working in ArchiCAD and Revit Architecture on the same job

[Anonymous]

My firm is going after a job with another architecture firm, where the partnering firm is working in Revit. We just baby stepping our way into ArchiCAD.

IMHO there's no way we can make this work "smartly" between ArchiCAD & Revit, we have a hard enough time managing files on our AutoCAD projects when we partner with other AutoCAD firms.

Does anyone have something "factual" I can use to explain how bad an idea this might be???

We have only completed ONE job in AC11. We're not experienced.

My fear is that those in charge aren't realizing how difficult this partnership could be from a working standpoint. I'm looking for articles or experiences that speak to the turmoil that could occur.

Thanks!

[Thomas Holm]

Both programs read and write IFC (more or less good). Search for IFC in this forum.

[TomWaltz]

Part of it depends on how you plan to work together. What's the division of labor? What are the end deliverables?

You will not get anything resembling XREFs.

You might be able to pull the project off, but it's going to require a fair amount of both firms futzing with incoming IFCs from them to show in their respective drawings and with outgoing IFCs that the other firm can read.

IFC is not something you can link to, so any time the other party makes changes, you will have to reimport it. Not fun.

Now, if you were using Revit for this project it would be a lot easier. You could either link in their files or copy-monitor them, and they could do the same with yours. Something to think about.

[Anonymous]

To my knowledge, our division of labor thus far has been that we are working on the interior while the other firm is working on the exterior.

The approach that they've taken thus far is to draw the work in autocad, and have the other firm update the revit model.

I don't doubt the other firms ability to manage their side, they have a strong Revit implementation. Our end is very very new to BIM & ArchiCAD.

Does anyone know of an ArchiCAD consultant that would be able to help us manage such a thing? It sounds like we'll be heading down the IFC path, and some major thinking has to go into the division of labor to keep everyone working as efficiently as possible.

and I apologize for the "oh no the sky is falling" initial post. things aren't impossible, it's just occasionally frustrating when those above look at the boxes with the cords and the wires and the screens and say LOOK ITS MAGIC....you can make it work, right? no problem?

[Anonymous]

Put a lot of time into test runs. Check the IFC transport in both ways. Use module linking and separated models for your part and theirs. For example once you open their IFC model save it as exterior.pln (example) and link it as a module into your project. Complexity of geometry will also be deciding how you want to do it. You could also separate model from drawings (theirs and yours) by exporting required backgrounds into dwg's and use them for your drawings.

[Anonymous]

does this mean that the best approach would be to have one firm work on the exterior, while the other works on the interior? this way what we would call composite types etc. aren't shared....?

i'm still looking for anyone who's shared architecture to architecture; i see a lot of posts on sharing revit structure with archicad...but nothing that speaks of revit architecture sharing with archicad. from what i can tell on the revit blogs, compatibility changes with each version of revit (architecture, structure, mep).

thanks, everyone, for your help thus far!!

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

Alice wrote:
The approach that they've taken thus far is to draw the work in autocad, and have the other firm update the revit model.
I don't doubt the other firms ability to manage their side, they have a strong Revit implementation. Our end is very very new to BIM & ArchiCAD.

Then maybe a good approach for the first step (the first job) would be to aim at starting and finishing your own work in ArchiCAD (model as much as you can, set up your views and layouts) and export DWGs for the other firm to keep on working the way they have been working up to now. You will be more than busy enough if you are only beginning with ArchiCAD, and starting and finishing the job in ArchiCAD may by itself be too much of a challenge on a normal job with a normal schedule.

Anything beyond that ('hey, check out this IFC I did and tell me what you see, would that be of any use to you?' etc.) could then be considered experimentation, and maybe brought into the workflow once successfully tried and tested. The good thing about experiments is that failure is not a failure.

[Anonymous]

I would more or less forget trying to coordinate data in 3D -- stick to 2D. You could try meshing 3D models together using DWG format or something similar. I can't vouch for Revit's IFC writing capability, but other AC users on this forum have reported that it's not great. That was Revit 2008, so perhaps things have changed.

If you do try IFC, then each team will be linking in a 3D version of the other consultant's work; do that into a separate file, not into your working file, and that link that data in for reference.

[Anonymous]

In most cases you can transport information using IFC, but some classes are not recognizable in either software. For Example Revit do not recognize slanted walls (those will import as Straight walls). Or solid Element operation. Or layers support. Most of those can be of course resolved, but it takes time to recognize them and find a working solution.

[Anonymous]

it looks like for this project we'll continue with the 2d working method.

however, as a hobby project, we are in the process of learning how to "translate" between archicad and revit architecture; step one is understanding the language barrier (composite = ? ). piece by piece, how does this work, what am i actually getting from one to the other...

i'll keep this thread updated with what we learn....

thanks!