Revit to Max Workflow

[mzagorski]

Gave up on FBX... Did .dwg export. Max is still kind of on it's knees and the machine I'm on has some pretty good horsepower. Hmm.

 

Design is a done deal... File is not going to change in any way during my work to get this biatch rendered and looking pretty

[Dave Buchhofer]

Well, if fbx, be sure to use the file link, it allows it to collapse by various things.

haven't tried dwg as yet.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Max is still kind of on it's knees and the machine I'm on has some pretty good horsepower. Hmm.

 

It is a pain. There is no other way to put it. The thing I find unfortunate is that it places limits on your creativity because you can't navigate, move, and change things up at the same speed your mind can think. It is not a good thing.

[novelh]

I do Revit to Max all the time. The cleanest way to import from Revit to Max is to forget about all the materials that Revit assigns. Don't use FBX since the geometry is very very sloppy and riddled with extra edges and triangulation. This makes it a nightmare to edit things in Max. What you do is go to a 3d view in Revit and then export it as CAD Format. You must be in a 3d view or it will export a 2d line drawing instead of a 3d model. The model that results from a CAD export vs an FBX is night and day. It's much cleaner and easier to edit. Since you are going to be applying Vray materials and renderings in Max all you really need is to bring in the geometry. Hope that helps.

[RevitGary]

What version of max and revit are you using? I have been using Revit to max with fbx since 2010 and now with 2011 with no problems. I also ignore materials in revit and apply them as needed in max.

[beestee]

Concerning Revit 2012:

 

"The management and control of material has been upgraded; for instance you can now create property sets for materials. These are collection of properties that are used to define the aspect of the material. The management of property sets are managed through an overhauled Material Properties Library Dialogue. This work has accumulated into the ability to have libraries that can be present in a project or an independent file which can be shared between users as well as other Autodesk applications such as 3dsmax. With this change we can again create customized libraries for project or for your office, something which was not possible when Autodesk changed from Accurender to MentalRAY. Finally, the icing on the cake, you can now purge unused materials from a project, no more keyboard combinations of selecting and deleting one at a time!"

 

Source:

 

http://autodesk-revit.blogspot.com/2011/03/autodesk-revit-architecture-2012.html

 

This was one of my biggest complaints of the recommended Revit -> Max workflow since the inclusion of Mental Ray.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

They have been developing a shared library for at least one release now. They are int he form of Autodesk materials. I haven't used them a great deal, but we did have one designer that rendered Autodesk materials with Vray with some success, though Vray currently does not support them.

 

I wonder how they will handle in Mental Ray since they are not native to Mental Ray. I say this because I felt the Pro materials which were the last try at universal material handled like crap, and if you wanted speed you had to go to A&D mats.

 

If I remember correctly, in Pro Mats concrete always had to have an actual glossy reflection. It was things like that that led my to be bah humbug on the Pro Mats.