Revit to Unity workflow problems

[bendalton]

Hey everyone. I have a problem that has been making me pull my hair out all week! I'm a newbie to all of this and I'm just hoping someone may be able to help me out.

 

I am trying to create workflows from the major BIM platforms; Revit, Sketchup etc... into the gaming engine Unity3D to allow for a 3D immersive environment which could be run in a CAVE (Cave automatic virtual environment).

 

I seem to be having major problems with Revit. This is my current workflow for getting a model into Unity:

Open up a 3D view of a project in Revit > Export FBX from Revit > Open 3ds Max > import the FBX from Revit > accept default settings > Click ‘render production’ on the main toolbar (if you cannot see the toolbar, press Alt+6) > Under ‘render preset’ select ‘mental.ray.daylighting.high’ and select ‘load’ > Export into the ‘Assets’ Directory of a Unity project > Warnings appear regarding the geometries, and too many material faces.

I am making sure that I am embedding media.

 

The project loses most of its textures and only basic colours appear, which for me is not satisfactory. I know that there are programs you can buy which work around this problem, however, I am a student and cannot afford to dish out if there is an alternative! If anyone could give me advice on this, I would be entirely grateful. Thanks!

 

Ben

[Scott Schroeder]

My advice, don't use Revit! Are you using jpegs? Unity has to auto convert jpegs as they are the worst thing to use in real time. Are your textures square in size and a power of 2? If not, Unity has to again auto convert to square power of 2 images, ie 2048x2048. Unity has a 64k face limit as well.

 

You cannot simply just export from Revit and not expect to jump through 4,000 hoops. Model it properly in Max and with a modular design in mind so you just have to model the major parts and assemble them in Unity.

[bendalton]

Hi Scott, thanks for getting back to me! Unfortunately it's part of my research at University, and they really want me to find some sort of holy grail, whereby; I can take models from most platforms (especially Revit ) and almost effortlessly get them into real-time, however they do not expect the quality to be amazing. On the other hand, they also want me to develop some workflows for a very high quality, for presenting to a client etc, in which they permit the use of time-consuming rendering processes.

 

Well, I've been simply using the textures which came with the default Autodesk example, which I didn't think were JPEGs, but then again I am pretty clueless. I have read that Revit encrypts its materials, which cannot be picked up by Unity. But apparently, if you export the Revit file into 3ds max, and then export the FBX from there, the materials will be picked up, however, I am having problems and many error messages...I think its the intersecting vertices etc, and I have no idea how to clean up.

I have been using JPEGs in Sketchup to try and make it look more photo-realistic! What would you advise that I do instead to make it more photo-realistic? I was going to try go through 3ds Max and try baking some textures there? Also, I wouldn't suppose you would know how to compress or simplify the models in sketchup to be faster in real-time (the models I'm using are huge!)? Cheers!

 

Ben

[Scott Schroeder]

The only way to make the model faster is real time is to create the model properly in the first place. Your issue is you are taking trash models and trying to turn them into gold real time applications.

 

Do you know why Revit hasn't been adopted by the games industry? What about SketchUp? How many AAA or even indie game companies are using that? Perhaps you should research the penetration of these programs in already existing real time pipelines before you try to re-invent the wheel.

Edited July 16, 2013 by VelvetElvis