MicroStation 2024 CellStation Edition?

As mentioned elsewhere, BIM is heavily dependent on using components provided primarily by manufacturers. This means being able to convert RFA content into Mstn equivalents with as much fidelity and retained functionality as possible. Mstn's RFA Interpreter is a pioneering tool... but I think the results have been more 'zombie'  than production-ready, lately. Overdue for an overhaul... using ODA BIMrv libraries?

Some of the problems:

  1. Missing geometry. Not sure but I suspect that this might have to do with troubles with reverse engineering Revit tools.
  2. RFA Cell is a monolithic 'zombie' element that can not be edited without dropping and losing all the attached BIM / Item info.
  3. Properties Panel does not display the nested elements.
  4. No way to use tools like FACET MODIFY EDGEDISPLAYTOOL to clean up geometry problems
  5. Everything lands on the Default level. I suspect that this due to Mstn's Parametric Cell (Shared Cells) limitations.
  6. No support for Revit's coarse medium fine LOD settings. All LOD versions come in and land on the Default level, making the results impossible to use. No Mstn Element Template support?
  7. No support for Revit's 2d plan, section etc geometry. High hopes that this will be corrected soon now that Named Presentations has been released.
  8. No support for Revit's Visibility state parameter. Again, all versions of the geometry come in and land on the Default level, making the results impossible to use.
  9. Unreliable support for Revit's parametrics. This will probably never be comprehensive, but we need to understand better what the RFA-I's limitations are. RFA-I previously targetted OBD parametric functionality. Even this seems to getting worse. This needs to be picked up again with Mstn's Constraints and Parametric Solids functionality.
  10. No support for Revit materials, textures etc for rendering. Visualisation is a very important side product of BIM.
  11. ??

No one is really going to want to use Mstn if every component has be to remade from scratch. OBD is infamous for having very bad OOTB datasets, based on decades old content, often US origin that has been 'metrified', based on old and multiple tools accumulated over the years. This has been overlooked for a long time as a lot of the corresponding functionality like Placement Points, Perforators, Named Presentations etc in Mstn just wasn't available. There is a huge pent up demand for updating all that old content to leverage the new MSCE Update16.1,2,3 etc functionality. OBD for example desparately needs to be able to include modern content in its OOTB datasets to be competitive. The converted BIMstore RFA content on ComponentCenter is no better. Hopefully, the localisation teams have been consulted by platform and the relevant conversion tools are being written.

Parents
  • When working with building designs and with Revit, I suggest working with Bentley's Open Buildings Designer. It is designed specifically for building design and has tools for working with Revit data included with it. 

    All questions concerning Open Buildings Designer should be directed to the Open Buildings forum. That is where you will find users of Open Buildings Designer to answer your questions.

Reply
  • When working with building designs and with Revit, I suggest working with Bentley's Open Buildings Designer. It is designed specifically for building design and has tools for working with Revit data included with it. 

    All questions concerning Open Buildings Designer should be directed to the Open Buildings forum. That is where you will find users of Open Buildings Designer to answer your questions.

Children
  • The RFA Importer has been taken over by the platforms team. So are a lot of the key modeling tools iincluding Named Presentations (which is a reboot of OBD's old Compound Cells functionality), Perforators, Placement Points etc. Parametric Content Modeler was intended to replace OBD's Parametric Cell Studio. Most of the fundamental OBD tools now seem to be developed at platform level, which makes sense as most of the BIM functionality that is needed by OBD are equally applicable for other verticals.

    This is the reason this thread was posted here and not in the OBD forum.