Autodesk® Revit® to Fabrication with Autodesk Inventor®
Autodesk® Revit® to Fabrication with Autodesk Inventor®
Harlan Brumm – Autodesk Inc
Bob Van der Donck – Autodesk Inc
AB3664-P In this class, we will explore moving an Autodesk Revit BIM model to Autodesk Inventor. We will cover how to prepare your Revit model for Inventor and leverage your BIM for fabrication. In this class, you will learn how to bring geometry from Revit into Inventor. We will also discuss best practices for creating Revit geometry to achieve optimal results in Inventor.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this class, you will be able to:
· To prepare Revit models and export Revit models to Inventor
· To import Revit models in Inventor
· To convert Revit models for sheet metal fabrication
· To recognize and cure import issues
· Add weld beads and create fabrication drawings of imported Revit data sets
· Create Bill of Materials and do costing on imported geometry
· Roundtrip Inventor models back to Revit
About the Speakers
Harlan Brumm is the Product Support Technical Lead for Autodesk® Revit® Architecture with Autodesk Product Support and has more than 15 years of Autodesk software experience. Before joining Autodesk, Harlan worked for civil engineers and architects in the Midwestern United States as a CAD and project manager. He also teaches AutoCAD® and Revit® Architecture classes at the Boston Architectural College.
Follow me on Twitter @HarlanBrumm
Visit our Revit Support blog at http://blogs.autodesk.com/revitclinic
Bob Van der Donck is the Product Support Technical Lead for Autodesk® Inventor®. He is a co-founder of Inventor and is based in the Portland, Oregon, office. In his 18 years with Autodesk, he has held various positions ranging from product support and training through QA management. Prior to Autodesk, he worked as application engineer on Euclid-IS. Bob used many different 2D and 3D CAD packages during the 10 years he spent working as a design and research engineer for various companies in the telecom, plastic mold, and sheet metal industries. Bob is a native from Belgium and holds a Masters degree in electro-mechanical engineering from the University of Brussels.
Contact Bob on Linked-In http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bob-van-der-donck/5/450/a49
Visit the Inventor support blog at http://blogs.autodesk.com/beinginventive
Contents
Learning Objectives 1
About the Speakers 1
Preparing your Revit model for Inventor 3
Choosing materials 3
Choosing Geometry to move to Inventor 3
Assemblies 4
Exporting your Revit model 6
Exporting from Revit 6
Settings in Revit for DWG 7
Importing Revit models into Inventor 12
Using the Import wizards 12
Import limitations 16
What objects are you going to get on the Inventor side 18
Go Green 18
Fabrication methods covered by Autodesk products 20
Using Revit models for sheet metal fabrication (duct work) 20
Fabrication methods 20
Import errors 21
Shape Extraction Techniques 22
Round-tripping 25
Stairs and Modular construction 26
Weldments 26
Weld preparation 27
Adding weld fabrication data 29
Create weld drawing views 32
Steel construction: BOM 34
Steel construction: default behavior 35
Steel construction: after applying macro 36
Conclusion 38
Preparing your Revit model for Inventor
The key to leveraging Inventor for fabrication is the need to understand how Revit geometry is interpreted when it is imported into Inventor and what is possible to export in Revit.
Inventor is able to interpret solid geometry from your Revit project.
Choosing materials
The first thing to understand is how Inventor will read the material information of your families/geometry when it is exported. In short it will not, however, Inventor will use the color information on the material (shaded color) during the import process. Most of your Revit materials will simply display as a default material in Inventor and will need to change later in Inventor.
More important than choosing the materials will be understanding how the object category affects the export.
Choosing Geometry to move to Inventor
Inventor could process your entire building information model, however, in all likelihood, you are interested in moving specific elements or geometry to Inventor to be fabricated and create your needed documentation. In 2012 products, you can leverage the assemblies feature to allow you to quickly create views of your building only showing the geometry you want to share with Inventor.
Assemblies
From the Revit wiki help:
You can select any number of element instances to create an assembly. The elements in the assembly can then be manipulated as a single unit. Each unique assembly represents a separate assembly type, and you can place instances of that type in the model as needed. Changes to assemblies are tracked as the model changes, and the types are automatically created or updated as needed.
Assemblies can be edited, tagged, scheduled, and filtered. After creating an assembly, you can select an instance of it and generate a sheet and assembly views. The assembly views are listed under the assembly type in the Project Browser and can be dragged onto assembly sheet views as needed.
An assembly gives you a ready-made way to create the view you need to export.
You can create an assembly for a group of objects by selecting them in the Revit view and on the Modify ribbon, selecting assembly. Revit will allow you to name the assembly and then the new assembly will be available via the project browser.
In the project browser you can create views for the assembly. The view that we will need for exporting to Inventor could be any view, but to get the 3D geometry, you will need the 3D assembly view.
In earlier version of Revit products, you can use section boxes and the visibility and graphics dialog to create a 3D view that shows only the geometry that you are interested in exporting to Inventor.
Exporting your Revit model
Within your Revit project, the next step is getting the data out of Revit. To do that, you can leverage the DW G file format to export the Revit geometry and import it into Inventor or you can use the SAT format. The choice is up to you.
Benefits of DWG:
· Better control over the way the objects look and act when imported into Inventor
· More control over how the DWG is created, ie. Layers and the way the different components of the export are handled
· Other formats prevent pieces of the Revit geometry from importing correctly or at all.
Using the DWG format allows for flexibility and provides the cleanest data transfer available.
Benefits of SAT:
· Simple Export from Revit. No settings or options needed
· Inventor geometry in some cases is cleaner
Exporting from Revit
The export menu under the Revit Application provides you the export to DWG tool or choose the SAT (ACIS (SAT) files) option. When choosing the DWG or SAT option, the current active view will be the view exported. Be sure to include a 3D view that looks like what you would want to see in Inventor before exporting the view to DWG.
Settings in Revit for DWG
There are settings that you can choose in the export tool to enable a better export from Revit for Inventor with the DWG file format. For the SAT format, there are not settings, you can simply save the SAT file with an automatic or manual name. For DWG export, there are settings to consider.
In the DWG export dialog, be sure to click the three dots next to the <in session export setup> drop down. You can save your own export setup just for exporting to DWG for Inventor.
The export dialog gives you options for controlling a number of settings and controls in the DWG output. Each of these is controlled by a different tab in the dialog.
The layers tab is the first tab that appears. The layers tab controls how each Revit Category is going to be exported as a layer. In this dialog you can control how your object will be broken down in Inventor and how it will be displayed.
Depending on your objects and what you are exporting, your layers may vary. I recommend looking through this and comparing it to your object to ensure that it will appear correct. New in 2012, you can also assign Layer Modifiers based on parameters within the object. This may be a good option if you would like some geometry of your export called out differently than others.
The key tabs and settings thought to set are on the Colors, Solids, and General Tabs of the dialog.
Colors
Make sure to set the Export colors option to the RGB values. This will match the colors to the colors exported as part of a shaded view.
Solids
On the solids tab, make sure to select ACIS Solids as the solid export. This setting will allow for cleaner geometry and true solids when the DWG is imported into Inventor. If polymesh is selected, it will be difficult for the geometry to be manipulated in Inventor and the object will appear as a mesh and not a solid.
General
Finally, on the general tab, it’s important to verify the file format that you are exporting to and version. Exporting to the lastly DWG version will have better results than exporting to an earlier format.
Next, you can click ok to close the setup wizard, choose next to export your view, give the DWG file a name, and you are set to import the DWG file into Inventor.
Importing Revit models into Inventor
Using the Import wizards
Either the SAT or DWG file format are viable methods to import Revit geometry into Inventor.Both formats make abundant use of options which we will explore.
Increase size of UNDO file Before you start to dive into the Import wizards and when you are working with large data sets, it is beneficial to increase the size of your Inventor UNDO file from the default 1GB to the maximum of 4GB. This can be done in the Application Options on the General tab
Import via SAT
The following dialog appears after opening a SAT file and selecting the “Options…” button:
SAT import optionsChoose an appropriate destination folder, let Revit determine the units by selecting “Source Units”, import all geometry types and make sure that “Import Assembly as single part” is unchecked. For the rest, sit back and relax while the import progresses.
Import via DWG
Options (in File Open Dialog)
Use the regular Open command to open the Revit dwg file. Inventor offers a special “Open DWG” command but this command does not give us the flexibility that we need to open Revit files.
The single most important option to get right is hidden under the “Options…” button the Open dialog. It is evident that you select the “Import” button and not the “Open” button. This will have to be repeated for every Revit file you wish to import as the setting defaults to “Open”. If you don’t have access to Revit, you could the Open option once in a while if you want to do fast side-by-side comparison between the original Revit model and the result you got after import in Inventor. Import is of course slower than Open.
File Open Options / DWG/DXF File Import WizardOnce you hit OK, hit the Open button to launch the DWG/DXF File Wizard.
Selective import
On the second page of the Import wizard, you will of course a preview of the model you try to import. If you work with large sized data that is far from the origin you might need to use the zoom context menu to get a full overview of what you are trying to import.
This page offers you a couple of interesting choices to remove what I call “selective” import. First of all on the left of the window pane you can remove unnecessary layers. By unchecking the “All” checkbox you can decide which objects exactly you want to important. All classic AutoCAD selection methods are provided (left-to-right or right-to-left window selection, individual picks) . Hit the next button to move to the Import Destination Options page.
Import options
The most important options for our Revit work can be found on the upper left portion of the screen.
3D options / Template optionsHere is what I suggest as most appropriate settings
§ Do not select single solid (we want to end up with multiple part in an assembly)
§ Do not select repair environment (we will repair as we see fit)
§ Select a correct Destination folder to keep things tidy (otherwise you might end up with thousands of files all in your workspace)
§ Use Default file names
§ Specify your units (use inches or mm depending on the Revit file)
§ Uncheck the New Drawing option and select the New part option (we are interested in 3D models only)
§ Select the appropriate template files (which might not necessarily be your defaults)
§ Create yourself a configuration file (.ini) if you plan to do this often. We provided a sample configuration file as part of the handouts. The good news is that Inventor remembers last used settings. So you don’t have to reset all settings when you repeat an import but configuration files can be handy if you plan to work with varying datasets that require setting changes.
Finally we can proceed with the Import by hitting the Finish button.
Import limitations
Revit buildings can be huge in size as can be seen in below image
Revit data that exceeds 100mx100mx100m in size or even smaller buildings that are positioned far from the origin might be hard to post-process in Inventor. Inventor might have some difficulties in creating Boolean operations on imported geometry. Operations like shelling and drilling holes might fail as can be seen in the next image of an hangar part. If you measure the part we see that this must be an airport hangar J that covers an area of 100x46 m^2.