Although I know about MoI for a long time, I bought my licence just a while ago.... I want to start using it more and more....
I think the next 2-3 weeks I will have time to start reading all those great tutorials and the documentation....
I have already done some nice things will Moi beta, and I am sure that V2.0 will be great....
Michael is a great guy and a big help.

So, what I want to ask is this....

I want to use MoI with Autodesk products, so I would like to learn about 3d converters and I prefer of course free or open source... I've heard of Meshlab which looks nice, I will test it.
I don't need MoI for my everyday's work, I want it for special architectural elements, things that AutoCad and Revit can't do easily. I use Revit all the time and render with Maxwell and Kerkythea, so obj and 3ds (I prefer obj) is the best way to do this... DXF is not good but can work sometimes.

I would think exporting from MoI as .obj or .3ds would be all you need to do?
Would any of those apps you mention not import those file types?

Actually, I have no problem adding obj to KT or Maxwell, it is Revit (and generally Autodesk apps) that don't like obj files.... Also 3ds is quite an old format and even AutoCAD has an addon for 3ds export... Older versions had 3dsout as a standard command.

I want to complete modeling in Revit because it is easier for me.... I don't intend to use Moi for complicated models, Revit is not good (at least for now) for general modeling.

Hi JTB, yeah MoI to Revit is not very smooth right now.

Revit kind of looks like it is not really set up to read polygon-mesh type data into it.

It does support DXF and I want to try and add that into MoI, but DXF is also somewhat problematic for polygon data, it actually has some similar limitations as 3ds for that kind of data, but it can hold a lot more kinds of things in it like lines, arcs, and curves. I would not be surprised if Revit is more focused on reading things like 2D line drawing plans from DXF/DWG instead of polygon data.

One thing that is interesting is that Revit also supports reading in SAT format - this is actually a full NURBS solid format and not polygons.

I think that it is going to be possible for me to get SAT export from MoI in version 2.0, so once that is in place that may provide a good route to Revit.

Your best bet right now may be to try and get your NURBS data into AutoCAD and then use the satout command in ACAD to write out an SAT file and bring that into Revit.

MoI will export NURBS data to either the .3dm or IGES file formats.

A long time ago AutoCAD used to support the IGES file format, but for whatever reason they removed that from the product some time ago.

So I think you'll need to get a plug-in for AutoCAD to read the MoI NURBS data into it.

It looks like Sycode has a couple of different AutoCAD plugins that could do the job here, they have a .3dm import and also an IGES import, here is the 3DM import:
http://www.sycode.com/products/3dm_import_ac/index.htm

They have a trial version there so you can give that a try and see if that will work for you - that route would be save from MoI using .3dm file format, Read .3dm file format into AutoCAD using Sycode plugin, export SAT format from AutoCAD using SATOut command, and read SAT into Revit.

Please let me know if this method works for you or not, I do want to make it easier to move data from MoI into Revit and I hope that SAT format may do a good job for this but I don't know for sure yet.

- Michael

re: Sycode plugin - I'm not really sure if the Sycode 3DM import plugin for AutoCAD will read NURBS objects from the 3DM file (which is what you need) or only polygon mesh objects from the 3DM file. It seems to mention the latter only here.

If that's the case you may need to use the IGES importer instead, I'm not quite sure.

- Michael

Thank you Michael, I will try to combine everything using 3ds and obj inside my rendering apps for now...it seems the only reliable solution.