Points file into Revit

[david.metcalf]

I have a 3 MB XYZ points file with 72234 lines with the following points at the top line.

675639.638728 886028.060362 1164.250389

I can only conclude that the points are outside Revit's range and there are too many points.
Is that a correct assumption and what method do I go about getting it into Revit?
Have Surveyor import points into a dwg file and send to architect?

I forgot to mention that the Revit returns with the Error that "no points were found in the file".

Thanks,
David

[sbrown]

As far as I know revit does not "see" points in a cad file. Revit doesn't have points so unless you know a way to change the points to a small line segment it won't work. We had a file like this just a few weeks ago. I forgot to send in a support request to see if they know a workaround.

[adb]

We haven't had much luck bringing a point file into Revit, however, we have had luck with bringing them into Navisworks. I know this does not directly answer your question but I wanted to share what we have done with a point cloud.

We had a laser survey done of a city square and surrounding area. It took about 30 setups and encompassed about 8 city blocks. The file we got from the survey was about 4G and had 68,000,000 points. We had the surveyor convert the file into a Leica ptx file format which Navisworks can read.

We brought in the point cloud file into navisworks and then brougt in the Revit model that we built. The first time we did this it took about 15 minutes for Navisworks to import the file and create the cache file. After that the file opened in about 10 seconds.

We were amazed to see how Navisworks handled all of that information and how I was able to move around the point cloud and model in real time without much of a drag on the system.

I have given a presentation on this at a cient's office and at Ga. Tech for a BIM breakfast. It was pretty cool stuff.

[gbrowne]

Yes, Revit doesn't like points, but does like contours. There is a way round it though. Lisp routines. Horrible thought, I know, but I had one that put a little circle round all the points on the file/layer. Very very handy.

The thing is, I can't for the life of me remember where I put it... I will start lookin..



http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=36503&highlight=lisp+routine

[cdatechguy]

I tried to import points and Revit crashed....It was when I was testing what Revit produced as compared to the ArchiCAD plug-in Architerra... That was using Revit 2008 though, I have not tested it in 2009 yet.

[david.metcalf]

We did finally bring the XYZ points into Revit via site tools>Topo Import points.
There were three hurdles to overcome;

1. The XYZ file from from surveyor was 72,225 points making it 3 MB in size.
2. Getting the file into Excel got it truncated to 62,000 points due the the spreadsheet limitations. Splitting it into two or three files will make it more manageable.
3. We decided to import the points file into Civil3D and create the contours. Civil3D crashed repeatly. I am sure a machine with more resources would handle it fine. But breaking the points file into three XYZ files and saving to CSV format allowed Revit to pull it in.

The resulting topography was not as desired and the surveyor would as a best resort need to generate a contours dwg file and correct any skewed results to send to the architect.