technical architecture.

Well, lets just say that dealing with large Revit files can get a little ugly for visualization purposes to say the least. there are several fundamental issues currently, ranging from workflows in building usable familys inside of revit, to dealing with the geometry after the fact for rendering.

I had the pleasure to again deal with a fairly large Revit model. It only weighed in at about 300mb to start! for working on final renderings thats all well and good, and not a real issue to deal with, but for mid project progress renders it can get a bit painful doing a lot of the deconstruction needed to make it useful to work in in 3dsMax. spending several hours ‘cleaning’ a revit model in max so that you can get any sort of rendering done is lets say, a bit depressing, when you know you’ll have to do the same process again in 2 weeks.

all that said, I started looking for some solutions to one small facet of the problem, and found some good case study testing on efficiently attaching a ton of meshes done by Dave Stewart and also a fair number of tips from the Maxscript crew at CGTalk

So I did a  small adaptation of Dave’s attachment script above, which can be found here: CollapseSelected-inParts5.ms Its not pretty, but we’ll get there soon enough.

It takes your current selection, and simplifies the number of objects by the square root (Dave’s tested optimal amount for speed collapsing!) its a work in progress, and i figure i’ll take this, combined with set of other tools for collapsing either by Selected Material, Similar Objects+Instances, Layer, and some name filtering. that should take the day long revit cleanup jobs and compress them down to an hour or so.

Yay.