Sharing with ArchiCAD

[Andre Baros]

Does anyone know what the latest options are for sharing between Archicad and Revit?

We're starting on an addition using Revit to a building originally drawn in Archicad and it seams downright stupid that what we're getting from the base building architects is really bad 2D DWG drawings while they're got most of a 3D model. Admittedly they most likely have a combination of both 3D and 2D data and would like to give us as dumb a file as possible but isn't there a way to use they're 3D data before we redraw everything?

[Wes Macaulay]

Wow. That's a new one... and you know what: I hope we see more of this. Sharing data in 2D is no picnic, and now we're sharing 3D data!

I don't think there's going to be any easy way for you to get the ArchiCAD data over to Revit. I believe this is going to be a significant topic in the coming years: 3D interoperability. And I think it's going to be a major, major challenge for developers to create a format that allows two totally different applications to share 3D data intelligently.

[Andre Baros]

That's what I thought.

But I wonder how much of the issue is market share and how much is technical. Right now both programs can map the database out very precisely to 2D dwg files (sort of like AutoCAD could map out it's database to a plotter to share with others) why couldn't they also do that to a 3D AutoCAD file with layers and meta-tags to guide the reimport process.

The intermediate file doesn't need to be editable or openable, just portable.

[hand471037]

This is what efforts like IFC, BLIS, aecXML, and such are all aiming for. However we are still a ways off from any of them being a viable reality, which doesn't help you today. There isn't a standard for 3D Building info at this time, only standards for 'dumb' 3D data. I hope that one of these open efforts wins out, for then it won't matter which tool you use for 'authoring' your part of the overall Project.

[pseletsky]

Actually it's not a problem at all. The product that readily (and quite nicely) addresses disparate 3D models - and can actually do interference checking between them - is NavisWorks. http://www.navisworks.com.

[Andre Baros]

Nice product, but doesn't help translate parametric files.