Revit Live Exploring the AEC Collection

With customers looking for more and more value from their software, the AEC collections seem to have arrived just at the right time. A Collection provides wider scope of software and therefore increasing the types of activities users are able to undertake at no additional cost. One of these activities that is certainly beginning to spark the interest of many users is VR. Using Revit Live which is now included within the AEC collections, users can be transported into a VR model within a couple of clicks. Although the attraction of the VR experience may push a lot of users towards using Revit Live, the reasons should not stop there. My colleague Justin Doughty explored the possibilities of importing both map data and survey data. By converting these types of source data to FBX file format he was able to import them into Revit Live, where they can be viewed within the browser or extended to the VR world. See below to learn more about the methods he used. 

By Justin Doughty 

This is more of an exploration of some of my ideas and testing, than an exact “how to”, but I thought I would share what is possible with Revit Live and the AEC Collection.

With the latest version of Revit Live there have been many updates, which streamline the workflow and make things much quicker.

However the terrain (which was the same hills for all files) was removed for speed. So I thought I would explore an alternative.

3ds Max Interactive lets you open Revit Live projects for editing and using this I was able to use a FBX file exported from InfraWorks to make my new terrain. Not only do you get the surface data and imagery, but also any other imported models from InfraWorks.

Pushing back to Revit Live, this then lets you publish a single file. You can send this file to anyone and they can have the same experience, walking around the file, without any software needed. Putting it a different way, you can send someone a game of your project.

To roughly summarise this workflow:

-Create a FBX file from a product in the AEC Collection.

-Create a Revit Live model from your Revit Project.

-Use 3ds Max Interactive to open the Revit Live model and combine with the FBX.

-Push back out to Live for viewing.

This led me to thinking about other products in the AEC Collection. With thanks to Cadline’s Matt Lees and the National Trust, I was able to use drone photography in Recap Photo to create a 3D model.

Using a combination of export settings from Recap Photo and the same workflow, this gave a really impressive result, combining real world and design data. This highlights how useful the AEC Collection is having access to all of the products and this workflow.