Tips for Importing CAD floorplan for ArchVis rendering

[adammercado]

Hi all

 

I searched the forum and did not find any results that answered my questions...

 

My wife is an architectural interior designer and she just dropped this job in my lap. Nice gig but completely new to me. She lays out her floorplans in Revit and can use SketchUp as an intermediary if necessary.

 

I am looking for some general tips and gotchas for this type of work as I move it into C4D. I have to take the floorplan, add some other components like drum kit, light rigs, seating, etc. Texture, light and render a still image of the scene. Pretty typical workflow for most users here I imagine.

 

We tried exporting the floorplan as DWG, DXF and tidy them up in Illustrator. Every section of wall was an individual line. This would take hours to clean up and prepare for extrusion in C4D obviously. Is there an Export/Import setting that will help avoid this?

 

We made a simple model in Revit and exported an FBX which seemed to work, although the scale and orientation were wrong. Again, is there a setting to help bring the model into C4D with the proper dimensions? The building is obviously in correct proportion to itself, but when I have to add an 8 foot drum riser, I need to know for sure that 8 foot in this world is 8 foot in that world. If you follow me. I am trying to get an FBX of the floorplan from the client, in the meantime I need to figure out how to work with the plan I have.

 

One thing I have always found odd about C4D is that the scale of things always seems off. I put this down to me not paying attention to one thong or another and just got on with the compromise as it has never been that critical for motion graphics. In doing some tests for this project though it definitely seems like the scale of things is odd. For example I built a simple 12 foot room with a window, but when I placed a typical 35mm camera in the room it felt like a show box. The only way to see the entire room, as you would expect to do as human standing in a 12 foot room, was to use a near fisheye lens with all that horrible distortion. I tried to scale the camera down but I could not do it. The only way to get close to satisfactory results was to multiply everything by 10, so my room was now - according to the C4D Co-ordintes - a 120 foot room. Thus my concern for building out this scene that needs to be inch accurate for the architects.

 

Any advice would be greatly greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers

AdamM

Edited March 10, 2014 by adammercado

[Scott Schroeder]

Revit works in feet, so you need to make sure that your c4d working file is in feet or you set the FBX import into c4d to convert to whatever units you are using. I would recommend setting c4d to feet to avoid any upscale/downscale issues.

 

If she is using revit, there is no need to just get basic linework to then extrude in c4d. Even more so cleaning it up in Illustrator which seems like a gigantic headache. Just use the FBX from a 3d view (preferably with all the extra crap hidden) and use the FBX model as either your model to render from or as reference to re-model in c4d.

[adammercado]

Thanks Scott. I did mange to get an FBX sent to me. Solves a lot of problems. DXF/DWG was just not going to work. Not sure if its because of how the geometry is created in Revit, or how its exported/imported, but every path was unconnected and was taking so much work to optimize. I expected this based on posts I had read.

 

The scale issue is still something I need to figure out. Got my scene set to feet with a scale of 1. The FBX is imported with a 96 foot ceiling. I just scaled down manually by eye based on door size, but obviously not the best way to go. I’ll explore further for ways to get accurate imports.

 

Thanks for the tips

Adam