Trouble Exporting Vwx Model

[MaxStark]

Hi,

 

I've searched online and on these forums. Found similar info, but nothing that has helped me. If this is redundant then please point me towards the answers if they are already posted somewhere.

 

I am working on a 3D BIM model for our office; it is a large (~250,000 sq.ft.) apartment building. My goal is to export the model for our engineers who are working in Revit. Ideally, I want to export directly to Revit but it is not working. I have tried export to Revit, IFC, and STEP file formats; a summary of the exports follows.

 

Revit exports work very very slowly until the progress bar is a fraction away from being finished and then freezes. I tried exporting the whole building including site (ambitious, I know) which took about an hour to almost finish. I left it for another hour @ a fraction of progress bar left, but it never budged and so I forced close. Tried again with only a single floor of the project in a new file - same result. Tried again with the single floor and converted symbols to groups - same result. Tried exporting a blank file with a single extrusion to revit and it worked.

 

IFC - taking a while but not nearly as long. Our engineers have said that if we can give them Revit instead of IFC that would save them lots of time.

STEP - found someone mention they export this format instead of IFC on the forums so I tried it. The export worked a lot faster but I don't know about this format, gonna see what the engineers think of it.

 

I need advice on how to fix this problem of not being able to export to Revit. Does anyone with experience here know of things to look out for that would vastly improve revit export and make it tenable? Symbol definitions need to be converted, need to use stories instead of just layer heights, no screen plane geometry allowed, etc. Other advice? 

 

Are STEP files the future? Should I use those instead of these knavish Revit and IFC formats?

 

I am using vwx 2021 SP 3 on a mac desktop.

[MaxStark]

Update:

We were able to get small scale revit exports to work but were unable to accomplish to scale up the export. I will summarize what I found to be the problem(s) so far. First started by getting a single apartment unit in it's own file to export to Revit, then tried a whole floor, then tried the whole building. (FYI it's a 6 story building to give you an idea of the information scaling).

 

Having symbols in the vwx. document prevents the export from working. Used the select similar tool to select all symbols and converted to group. Groups export fine. Also turned off all 2d/3d furniture objects that were in the plans. They had been taken from the vectorworks resource manager default libraries. These two changes allowed me to export a single apartment unit!

 

Repeated the same process with a whole floor, which worked but took about an hour. Tried again with the whole building, which I let run for 36 hours over the weekend. Strangely enough it did not work according to vectorworks.... freezes @ almost finished progress bar and then eats up CPU memory until the Force Quit window pops up saying that the computer ran out of memory. This time it happened it showed ~30GB usage for vwx, but last time I let it run it showed ~60GB usage for vwx (hoping this helps diagnose the problem). But, the exported file was saved and exported even though vwx says it did not work. The exported file is 1.2 gb and saved to my desktop, as specified. I am unable to import the file into vwx to see if it looks right - it simply takes too long.

 

When I have more time to waste I will try making other modifications to the file to allow for a smaller Revit export / a revit export that works. Am I doing something wildly wrong here?

[MaxStark]

Another Update:

 

Big breakthrough in the Revit export.....

 

All our apartment units are modeled as symbols. I converted all of them to groups and then ungrouped all of them. Also, I deleted our furniture, equipment, and plumbing classes (where we have all furniture, appliances, and plumbing fixtures). Turning off the classes was insufficient apparently. Exported file went from 1.2gb (and not working) to 68mb.

 

Best workflow for us at this point is to have our Master file with symbols so that we can update throughout DD as necessary, and then to duplicate the file and unsymbolize, ungroup, and delete classes for 3D export to engineers.

 

Hope this helps some people.

 

However, problems still exist. When the engineer imports a small test Revit file (exported from vwx) into Revit 2021 the model looks great in 3D, but some of the walls don't show in 2d views. Some are not visible in plan view in Revit, and some different ones are not visible in section views in Revit. Not sure how to fix that.

[Kian]

On 5/17/2021 at 6:23 PM, MaxStark said:

were able to get small scale revit exports to work but were unable to accomplish to scale up the export. I will summarize what I found to be the problem(s) so far. First started by getting a single apartment unit in it's own file to export to Revit, then tried a whole floor, then tried the whole building. (FYI it's a 6 story building to give you an idea of the information scaling).

 

Did you ever manage to find a solution for this? Experiencing the same issue myself and it's not even a big file!

 

Thanks