right solution. Revit is great for designing life sized buidlings. But it has basically no functionlity with regards to 3D printing. When your design in Revit is complete you would have to translate it to a format the 3D printer will understand.

As far as Iknow this is in many cases STL. This is not natively supported by Revit. There are some add-ins which can help. Then your second issue is that you would have to scale everything 1/87th. This is also not really supported in Revit.

So as far as I can see it you would already go through hoops to get your model out of Revit in the right scale and in the proper format.

If you would already have Revit in your arsenal and already have your model in Revit I could understand this. But starting with a clean slate....?

I would look for software which has good support for STL files/3D printing and would be able to help with the design of the smaller parts. Especially If you are considering to print the building in separate components. Maybe software more in line of product design (e.g. inventor or similar), which are geared to smaller parts and assemblies, are bettter suitable.

You also could consider to contact a 3D printer service company and ask them if they have experience with software that  might be suitable for you.