By Justin Doughty
Recently I have been looking at some of the new features of the 2016 products and how they could be incorporated into real world situations or workflows. In this workflow I’m going to show how to take a Revit MEP design, through to a Fabricated model and back into the design to be compared. This could be incorporated into a very strict coordination model, or for moving on to an as-built model.
This uses Revit MEP 2016, Fabrication CADmep 2016, and the Revit Extensions for Fabrication.
First start with your Revit MEP design
Select the entire system and “Store Design Line Elements”. Then when finished use “Out” to export as a Revit Export File (.rif)
Now open Fabrication CADmep, and select your content as normal. Start a new drawing and “Import Run of Items” (PROCESSRUN).
Select the .rif file we created in the previous step.
Next we have to map our Fabrication Content to this imported design line:
Once complete, use the CREATECAM command to export a .maj file
In Revit start a new Revit MEP .rvt project. Use the Revit Extension for Fabrication to import the .maj file created. Again specify your correct content library:
This will give you a Revit project filled with fabrication content:
Either link this fabrication model .rvt file into original Revit MEP Design or vice versa.
Then you could use the visibility graphics to show the changes between your design and the final fabricated product. In the example below I used a simple filter setting transparency and colour:
This workflow still does need some work regarding shared coordinates which we are working on, but you can still use this by moving the Revit link into position manually.