Archicad to Revit for MEP: the workaround Graphisoft's own method couldn't give me

Helio_Avila — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:14:34 GMT

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share something we worked through, partly to help anyone in the same spot and partly because I'm hoping someone here has a cleaner answer than the one I landed on.

It started with our MEP Electrical consultant asking for our architectural model as an IFC reference. Nothing unusual on paper — they wanted walls, slabs, and roofs as elements to work against, and the room numbers readable on the units and common areas for them to build their schedules. Getting all of that to survive the trip from Archicad to Revit turned out to be surprisingly fiddly.

The first hurdle was the handoff method itself. We reached out to Graphisoft to get this right, and the recommendation was to link the IFC directly on the consultant's side, using the official add-in. The trouble is that the linked IFC came into Revit as geometry the consultant couldn't really work against — nothing native to host their families on and no clean way to Copy/Monitor it, so it effectively meant rebuilding the walls by hand — and on top of that, the zones didn't even show up. What finally gave them something usable was the same add-in's Improved IFC Import (on the Add-Ins tab) instead, saving the result as an .rvt and linking that file with Link Revit rather than Link IFC. The tool is Graphisoft's either way; recommending the Improved IFC Import over the direct link is just what worked for us.

From there it was a fair bit of trial and error to get the model itself to behave.

My first real test used the full classification mapping, with everything typed correctly. That's exactly where the door and window problem surfaced: with the walls and the openings both classified and interpreted together, Revit re-hosted the doors and windows and pulled them off their true position — as far as I can tell, the wall reference line and the door/window reference line disagreeing once Revit re-hosts them.

So I cleared the mapping and went the other way — exported the whole model with no classification, so every element came in as IfcBuildingElementProxy. That "all generic" export was revealing: the doors and windows landed exactly where they should, and the zones came into Revit matching the Archicad model perfectly, right down to the perimeter. Everything was in the right place.

From there I mapped elements back one group at a time to find where the trouble actually was. Walls, slabs, roofs and columns behaved fine as native types. The doors and windows were the culprit — classify them and they'd shift every time — so I settled on leaving them unclassified, letting them fall back to proxies, which keeps them exactly where they belong as reference.

That left one more oddity: every classified wall that had an opening in it still came into Revit as a Generic Model, while the solid walls imported natively. I couldn't pin down exactly why, but my best guess was the void itself tripping up the interpretation, so I used IfcOpenShell to remove the IfcRelVoidsElement relationships on those walls — and empirically, that fixed it. The walls finally came in as proper native walls, with the doors and windows still sitting in place as reference. While I was in there, I also fixed the room numbers: our zone number was ending up in a property set the tags couldn't read, and since Revit uses IfcSpace.Name as the Room Number, I copy it there — just for the units and common areas.

The end result is genuinely usable. On the export side we're on IFC2x3 / Coordination View 2.0, with the geometry set to parametric (extruded/revolved, no junctions, no splitting of complex elements). On import, the consultant uses Improved IFC Import with Import all IFC parameters on, Auto-Join Elements on, and Correct lines slightly off axis off, then saves as an .rvt and links it in. Because the model was authored on the correct origin with only Project North rotated, it lands in the right place with no manual offsets. Updating is painless on the consultant's side — each new publication just overwrites the same .rvt and the link reloads, so nothing has to be rebuilt. The catch is on ours: the IfcOpenShell pass (stripping the voids and fixing the room numbers) has to be re-run on every new IFC we publish. It's scripted, so it's quick, but it's still a manual step in the loop and honestly the part of this I'd most like to see become unnecessary.

There's one thing I still haven't cracked. Once the walls are native, the rooms no longer come in as cleanly as they did in the all-generic export — the perimeters get pulled in, as if Revit is recomputing the room boundaries against the native walls instead of trusting the imported space geometry. For now the consultant leans on the tags together with the background drawings for the exact extents, but I'd love a proper fix.

And stepping back, there's still a real interoperability catch worth naming. Wall-based families can't be hosted onto a linked model — that's true whether you link the IFC or the .rvt, since it's a link either way. The payoff of delivering native walls is that the consultant can Copy/Monitor them into their own project (or use face-based families against the link's faces) instead of rebuilding anything. It works, but it's an extra layer of setup, and I'd still like to see the Archicad-to-Revit hosting story get smoother, given how Revit-heavy this market is.

So I'm curious how others handle it. Has anyone delivered an architectural reference to an MEP team under these same constraints? Is there a native way to keep classified doors and windows from shifting in Revit, or a better fix for walls-with-openings importing as generic than stripping the voids? Has anyone gotten imported rooms to hold their real perimeter once the bounding walls are native? And more broadly — is there a hosting approach that spares the consultant from rebuilding the model just to work against it?

Thanks in advance, and happy to go into more detail on any part of it.

Betreff: Archicad to Revit for MEP: the workaround Graphisoft's own method couldn't give me

Stefan L_ — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:01:53 GMT

Great report, thanks a lot! 😍
Would you mind sharing the involved Archicad and Revit versions?

topic Archicad to Revit for MEP: the workaround Graphisoft's own method couldn't give me in Collaboration with other software

Archicad to Revit for MEP: the workaround Graphisoft's own method couldn't give me

Betreff: Archicad to Revit for MEP: the workaround Graphisoft's own method couldn't give me