My issues with Rhino Inside - not good for interior design work

Rhino.Inside Revit
1

I’m an interior designer, I model in 3D and thought RiR would be a life changer. In theory yes, but I’ve hit a couple major obstacles. I thought I’d write about them to hopefully improve the product. My main criticism is that the product seems geared to architects and ‘big scale’ geometry, but anything you create at an interior level human scale seems to be a challenge.

FYI I’m using Conveyor 3.0, Rhino 7, Revit 2023. I use Conveyor because I’m not a programmer and I’ve tried Grasshopper and my brain doesn’t understand it.

  1. If you model anything with a radius or rounded/fillet edge in Rhino, Revit sometimes treats it like it doesn’t exist. Sometimes I can dimension to the radius, sometimes I can’t. Very hit or miss.

I know it might have something to do with very small radiuses that Revit can’t handle. But, if I create a molding profile with many small radiuses in Revit directly, it seems to be OK. See point 2 below. So what is the difference between a native Revit radius and an imported one?


  1. Create a molding with a detailed profile in Rhino, and in Revit it goes haywire graphically. Rebuild the exact same profile in Revit and create a sweep, and everything is fine. FYI, posted this issue on Revit forum and their advice was ‘Rebuild profile in Revit’, which works, but completely defeats the process

Rhino geometry sent to Revit via Conveyor, moldings looks bad:

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Molding - RCP.rfa (904 KB)
Molding - 3dm.3dm (3.5 MB)

Rebuilding the molding profile in Rhino, removing any radius portions and making them straight, seems to fix the issue in elevation, but not in plan view:

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  1. Sometimes I model a unique shape in Rhino, send it across with Conveyor, and it shows up in Revit as Rebar when its set to Casework family?? I know I have an example file of this somewhere but for now you’ll have to trust me on this one

MY WORKAROUND DESIGN PROCESS

  • Model everything in Rhino to how I want it to look
  • Anything with fine detail, rebuild in Revit, which doubles to the design time
  • Remaining larger designed pieces, send to Revit via Conveyor

Basically RiR + Conveyor works for 50% of the design.

What happens when a client requests a design change?
Redesign in Rhino, send to back to Revit, all dimensions and notes are broken, have to re-annotate. If I’m lucky, the geometry I rebuilt in Revit can be edited in Revit.

I understand this is a new product and there are major technology issues to figure out on the Rhino and Revit ends, but hoping one day the process improves - particularly for interior-design level work.

Thank you for reading!

@archinate1

1 Like
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Hi Thomas, I changed the category from Rhino.Inside to Rhino.Inside.Revit. Rhino is Inside a lot of different programs and isn’t limited to Revit.

Being a new comer to Grasshopper definitely is a large learning curve when trying to fit a particular workflow from or to Revit from Rhino. Geometry Tolerances as you note are a big challenge to overcome.

We continue to improve the translation of fine geometry to Revit, showing additional error information and converting when possible. I don’t expect much from Revit in respect to it coming our way, like you said, it’s geared towards larger scale documentation, anything small has to worked around to provide the particular outcomes desired.

Thanks for the input and joining us on this quest for better workflows.