Revit model export to Pyrosim?

[Shane Cherney]

I have a project I will be developing a fire model for that the architecural design is done in Revit, as opposed to AutoCAD.  Since the building has already been modeled three-dimensionally in Revit, I would like to leverage the model the architects so kindly created by not duplicating that effort.  I have some ideas for how to accomplish this, such as exporting a 3D DXF and utilizing that to import to Pyrosim, etc., however, am curious for some feedback before I undertake this.

So, my question is:
Has anyone gone through the process of utilizing a Revit model to import to Pyrosim, and if so, do you have any suggestions or know of any guidelines of some sort that are available?
Thanks for the help!

[JWest]

I`m working on a project where the architects use REVIT for building 3d model. As all disciplines can`t use this type of model,they also export the model to 3D DWG (and splitting the revit model into a drawing for each floor).

What I did was to load up my Autocad, and convert these drawings into 3D DXF`s, and then loading all of them into Pyrosim, one by one. Each floor then fit nicely on top of the previous one, until I had the complete 3d model :-)

However, I`ve later come to understand that REVIT also has a direct DXF export function, so you might want to try that. Also, the export to DWG/DXF from REVIT requires the option "export using polymesh", not "export to ACIS solids". However, you could also fix acis solids by exploding every object in autocad, and then do the dxf export.

One drawback for export to DXF is curved geometry. High use of curved geometry will force the dxf into a quite large filesize. Depending on your hardware (memory), the import into Pyrosim might not work. For my rather big model, I had to go 64bit and 8g memory. Though you might be able to split the drawing into even smaller pieces, and put these together again in Pyrosim..

Hope that this was of some help!

Best regards

Jonna
 

[JWest]

A little followup on this to developers: Any future plans to include support for import of geometry other than DXF? As mentioned above, the dxf files become quite large and cumbersome. Support for DWG and file formats like revit and ifc would be very appreciated! :-)

Best regards

JWest

[Charlie Thornton]

I hear you. We've tried to come up with a ways to do direct DWG import that we can manage (cost, time) and we just haven't been able to solve it yet. We re-open that discussion every time we do a bit PyroSim update, so some day...

A few ideas that may help:

- PyroSim can read a zipped DXF file, so if the problem is purely the size of the file convert it to a ZIP and it'll be a lot smaller. Compression is very effective because the DXF format contains a lot of repetitive text.

- As of PyroSim 2010.2.1114, STL files are supported. I doubt a different text format will help, but it's worth a try.

- The problem most people have with the DXF files is level of detail. Every door knob and arm rest becomes hundreds of triangles. If there was some to keep all the extra fine detail stuff in a layer that you don't export (or convert fancy objects to big chunks), it would help a lot.

[JWest]

Good to hear you are still on it, and haven`t given up :-) By the way, have you looked in to the use of IFCOpenshell ? I think Blender used this to make an import-function of IFC files. I`m considering trying this approach, and then using BlenderFDS to export the created geometry into a FDS file, which then may be imported into Pyrosim again.

A bit of a hassle, but I will give it a try anyways..

Best regards

JWest

[Richard O'Konski]

We had not heard of IFCOpenShell before, but it looks like it might be a viable solution. 

When we first looked into IFC import a couple years ago, we were actually thinking about taking an approach almost verbatim what they did in IFCOpenShell - use Open CASCADE to support the IFC geometry.  This would have been a significant development effort, however, considering the vastness of the IFC standard and the sheer numbers of geometry types that would have to be supported.  During our PyroSim development cycles since then, we haven't had enough reason to spend that time when we already supported DXFs that got us 90% of the way there for BIM support. 

Now that someone has done this work on IFC, however, we might be able to incorporate it into our software with little expense (depending on IFCOpenShell's license).  Thanks for the heads up!