How much interest is there in a loader add-on for Revit for loading Sequoia meshes?
The initial advantage would be that we would be able tailor the loading of heavy triangle meshes for Revit reducing the need for excessive mesh decimation. This could also develop into a tool with features to aid in Revit modelling. With Revit’s weak support of triangle mesh loading, this was one of our takeaways from last week at AU. Let us know what you think!
We would likely implement this via our XMesh ecosystem which already supports 3dsMax, Maya and Nuke. XMesh loading is currently license-free while XMesh saving requires a license. Sequoia is itself a licensed XMesh saver, so no further plugins, licenses, or add-ons are required to save XMesh files from Sequoia.
We haven’t looked at providing integration for SQ meshes in general as the generic formats are generally well supported, if the target is 3dsMax very well support with both XMesh and others.
In another thread we discussed Sequoia generating primitives like planes, cylinders. This has promise as a way to create a lighter mesh, suitably constructed mesh that Revit is able to import.
XMesh might use the simplicity of the primitives while allowing more complicated areas to be meshed using point clouds and export to Revit. Some modellers use 3DSMax obj to model historic building ornamentation, so that workflow is pretty accepted.
Can the generated primitives, point cloud meshing and XMesh work together to generate a building file Revit likes? It would be promising and move BIM ahead. Seems to leave the assigning of families and scaling up to Revit which reduces the development complexity.
It will take some thought I think to make it effective. One of the tings we heard a lot about at AU was how do we get SQ meshes into Revit and facilitate faster modelling. We are open to suggestions!
I published a Revit add-in to do this last week, “Mesh Import from OBJ Files”. Please see truevis.com/revit-mesh-import/
I have had success with Revit and Sequoia-created meshes with a limit of around 150000 faces. Cleaning up and decimating the meshes in Autodesk Memento before importing into Revit also helps.
What would be the advantage of loading a SQ mesh into Revit (or any of the other main Autodesk applications) over using the integrated Recap point cloud loading functionality?
the first advantage is that it isnt a point cloud. we heard from a lot of people that they dont want to work with point clouds for visualization, demonstration etc.
i don’t know precisely why, but my guess is that some people can’t visualize pointclouds well [they have difficulty understanding the depth, the arrangement of points etc], and that some need to print and that shaded mesh will print better (especially zoomed in), and some folks feel the dataset can be representative and result in a smaller/lighter file, which is better for their use. There were other suggestions as well, but some seemed to be hypothetical.
what was interesting is this: for as many people who asked us why they would want a mesh in revit [or product x] rather than a pointcloud, we had an equivalent people saying ‘yes! a mesh instead of a pointcloud!’
