REVIT to ArcGIS

The downside of online shopping. I needed an odd sized bolt made of brass for my old sailboat and it was nowhere to be found in the local hardware stores. Easy enough to pay a little extra for shipping to save me the trouble of driving all over town. I quickly found a couple different vendors and chose the one that looked like they were really doing e-business and pushed the button and waited for the confirmation. Two phone calls and three, “ we shipped it yesterday emails”, still no bolt after over a month. Sometimes grabbing hold of the real thing and walking it to the register is the best way to go. Until e-business and boat hardware inventory systems are more interoperable… I’m off to the hardware and marine supply stores to find, and grab a 8 ½ inch quarter-twenty brass carriage bolt and matching wing nut that I can put in a bag, buy, take home and fix to my boat. …but wait I see another confirmation in my inbox.

Although, far from being an integrated system, I still have a need to get data from REVIT into ArcGIS. Here is the path I used last time I did this to create features in ArcGIS. You may find other paths to get there. Working with one DXF file exported from REVIT. The resultant AutoCAD file contained 3D entities that ArcGIS doesn’t support (Polymeshes). However, exploding them with the AutoCAD EXPLODE command did create 3D Faces that are supported by ArcGIS. From REVIT I can also export data to a 3D Studio file (.3DS). I could have used ArcGIS at this point to bring the entire 3DS file in as single 3D symbol in ArcScene or ArcGlobe, but I wanted to get the individual building parts as separate multipatch features. I imported the .3DS file into plain AutoCAD, which generates 3D face entities directly, the type of 3D CAD entities ArcGIS does support as multipatch features. The resultant AutoCAD file could then be used in ArcGIS.

Yet another option if you are confronted with AutoCAD SOLIDS entities exported from REVIT is to use the AutoCAD 3DSOUT command to export the resultant AutoCAD SOLIDS out of AutoCAD into a .3DS file and then import them back in. The result again is 3DFace entities. (If your version of AutoCAD doesn't have the 3DSOUT command, check here.)

To make the drawings even more usable I created separate muiltipatch feature classes using ArcGIS for AutoCAD for each different building part that were easily destinquished based on their AutoCAD Layer. Now when I add the data from either of the two AutoCAD files in ArcGIS I get 3D multipatch feature layers that correspond to the different building parts. I can also use the existing CAD georeferencing tools of ArcMap to position my building in geographic space, and migrate the data into a geodatabase if needed.