Revit Family Import

Loren Cook Fan Company provides Revit Families of all of their fans use with Revit MEP 2009. I have a couple of questions regarding this.

1. How can I open these files Microstation or a Bentley Building Product?

2. If I can't open these files now, will I be able to in the future? Is this in Bentley's Plans?

3. My final question is for discussion. What is the best course of action for the community/Bentley to take? I know I keep harping on this issue, but the availability of Revit families from manufacturer's continues to increase and the availability of PAZ/BXC/CEL/DGN files continues to stay the same (from what I am seeing). I believe manufacturer data is incredibly important in the future of BIM/VDC. Are we as Bentley users responsible to continue to push our manufacturers into generating Bentley files? Is Bentley responsible to make conversions between Bentley and Revit "Just Work"? Is there a combination or middle ground?

There will come a time when using BIM tools as an "easier" way to extract 2D drawings will no longer be acceptable. There will be an expectation from Owners/Architects/Engineers/Facility Managers/General Contractors/Subcontractors to see the Rooftop Unit from the Manufacturer in their building. I hope we aren't headed towards a dead end...

  • Hi Jeff,

     

    Appreciate you sticking your head above the parapet !! Hopefully, there will be something to celebrate in a couple of years.... or so.

    The mention of external advisers is worrying. This sounds like you are getting a lot of 'shrinks' to tell you what is wrong or missing. Some would say that at the 'Superbowl' level of competition, if you have to ask, you really shouldn't bother...:-)

    Anyway, I hope the soul-searching is going to balanced by getting some hardcore techie big-brains to actually come up with the goods.

    You stuck your neck out, so I will do the same and give you a quick list of what I see are the 'quirky' characteristics of BA that we loyal and ex-users have come to know and love over the years. I think, a lot of these things have been tolerated in the past, but have gotten out of hand, and will be increasingly harder to overlook given the competition.

    1. So-called commercial releases that look like it's still beta-testing it's way forward. This seems to have been made popular by Google and their endless beta periods. I guess Grasshopper and GC are also guilty of this. There is a lot to be gained by the extended feedback harvested, but the big changes and 'breaking' of previous functionality makes it very difficult to manage in a production environment. This also stinks of a 'programme driven' agenda, where management lay down objectives and the troops fudge their way forward, hoping to outrun the fallout, while users refuse to upgrade for fear of stepping into deep dog *** (or is it dog food ?). DV/BV is a prime example of functionality that wasn't thought out before released, causing a lot of people to dabble around, wasting time, and eventually returning to DEM.

    2. The separation between platform and vertical layers. I always get the impression that there is a lot of self censorship as far as features are concerned. Really compelling features will almost certainly need big changes at platform level. There seems to be a lot of 'Waiting for Godot' going on, where verticals wait for platform to provide, if they can, but by the time they are in position to do so, the situation has probably moved on. I guess, the old excuse was that Bentley's hands were tied by its problems with Intergraph. The years we wasted waiting! This gives 'little' shops like ArchiCAD etc, and to an extent Revit, a big speed advantage as they don't have to worry about timesharing their core code development.

    3. "Nice-to-have" features masquerading as "Workhorse" features: PCS and DDD and FS are good examples of this. These have all the signs of little experiments that may be OK for a few specialised requests, but have stagnated; while being put forward as real 'broad-spectrum' solutions. They don't talk to each other or the other ancillary functions and do not have any deep strategic thinking or foundations. I guess this has something to do with items 1&2, and the 'shrink' thing. The result is the lukewarm, fragmented app that BA is today. I think, in this day and age, Bentley needs to get 'the best of the best' and not just leave it to their 'own people', no matter how good they are. The burgeoning parametrics/associativity/computational design/constraints modeling challenge is one area I do not see Bentley solving in-house only, given its track record.

  • Bentley has put forth a considerable investment to ensure our Bentley user can collaborate and coordinate with Revit with the "i-model Plug-in for Revit". While we do tend to lag behind Revit in our release schedules for the plug-in, that is mostly because unlike most third party developers, we are not privy to a pre-release version nor would we want to develop against a pre-release version. And YES, we are already investigating the recent 2011 Revit Release.

    The current release of "i-model Plug-in for Revit" (08.11.07.43) is still a free plug-in which works with 2008, 2009 and 2010 Revit Architecture, Revit Structural and Revit MEP, both 32bit and 64 bit. This is now a one step process, which generates a v8i i-model from the active view of Revit. Bentley has also released other plug-ins; such as the ISM Revit plug-in, to support Structural analysis, design, detailing, documentation, fabrication and BIM software of your choice. We will also be releaseing another Revit Plug-in to support our new line of Energy Ananlysis and simulation products. Shortly, we will be combining all of these Revit plug-ins so access and installation will be a seamless process.

    For more information please refer on the "i-model Plug-in for Revit" please refer to http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Promo/Revit/i-model.htm.
    For more information please refer on the "ISM Revit Plug-in v8i" please refer to http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Promo/ISM

    This thread has made reference to the desire for Bentley to directly consume or produce Revit files and/or content and questioned whether the aggreement struck between Autodesk and Bentley in 2009 made provisions to make that happen. While the aggreement made huge strides in interoperability it really concentrated on interoperability between Bentley's open file format DGN and Autodesk's proprietary DWG. However an aspect of the agreement between Bentley and Autodesks covers "technical support for the use of our repsective APIs in each other's products." These APIs do include Autodesk's Revit provit products, but as it stands to day, the Revit (.rvt/.rfa) remains a proprietery format and we can only access information available to use via the API. This API does not give us the capabilities to write native .rvt/.rfa files nor does it give us the ability to access Revit files/content without the presence of Revit. With that said, Bentley is undertaking several investigations on how to leverage Revit content and possibly consume that content into a Bentley DGN that persist the parametrics and can be properly utilizied in the context of a DGN. If you would like to read more concerning Bentley/Autodesk interoperability agreement, please reference the ‘BE Current' magazine (http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Corporate/Publications/Magazine/all+archives.htm), Volume 5, Issue 3, or it can be read online at http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/bemagazine/vol5issue3/. In that issue, Keith Bentley set the record straight in an enlightening article on the topic titled ‘What Does the Bentley/Autodesk Agreement Mean for Bentley Users'.

    Another popular topic on this thread seems to involve the work Bentley Plant is doing with ISO 15926 and what the Bentley Building equivalent vision would be. ISO 15926 is primary a plant oriented standard dealing with process pipe. There might be some overlaps with the building industry in particular building types such as Healthcare where they distribute gases, but for the most part, ISO 15926 does not have the relative coverage of building to be useful in our industry. As many of you have already identified, the IFC standards is the closest thing the building industry has to a comprehensive and international standard that attempts to normalize a building data schema, process and presentation. Bentley has invested a considerable amount of time investigating various aspects of the IFC and from our perspective, the IFC has developed a very strong schema architecture, although a little verbose. Other criticisms of the IFC has been that the IFC have some definite weaknesses in certain specific disciplines such as structural where there are a myriad of other file formats that cover only a certain set of materials (like CIS/2 for steel but nothing for concrete). The promising aspect about IAI, relative to the IFC, is that they are reaching out to other standards organizations and recognizing those standards as a means to fill in any deficiency or industry specific expertise. I would anticipate you will see Bentley Building having a greater affinity for the IFC standards similar to that our brethren Plant group has demonstrated with ISO and for the interoperability among applications demonstrated by Structural Modeler's (formerly known as Bentley Structural) ISM initiative. However, IFC is yet again, another standard format. What Bentley is investing in now, is an interoperability platform - not just another file type, a way to handle change management, provenance of data, revision history and intelligent data interrogation without the aid of native applications residing on your desktop. This framework will support the industry standard formats that exist today (and even be based on many of them) but will go much beyond a simple static file translator.

    So this leads us to the Bentley vision for the Building Design and Analytics applications, and the reason for the corresponding silence of late. As many of you may have heard, Bentley Building has been undergoing a reorganization. This reorganization goes much deeper than reorganizations of past. Not only was the baton of management passed, but this time this baton came with a new commitment to the Architectural/Engineering/Construction (AEC) community and the applications that will support them. This commitment also comes with additional development resources to extend our Building solutions and priority support from MicroStation's platform group. Over the past couple months, Bentley has been planning on where to take the building solutions and how best to apply the new investments. Bentley has started developing on two simultaneous tracks. The first track will provide continued value within the current solutions. During the next year, the MicroStation platform is going to remain fairly stable giving us the opportunity to start addressing many of the concerns listed in this posting related to missing features and functionalities. We currently anticipate this track of development to be completed in a one year time frame. Meanwhile, a second (parallel) track of development will be addressing new solutions to extend our capabilities and address some of the long lead time features and capabilities. These solutions will provide additional capabilities in both the Building Design applications as well as our Building Analytics. I know, by now, you are frustrated by the lack of details, but at the current time we don't believe it prudent to make our detailed intentions public. However, Bentley is considering the Building (AEC) market to be among the highest priorities. We have recently hired experts in the field to join Bentley's BIM team full time to help with everything ranging from simplifying the GUI to extending our architectural feature sets to extending the capabilities of our energy products. I'm sure our plans will become more forth coming as we make progress on either tracks, although I would also anticipate more conservative presentations on our plans of future development. Let our actions present the commitment (and gain your trust) rather than a bunch of blogs or fancy PowerPoint presentations.

    -Bentley Building



  • dwy.seah@gmail.com:

    Steve,

    ...Why are people staying on J? is it because they can't find support ? 

    I believe it's because they either have what they *need* for their current projects, or simply cannot upgrade without it being a major deployment project of its own.

     

    dwy.seah@gmail.com:

    ...Its not so pretty in the AEC world, which is a good reason for Bentley to stay committed, if only to keep things challenging.

     

    No argument.   Things are moving fast...    I believe we are committed, and that the future should bring some much needed change.



  • Steve,

    1. Point taken, but the road is strewn with half digested third party tech that do not deliver compelling, 'transformative' tools that users will use. PCS is a good example in my view. That's probably why Spaceclaim went the extra mile and hired ACIS's lead tech. This gave them an inside view on ASICS and got past their support desk, who don't write their code and probably don't have the insight / history to redefine the code, I suspect.

    2.  Bleeding edge? I think you need to get out more :-)  I think Bentley's model of relying on tech support to configure and support its apps is really shortsighted and promotes bloated overheads that will keep its costs and costs to the users high. It will eventually be overrun by software that will see their profits scale with the number of licences sold and not have to find, train and pay staff to support each license / site. Users will keep away and there will be a self perpetuating glass ceiling. Why are people staying on J? is it because they can't find support ? 

    I suppose, this model could still be valid out in emerging markets like the BRIC countries, where techie labour is still relatively cheap and most  big engineering firms are pretty software un-savvy and would like Bentley to step in lilke some kind of IBM or SAP or .... Intergraph? They must be running out of big fat ENR 100 type companies at home.

    3.  Yes, but coming up with compelling apps is a deep and many layered affair that requires a huge amount of coordinated working that I don't think Bentley is used to in many ways. It has aquired a lot of companies over the years and is probably having to divide its resources between supporting old code and building the foundations for the next generation. Remember Speedikon or Bluethink? I suppose if you are working in the civils or mapping or plant sector where Mstn is pretty entrenched, you can afford to sit back and wait for Bentley to deliver eventually. Its not so pretty in the AEC world, which is a good reason for Bentley to stay committed, if only to keep things challenging.

     

  • Though it would be hard to argue that BA V8i was put out prematurely as tech support was even 6 months behind delivery.

    Ustn since 1988
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    Eric D. Milberger
    Architect + Master Planner + BIM

    Senior  Master Planner NASA - Marshall Space Flight Center

    The Milberger Architectural Group, llc