I’m curious what has been everyone’s preferred workflow when it comes to exporting large amounts of attributed Rhino geometry into Revit. Having tried non-Rhino.Inside workflows such as direct imports, I still find Rhino.Inside imports as DirectShapes superior as it preserves attributes (as parameters) and gives more visibility into potential errors.
One problem I’ve encountered is the time needed to import direct shapes into Revit. For a file with 70,000 linear curves/polycurves, the process takes 5 hours. Is that in the ballpark of what you’d expect? I’m trying to expedite the process (Breaking up the model into smaller chunks, for one) but if this 70k curves will always take 5 hours to export as DirectShapes with parameters then it is what it is. Thanks!
Hi Clarence, I think it is what it is in this case, mostly transaction processing time most likely, granted that does sound a little long, but as long as it completes the time can be accounted for (send before you leave for the day). Are you running this on a fairly new computer?
Thanks for the reply. It is a pretty robust computer that has run very computationally intensive scripts without a hitch - though this is the first time I’m exporting copious amounts of Rhino geometry to Revit.
I’m trying to squeeze some efficiency from the process. The tree structure seems fairly straightforward (All grafted) and the geometries are all as clean and simple as can be - so I wonder if this is as good as it gets. We have some far more complex polysurfaces to export and those do worry me. Could it be converting attributes to parameters that takes the greatest toll? I doubt it - surely that must be far simpler computationally than the actual geometry conversion.
Perhaps I should convert the polysurfaces to meshes before exporting to Revit?
So we decided to import the Rhino geometry into Revit as a simple DirectShape (just one big dumb geometry instead of individual ones - and without attributes). I’m tempted to do it via Revit directly but RiR’s placement of DirectShapes onto the project base point seems useful. My question is: Is it possible to import all Rhino geometries as one big dumb mass via RiR? Thanks!
A follow-up question: Currently, I’ve set up the DirectShape sequence as processing multiple branches at once, with each branch containing geometries that I don’t mind getting lumped together.
Are geometry adding components like DirectShape not able to take in multiple branches of inputs? I wasn’t sure if that’s the case or if some branches simply had bad geometries that causes the whole thing to crash. My other thought was to Long all the inputs so they share the same tree structure.
Thanks Japhy. I tried 4 branches containing simpler geometries, with all component inputs sharing the same tree structure just in case and it worked. A 5th branch plugged in independently resulted in Revit crashing instantly.
Thing is, I’ve ran Null/Invalid and Area tests to cull bad geometries prior to the input. Geometries smaller in area or length than the Revit project unit minimum have been culled. But there are still some dirty stuff in there that fails the conversion.
The 4 branches that worked also contained geometries which failed the conversion but at least the script ran smoothly.
Also wondering how the DirectShape component works - if it hits a bad geometry, does it try a few times to build it before moving on … or does it keep looping? I noticed Revit flashing periodically for a couple of branches.
Hi Clarence, a useful tool when working between Rhino and Revit is also BEAM. This plug in allows seamless imports between the two without taking a long time to load. More information here: https://www.mksdtech.com/
