Once the relevant views are displayed, simply check the box under the Include column to select the 3D views to be exported from Revit to Sketchup. If you don’t see the 3D views that you created in step one, you might need to change the Export dropdown to and the Show in list dropdown to Views in Model as shown in the screenshot below. In this DWG Export window, you are presented with several options including the option to select multiple views to be exported in batch. Within Revit, navigate to the File menu and choose Export > CAD Formats > DWG. Now that you have your model prepped, you are ready to export your 3D views as individual model as the next step in transitioning from Revit to Sketchup. There are a number of ways to control visibility in Revit, so I’ll leave it up to you to decide what works best for you. In the screenshot to the right, you can see that I’ve created an individual 3D view for Doors, Roofs, Walls and Windows, however the view named “Export – Site” actually has the Parking, Planting, and Topography model categories set to visible because for this project, it makes sense to have all site elements in one exported model.
Although Sketchup maintains layers for visibility, it is still much easier to manage when individual models contain a common model category. Export Models by Model CategoryĪnother technique that can help when exporting Revit to Sketchup is to export multiple models which contain a few model categories rather than one model containing all model categories. As shown later in this tutorial, it can be difficult to align the multiple models in Sketchup without these lines to snap to. I highly recommend that you draw a set of model lines around your Revit model to use as a reference after imported to Sketchup. On the surface, it can seem fairly simple to export Revit to Sketchup, but here are some techniques that should make your life a little easier before importing to Sketchup. In part one, we’ll cover the process from the Revit side of the workflow, where you will prep your model for export. In this post, we will cover the less common workflow of going from Revit to Sketchup and discuss some recommended techniques and some common errors to watch out for. The former will result in open spaces between surfaces, which may or may not receive light, while the latter can be more problematic Indigo currently (as of 3.4.8) assumes that the camera is in a single medium, which is usually a reasonable assumption, however with the large sensors sometimes used in orthographic rendering, this assumption is more likely to break down.It’s a common workflow for designers to turn to Sketchup during the early phases of a building design because jumping straight into Revit model is often more time consuming. go through glass or water), causing problems. go through walls), especially different media (e.g. One potential pitfall with large camera sensors is that they may intersect other scene geometry (e.g. The orthographic camera must be at least as large as the objects in view, since they are directly projected (parallel rays) without any perspective effects which might otherwise allow large objects in the distance to be viewed with a much smaller sensor. Orthographic cameras require Indigo 3.4.4 or newer earlier versions will report an error when attempting to render scenes which have a non-perspective camera defined. The zoom level may need adjusting to keep the same part of the scene in view bear in mind that this is actually changing the camera's sensor size, so if you're rendering a building it will need a building-sized camera. With this applied, we can immediately see the viewport change to remove all perspective effects. We now select the Parallel Projection option from the Camera menu, which will enable the orthographic camera mode: We start with the normal (perspective projection) camera, which will give the normal depth cues such as distant objects being smaller, in a simple scene with some boxes: Switching from perspective to parallel projection In this tutorial we'll cover the steps required to render with orthographic cameras in SketchUp, as well as cover some potential pitfalls with their use. This is sometimes desirable for technical illustration or architectural visualisation purposes. Orthographic cameras remove the perspective effects normally seen in a 3D rendered image.