Inventor 2014 to Revit Family BIM MEP Connector Tricks

by David Gate

Inventor 2014 introduced the new BIM export tools allowing you to export Revit files from Inventor, if you want to see these in action then please have a watch of my video. 

I was recently using this tool and had a number of the connections fail to export correctly.

When you have finished the export you will get a message in Inventor telling you that the translation was either successful or unsuccessful and offering you to see the translation report. This success or fail criteria is related to the 3D model and the connections don’t seem to have an effect. If your connections fail the only way to know is to look at the translation report.

You can see Inventor tells me the operation was successful but a closure inspection of the report shows that the connectors failed.

This is due to my selections I used when I created the connectors. I had picked cylindrical faces.

Picking these cylindrical faces causes the export to fail.

Flat Circular Faces and Circular Edges are the selections you want to make.

Picking circular flat faces works fine but in some cases you don’t have these faces to select. Picking the inner edges when creating the connectors in the instance above results in success. Outer edges or the circular faces work for cylindrical extrusions.

It may require a slight bit of trial and error to get all your connectors exporting correctly but always check the report after export and make sure you pick edges or flat faces not the cylindrical faces.