Introduction
Our customer, a well-established German engineering firm specializing in technical building equipment (MEP), was founded in 1973. They offer a diverse range of MEP planning and engineering services, including for sports facilities, office buildings, shopping centers, and residential buildings.
Challenge
For calculation purposes in MEP systems, software called SOLAR is used. In many projects, it is required that the delivered MEP model be created in Revit. While SOLAR allows IFC export and Revit offers IFC import, the imported file appears in Direct Shape format, which hinders further editing, and the attributes of the imported objects are inaccurately represented. In essence, a simple export-import process cannot solve the issue.
Our Approach
Our client initially came to us to outsource the time-consuming task of re-modeling Revit files.
However, after carefully looking at the core of the problem, we saw potential for a more elegant solution: automated conversation from IFC to Revit through a mapping mechanism, far more advanced than the IFC import tool provided by Revit in standard.
Our Solution
We've developed a Revit add-on tool that streamlines the process. This tool allows you to import your IFC files. Through an intuitive mapping mechanism, it automatically generates a new Revit object for each IFC object based on the mapping file. Once created, the tool positions them accurately. In the final step, it seamlessly connects all objects that belong together into a system. All these steps occur automatically with just a click of a button. The outcome is a Revit-native MEP system, complete with accurately assigned object attributes, achieved in just 5 minutes, as opposed to the manual labor of 5 working days.
