Hi JTB, yeah SAT is the main way to transfer stuff from MoI to Revit.

MoI does actually assign style properties to the objects it writes out to SAT format.

You can see this by doing something like create 2 boxes and assign one style = red and the other style = blue, then write that out to SAT format. Then start a new MoI session and import that SAT file and you should see a red box and a blue box imported into MoI.

So the style attributes are in the SAT file and they are able to be seen by some other programs as well, like for example ViaCAD will read in a red box and a blue box. So I guess that Revit is ignoring those particular attributes.

Do you have AutoCAD? Maybe you could try getting stuff into AutoCAD first by something like IGES transfer (or possibly SAT if it handles color attributes better) and then going to Revit by DWG.

SKP is a polygon based format while SAT will maintain solids and NURBS surfaces, so it's probably not going to be as good to try and use SKP for that kind of transfer. Also styles do not export to SKP format currently so it won't help you in that aspect either.

- Michael

Thanks, I have Acad but I was hoping for a way to use only Moi and Revit...
DWGs in Revit are not a good thing, especially if they are use a lot...
After all, Moi ->Acad->Material assignment-> Revit seems more work than
Moi->Export objects separeted ->Revit to re-assemble the objects...
A furniture system usually has wood, glass, metal so I don't find it really difficult...

After all this is only for quickly making something I need... otherwise I will try to make a family (something
like ACAD's parametric block) that can be really flexible and accepts params for widht, depth,height, material etc...

Hi JTB, are SAT files from other programs able to go into Revit with colors intact?

What happens if for example you create 2 boxes in AutoCAD and put one on a red layer and the other on a blue layer and then export that as an SAT and import it into Revit. Do the colors go through to Revit in that case?

- Michael

No, it is another Adesk stupid thing... Not only Revit doesn't understand colors but it also imports everything as one object...

So, the only acceptable way - which I also wrote in Revitforum.org - is this:

1. Export from Moi3D to SAT. If we want many materials we split to as many SAT files as the Moi styles.
2. In a Revit project, not family editor, we re-combine the SAT files to one, this is not so difficult, sometimes it is easy to use reference objects that we can later delete.
3. Using Object styles we can assign materials.
4. Then we can make a group using all these SAT files, export to a file and then we can insert this as a group to all our projects...

Hi JTB - so as far as what I can tell from what you described, it would be necessary for Revit to make some improvements to their importer to make that any better.

If in the future you do find SATs from some other source going into Revit better than MoI's ones, please send me a simple example file so I can look at it and see what attributes are being used.

But there isn't much that I can do if the Revit importer just does not look at any of those kinds of attributes at all.

- Michael