Better interoperability with Revit

Autodesk has announced it is reworking their Sketchup import for the new Revit (2020). Great news for everyone who’s has both Revit and Sketchup in their workflow.

However, we often need to go from Revit to Sketchup for design iteration. It would be very helpful if the Sketchup developers could also step it up and improve the Revit import into Sketchup workflow :slight_smile:

In an ideal world:

  • Link a Revit model (frozen but can be updated, very helpful for existing condition, site, …)
  • Import a Revit model (can be changed in Sketchup)
  • Support for Revit materials
  • Clean geometry (prevent triangulation when possible)
  • Optimized for speed (instancing of families, …)
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Can I add this one point?

read Revit families

Can you point us to Autodesk’s announcement? Thanks Pieter.

It’s mentioned in their public roadmap: http://blogs.autodesk.com/revit/2018/04/13/revit-roadmap-update-april-2018/

I can’t share more information because of the NDA but I’m sure you could reach out to the development team to get more specifics.

We all love using Sketchup, but because the “Sketchup to Revit” workflow seems to be more developed than the “Revit to Sketchup” workflow, our projects tend to migrate to Revit and never go back to Sketchup which is really a shame.

I wish we could quickly ‘break out’ out to sketchup (without having to redo work like cleaning up geometry, adding materials etc) and do design exercises, presentations etc in Sketchup.

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I am afraid the Revit model and family file formats are not open to third party developers. I don’t know of any application besides Revit itself that can handle them. The same goes for other BIM applications too. The vendors want to bind their customer base to their own platform even if it makes life much more difficult to their users. IFC is the only lingua franca but usually using it doesn’t help transfer models from application to application in editable form.

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IFC is not going to help much unfortunately as the quality of the geometry is very poor.

Other programs have build (live) links to Revit though, some Autodesk products (3ds max) but others like Lumion and Twinmotion use a plugin that connects into Revit and delivers the geometry to the application. Using fbx might also be an option.