Grasshopper to Revit

I would like to share another Grasshopper - BIM exchange approach which supports Revit and AutoCad Architecture. I developed "Gravit" during an intensive Workshop about high-rises (Design Research Exchange) where we had to transfer complex Rhino geometries to Revit.

The Idea behind Gravit is to create abstract BIM objects directly in grasshopper and send them with one click to Revit (RVT) and/or AutoCad Architecture (ACA) where they are interpreted as native objects. In ACA and RVT most of the objects are defined in a similar way: Walls for example consist of baselines, styles (ACA) or types (RVT), height value and further properties in ACA or parameters in RVT. Therefore an abstract wall object only needs to contain these properties to be rebuilt in both environments or even more. The object library also contains the Gravit client to receive data from the Gravit server in Grasshopper. Adding another program to be capable of receiving Gravit objects is quite easy, it just requires the implementation of abstract object Parser. The current implementation supports ACA (Walls, Doors, Curves, Rooms, Columns, Points and Slabs) and Revit (General Families, Adaptive Components, Hatches, Curves, Rooms, Walls, Columns, Gridlines, Levels, Slabs and Topography).

Each of the components will give you a preview to give you an idea how your model will look like in the target application. Once you assembled a model you simply add a "send" component which serializes and sends the components via TCP. There are no export files required, it is a simple one click operation. In RVT or ACA you need to start the client software to receive the Components. It doesn't matter if the client runs on localhost or anywhere else in your network. Once the client received the objects you simply click "ok" and your BIM Model is going to be assembled. Gravit also supports updating the objects. Once you changed a your geometry in grasshopper you just click send again and the client will update the geometry of the objects. The major difference to the existing solutions is: it requires less configuration, you get a preview of the model in grasshopper, there are no additional files and it supports Revit and AutoCad.

I would be very interested in your opinion about it and would love to share the whole source of the next release which will hopefully support Microstation Architecture.

Here,here and here are some videos in action.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by JS on December 3, 2013 at 5:37am

This looks very interesting! Right now I have to export all my geometry to autocad or sketchup and then import it into Revit. Or export it as a SAT and build on it in Revit.

Can you example more on the general families? Can I take anything from grasshopper such as this

directly into revit's massing environment and be able to further work with it in Revit by assigning materials, or use the paneling tools on it, or cut it up with voids, etc.?

Permalink Reply by maximilian thumfart on December 4, 2013 at 1:45am

Dear JS,

so far the supported families are adaptive components (with n number of points) and point + linebased families. Massing elements are not supported yet because I developed Gravit to get around the massing elements as they are not working smoothly with basic elements like walls etc.

We also tried to transfer more complex geometry to Revit but the basic problem was that the curvature wasn't the same in both programs. We were redrawing a tower facade based on few fixed points only and in the end the same procedures (sweep, loft...) resulted in a more bumpy curvature in Revit. But adding massing elements shouldn't be too complex. I will have a look at it.

One question I personally would hate but: Why do you want to have such a geometry like this tree in Revit? For me the only reason to use Revit is for having a proper BIM Model of my building which is not too special in geometry. Simple geometries, slightly curved or twisted things maybe. With everything that becomes more Gehry like I experienced the limits of Revit quite fast.

Regards

Max

Permalink Reply by JS on December 4, 2013 at 5:58am

Hi Max, the tree thing was just something I found on this website as an example of something really complex.

Thanks for the explanation, I look forward to future updates.

Permalink Reply by Daniel Hambleton on December 3, 2013 at 6:32am