Issues in translations?

[MtnArch]

Anybody having translation issues between your cadd-of-choice and any Autodesk products (Acad, Revit, etc.)? Any products that seem to translate better in 2D? Any better at BIM? Anyone utilizing or seeing SketchUp (Free or Pro) utilized for CD submittals?

Personally I'm still having a hard time justifying anything beyond standard 2D for smaller projects, but I can see the beauty and ease of using SU along with my cadd-of-choice (DataCAD) to get everything across to my clients AND the AHJ.

 

[brudgers]

Exchanging BIM objects between software packages is not like exchanging dwg's because of the differences in feature implementation and data structure. IFC can be useful to some extent, but due to complexity does not round trip well.

 

[Yikes]

Our office was an early adopter of Revit (I can remember version 2.0, when you leased the software). The biggest problems I've had related to the visual / graphic readability. Take for example, the humble 1/2" plaster reglet:

* In CAD, we would draw a single line to represent a reglet.

In revit, it is a model "family", accurately rendered with 4 lines representing the visual edges of the reglet. When I export the file from Revit to CAD, oftentimes I will lose information about line weights; and in scale, the tiny Revit reglet with its 4 lines suddenly looks like one very thick line! Meanwhile, the corner of the building renders with almost no line thickness at all.

The end result is that things can be totally misread, where the reglet looks visually more important than the corner of the building. In Revit, I can fake my way around this by turning on some shadows, but no such luck when it's exported to CAD.