STOP MESHING ABOUT

 

“Carry on Subscribing” featuring slapstick comedy in the tradition of Pinewood Studios.  Not really, just a little Kenneth Williams joke to kick things off.

I have been advocating better tools for bringing mesh geometry into Revit for some years now. In 2018 I got some help from Russell Fuller Hill to bring statues into Project Soane. The edge hiding trick via 3ds and DXF is not the slickest workflow ever but it does the job when the chips are down.

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2018/11/statuesque-revitry.html

 

So it was exciting to see OBJ imports with automatic edge hiding pop up in Revit 2023. And I agree with Paul Aubin that we will take whatever is on offer and put it to good use, but all the same the limitations are a bit disappointing.

If you import OBJ into a family template it doesn't behave like a DWG mesh. You can't scale it, and you can't find its layers in object styles to apply materials. You may find a material or two in the Materials dialogue that can be renamed and redefined.

 

I found a couple of free downloads on the interwebs. The stonehenge model didn't bring any added value to my recent work. There is a better looking file on Sketchfab but I was unable to reset my password there.

So I have a chair and a cushion. I installed some free mesh editing software hoping this would be less intimidating than 3ds but one of them kept crashes and the others didn't seem to have the features I needed.

 

 

So once again I stumbled around in an application I wish I could use with fluency. It was easy to extract a single chair from the 4 seater desk I had acquired. That came into a family, and looked pretty good but with a largish file size and a bit overscaled. I was expecting a scale factor that I could adjust, but i not there and the scale command is also inactive. That's a shame

 

 

I tried decimating the mesh to get the poly count down. Didn't affect the file size as much as I hoped and messed with the smoothness of the geometry. Not worth doing in this case. For the DWG / DXF Edge hiding and bumpier shapes like statues, decimation tools are important. For the OBJ imports... so far my advice is "don't bother"

I did acquire some new skills at scaling mesh objects in 3ds. Its not hard. I'm just a total novice. I did also experiment with some remeshing, smoothing, etc but ultimately decided to stick with the original mesh.

 

I did decide to try decimating the cushion, and putting it through the old edge hiding routine. That brought the file size down and once done gives a cad import that can be easily scaled to provide scatter cushions of various sizes.

 

So

If you have an OBJ mesh that gives you a shape you want, the new facility is a blessing. You will probably have one or more material names baked in. Control their appearance from the materials dialogue and if you need cushions with different materials you will have to duplicate the family and rename materials in family editor. Could be worse.

 

My wish list?

Mesh objects imported into Revit to have a "hide edges" check box and a "scale factor" parameter. Ideally that would work the same for OBJ and DWG. Baked-in materials inherited from OBJ and bylayer materials applied to DWG are fine, but material parameters would be even better.

The more mesh imports work like native Revit geometry, the better.