I have been trying the new Revit importer for SketchUp 2023 and have discovered that it does not recognize Revit Phases. This makes the importer useless for any project that has an existing building with some demolition work. Or any project that has multiple design options. Or any project where you simply want to import one specific phase into SketchUp. The importer just unintelligently brings in every single piece of geometry ever created in the Revit file, regardless of what I see on screen in Revit… is that correct? Or am I missing something?
I understand that this is the expected behavior. It imports geometry with family and type name, Revit id and materials. It does not import any more associated information so you will never know what phase you are in.
IFC might help you more importing data
bummer. i will give IFC a try though, thanks! or i will simply go back to using the cumbersome .dwg export and import process. at least that lets you export only what you see on screen in Revit so you can do it by phase, design option, etc. the time required to re-organize all the geometry that sketchup imports from revit makes the current importer useless.
being able to go between revit and sketchup with ease would be incredibly helpful for nearly every designer in our office. i had hoped this new importer was the answer. instead, this looks like a good reason to continue to save money and not upgrade our sketchup licenses.
at that point, i am introducing enough extra steps that i think i’m better off just going back to the .dwg export and import. that approach lets me preserve whatever i see on screen in revit, be it phase filters, or section boxes, or design options.
simply being able to import exactly what you see on screen in revit into sketchup would make the new revit importer far more functional.
It should respect the phase and the elements that are visible by that phase. It looks for the first 3D view but prefers the (standard) {3D} ) view set in Revit. If you have access to Revit you can control the import by activating the wanted (3D) view and then do a save. Or have it named 3D - etc. And remove the standard {3D}
Okay. I assumed that is how it is supposed to work, but am not having any luck. If I open Revit, click on my default 3D view, set the phasing and design options just as I want them, and do a save-as just to be double-sure I’m not importing the wrong Revit file… well, I still get all of the geometry from all of the phases imported. When you say “It looks for the first 3D view but prefers the (standard) {3D} view”… what is the “first 3D view”? And is the “(standard) {3D} view” the Default 3D View…the one that is accessible by clicking on the little 3D house icon at the top of the ribbon in Revit?
here’s what i see in sketchup (i recognize the differences look subtle in this view, but there are hundreds of interior walls, doors, windows, pieces of curtainwall, exterior cladding panels, roofs, etc., etc. that are correctly demo’d in revit and not showing up in my Default 3D View in Revit, but are being imported into SketchUp):
That will work, or wetransfer.
By the looks of it, it seems that all the created views in Revit are ment to be rendered.
What is the main purpose of using SketchUp?
Just render those views?
What renderer are you using?
The purpose of utilizing SketchUp is for several purposes. I am the Director of Visualization at my firm, and take a lot of our Revit models into SketchUp so I can: refine the geometry, add detail, combine models from consultants (we have a couple landscape consultants that only exclusively in SketchUp), study design ideas that the team has not yet resolved in Revit, etc.
SketchUp is “the great unifier” in our office, and being able to get all of our ideas into there is incredibly helpful. I render in Lumion or VRay typically, depends on the client, schedule, and budget. Animation is almost exclusively Lumion, stills could go either way depending on the project and the complexity.
I gotta’ run to pick up my kid and hit the grocer, but will be back in an hour or so and will see if you’ve discovered any solutions. Thanks for all your help on this! The Revit Importer looks like an awesome tool, and I want to be able to utilize it as much as possible moving forward.
Getting late over here, I have detached the central model for working locally and not having the restrictions of the (non-editable) worksets, but, these files (which probably show up in yours) are missing:
The importer doesn’t work with referenced Revit files, the same way as Revit, alas. Multiple imports and reloads are required, I guess.
See this workflow for linked Revit files:
Come to think of it, the need of reloading of the proxies that represent the revit links might become a very handy workflow when presenting other options by reloading them with alternative options.
Thanks again for the help. All of the linked files were removed because they will not be necessary for this work, aside from Structural, which I was going to bring in as a separate import anyway since I only need pieces of it for a handful of renderings. I can’t imagine the links could have anything to do with the Importer not recognizing Phasing though. If you have any more time to keep plugging away on it tomorrow, just let me know. Otherwise I’ll jump back over to the .dwg export-import process.
Ok dug a little deeper.
Normally, the active 3D view is imported in SketchUp by default. If no 3D view is active, the first 3D view containing {3D} or {3D or 3D in its name is imported.
The views in this Revit project are a bit overwhelming for a regular ‘scenes in SketchUp’ guy and I was having a hard time in finding it (or rather the pc I was working on)
excellent, thank you so much for digging into this a bit more. looks like i just need to delete all 3D views, regenerate the Default 3D view, save the Revit file, and then import that into sketchup. That’s an easy enough workflow for now. I would love to know how SketchUp chooses which 3D Revit view to import model geometry from though.
Just to let you know, the approach of eliminating all 3D views except the Default 3D view worked as expected - thank you. Not a perfect workflow, but not nearly as cumbersome as exporting and importing a 3D .dwg file.
We have a few designers in our office (myself among them) who prefer working in SketchUp over Revit or even sketching by hand. I was most excited for this Revit importer because I thought it would quickly allow designers to import Revit geometry into SketchUp at any stage of the design, and iterate on multiple design ideas efficiently in SketchUp. Some teams even keep a SketchUp model up-to-date in parallel with their Revit model through Schematic Design and even Design Development so that designers can use it as a design tool. Being able to work in Revit the majority of the time, and then import your model into SketchUp at critical moments when a part of the design needs to be studied in more detail seems like one of the Revit Importer’s greatest potential strengths.
As mentioned above, the Revit Importer will only import what is visible in the selected 3D view.
The Revit importer selects which view is imported with the below process:
(1) Selects the “Starting View” in Revit if it is a 3D View and if it contains visible elements
(2) If (1) fails, Selects a 3D view that contains visible elements and that includes {3D} or {3D in its name. The view must have visible elements
(3) If (2) fails, Selects the first 3D view if any and if it contains visible elements
(4) If (3) fails, Creates a default 3D view
(5) If (4) fails, Returns an error
(This sequence of steps comes from @Jacques)
So I think the easiest way to control this would be to set the starting view (the view that opens when you open the project) to one specific 3D view that you are using to control what is visible and therefore what is imported. You can also set the starting view to be “Last Viewed” and then the starting view will just be the view you have open when you last saved the model. To set the starting view you go to Manage Tab>Manage Project Panel>Starting View Button.
Keep in mind that if this is a workshare model then whatever you set as the starting view will be what everyone sees when they first open the model. So you may want to either change the starting view back to what it was previously, after you are done using the Revit Importer or open a detached model and then you do not have to worry about that.
I believe in step (2) the Revit importer first looks for {3D} and if that is not there it looks for any view with “{3D”. So a potential workflow for using a workshare model that you do not want to detach or change the starting view on would be to use {3D} as the view that you always manage what is imported with the Revit Importer. If the {3D} view is deleted and you want to get it back into the Revit model without deleting all 3D views out of the model (you may want to do this if someone has set up rendering or presentation 3d views that you do not want to lose) you can do so by opening a detached model and then going to View Tab>Create Panel>3D View>Default 3D View. This will add the {3D} view back into the model but you would need to then replace the current workshare model with this one and tell people not to delete {3D}.
If you wanted to actually work with phases in SketchUp with an imported model (so be able to toggle between existing, demo and new) then I think the workflow would be to set up the Revit view that you are using to manage what is imported into SketchUp and then make only the existing elements visible (minus the elements that will be demoed) then save in Revit then import into SketchUp. Then do the same for the demoed elements and then for the new elements. The importer brings in each import as a component so you can then easily make tags and tag each component/phase as “existing” “demo” and “new”
and I was having a hard time in finding it (or rather the pc I was working on)
