Hi guys, im an architectural visualiser in an architects office and for my modelling process I tend to use archicad but also use moi alongside it to create custom objects and detail that archicad just isnt up to. I have also used moi to create some smaller buildings but have come to the conclusion that its probably not going to be suitable for all singing and dancing large buildings over many floors although groups will help this. So anyway the office is starting to get the feeling that the construction industry seems to be heading towards Revit as a bit of a standard (damn that autodesk!) and it might be beneficial if we got a seat, so im looking into it.

So my question is, is there anyone out there who uses revit and moi together regularly (I assume using SAT export import)? I have seen some of the posts here about some issues with SAT but that revit 2010 seems to handle things better. It seems like a better combination than archicad and moi so just wondering how revit interperates the moi models and if they can be used in an intellegent way, not necissarily altering the geometry but more used as assembly parts like any other native revit object? will it read 'styles' so objects with different materials can be exported?

Cheers and sorry for the rather vague questions.
Rob

Hi Rob, I did some testing to improve the export to Revit, and it seems to be working pretty well now with some of the changes from a couple of betas ago to split closed surfaces into 2 pieces when exporting to SAT. Before that things like spheres and cylinders were not working well, but they seem to be ok now.

I don't really have enough information to answer most of your questions though.

> will it read 'styles' so objects with different materials can be exported?

As far as I know, SAT format does not exactly have regular "materials" like a named list of materials that can be assigned to objects, it only has an rgb color value that can be directly set on each object.

MoI will set those individual object colors when it writes out the SAT file, and some programs can read them but it appears that Revit may ignore them. At least it does not seem to use it in its viewport display anyway.

- Michael

Thanks michael,

seems a pity revit ignores the colours, I wonder if they are planning to fix this limitation. I guess multiple exports (one per style) might have to be the way round to start with.

Cheers
Rob

Hi Rob, it may be possible that the colors come in to Revit but only show up when rendering and not in the realtime viewport. I don't have rendering set up on my trial version of Revit so I don't know about that part for sure.

If you are able to find that Revit is able to use colors from SAT files from some other programs but not MoI, please let me know and send me a simple example SAT file so I can take a look in it and see what kind of attributes it sets inside the SAT file to transfer them across.

MoI does already set what seems to be the standard SAT color attributes used by other programs though.

- Michael