The Whole 9 Yards: Visualization Workflow from AutoCAD to 3ds Max

STEVEN SCHAIN: So we'll get started. I'm going to do some introductions and then we'll get right on into the class. So this is the whole nine yards, á la the football theme.

We're going to go through and just talk about the workflow of going from AutoCAD into 3ds Max. My name is Steven Schain, AKA the 3D Professor. I'm the post-production supervisor and media and entertainment content manager for CADLearning. This is my colleague David Cohn. I'm going to pass it off to you.

DAVID COHN: So as Steve said, my name's David Cohn. I'm an architect. I started using AutoCAD in 1984 in my practice in Memphis and then quit practicing, joined Catalyst as their senior editor. I've written for a number of other magazines. And in 2008 I joined 4D Technologies to work on their AutoCAD course.

Since then I've worked on courses for ReCap, FormIt, Advanced Steel, Revit before Jason Boehning joined the company. I'd like to introduce my colleague Jason Boehning.

JASON BOEHNING: Thanks, David. My name is Jason Boehning. I'm an AEC consultant for 4D Technologies. So essentially, I work with our clients to help them be successful using the tools that they have. And I also work with our CAD learning products and oversee the development of the content related to building, design, and construction. And another valuable member of our team is Katie Watton.

KATIE WATTON: Like Jason, said I work for 4D Technologies as well. My main focus is Revit and BIM 360 CADLearning content.

STEVEN SCHAIN: All right, so we're going to welcome everybody. Hope everybody is having a good morning. Just the obligatory learning objectives. It's the slide everybody has to see in the morning or in the afternoon.

So this is what we're going to really go through today. We're going to hit a little bit on 3ds Max. But we're going to really look at going from AutoCAD to FormIt to Revit to 3ds Max. And Katie is going to discuss using BIM 360 to sort of take all that stuff and wrap it up into one place. And then we'll look at linking a model into 3ds Max.

And I'm going through these quick because I want to get to the rest of the presentation. And we'll place the Sun, place a camera, and do a quick fly through animation. So a quick question-- is anybody using a multi software workflow right now? So a couple of people?

Is anybody just using a single product in their department? Nobody, great. How many people are using FormIt? Anybody? No? OK. How many people use BIM 360? So a handful? Revit? 3ds Max?

Ah, that's good. That's like an equal number there. [INAUDIBLE]. So I am going to pass this off to David. He's going to talk about the project and what we did.

DAVID COHN: Thanks, Steve. [INAUDIBLE] The project that we're talking about was an actual project. I didn't [INAUDIBLE].

STEVEN SCHAIN: Is your mic on?

DAVID COHN: [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, I know [INAUDIBLE].

STEVEN SCHAIN: What number are you?

DAVID COHN: Five.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Make sure it's not muted.

DAVID COHN: There we go. Thanks. So this is an actual project located in Washington. I had nothing to do with the project. But when I drove by this I said, wow, this would be a great project to use it as a FormIt data set and bring into Revit. So it's a pair of duplex townhomes, two story townhomes.

So again, those of you using SketchUp, Autodesk came out with this program called FormIt several years ago. And what FormIt is is basically their version of SketchUp. So this is a conceptual design tool that enables you to do work much like you work in SketchUp. Work with 2D geometry, very quickly touch that 2D geometry, extrude it, turn it into 3D geometry, subdivide it to be able to break elements into different faces.

But the nice thing about FormIt is it runs in a web browser. So it's available as a Windows app, it's available as a web browser app, and it's also available on the iPad and Android devices. And the beauty of this is, you can start working on a project any time you want to. Anytime inspiration strikes you, start working on your mobile device. From the mobile device it saves it into the cloud and then you can open up on a browser on any program, any type of computer that you're writing a web browser.

You can incorporate actual site information. So you'll see as I start developing this project one of the first things I'm going to do is locate this at an actual address because we know where this project is going to be built. That will automatically set everything up so that it understands the location so we can do shadow studies. If I'm working in the browser based version I can also immediately see various weather stations where weather data has been accumulated and incorporate that in. So at a very early stage of my design I can start to do environmental analysis on this building and determine if I reorient the building a certain way, how is that likely to impact the energy performance of the building, day lighting performance of the building?

Again that's only available in the browser version, not in the tablet or Windows app version. But again, with all but the Windows app you store your data in the cloud and then you can open it up on any other device. On the Windows version you have a choice of storing locally or storing to the cloud. And as I'll discuss a little later, there are some advantages when you store to the cloud.

And then once you've finished your design, for those of you that have been using SketchUp and then moving the SketchUp model into Revit you know that that can oftentimes be very cumbersome. The data that you bring over comes in as this big amorphous block and then you've got to start breaking it up before you can do anything with it. Because FormIt's an Autodesk product, that FormIt model when you bring it into Revit, Revit already understands what that model is and you can immediately start turning surfaces into walls, or roofs, or if you've put levels in the model immediately start to subdivide that and create floors inside the Revit model. There's nothing that you have to do to convert that file.

And then once you're working inside of FormIt, again for those of you that do use SketchUp, it works much the same way that SketchUp does. You sketch in 2D, you grab things, you start extruding them up to convert pieces into 3D, you subdivide faces. And once you've created a new face you can grab that face and start pulling on it or grab the line and start pulling that up to create a roof. So you're essentially using push pull operations, Boolean transforms, and other types of transforms to take this very simple model and start turning it into a very accurate study model for your project.

So if I start this project, the first thing I'm going to do is set the actual location of the project. This is important for downstream accuracy, it's important if you want to do environmental analysis. It also establishes all the coordinates when you start working in Revit and then bring it down. Later on as you'll see when you bring it into 3ds Max and you want to start animating and you want to see how the sun is going to move through the sky, it's already setting all that information up for you.

You can also bring in scaled satellite information as a background. So this is the site. We got a pointer on this?

STEVEN SCHAIN: The green button at the top.

DAVID COHN: The green but-- oh, OK. Oh, right there. So--

STEVEN SCHAIN: No, no, that's the on/off. That button, that button.

DAVID COHN: Thank you. So that is the vacant lot. I captured this a while ago. All the satellite images are based on Google Earth satellite imagery. So every few years, the satellite will fly over the same area.

And so if you look at it now you'll see the actual townhomes on this site. And now why is this not working?

STEVEN SCHAIN: Oh, Let's see. Check that we turned it off. There we go.

DAVID COHN: Once you've got your satellite data in there, you've got various display options. So you can turn terrain view on and off. If you turn the terrain view off you just get the streets. You no longer see any of the adjacent buildings. When you turn the terrain on you not only see terrain but you see any adjacent buildings as outlines as they were scanned on that site.

If you go to a satellite view, then you can turn labels on and off. When you turn labels on then the streets are highlighted and the names of the streets appear on that satellite view. You can also switch between a top down 2D view of that satellite imagery or start to look at that location as a 3D image and orient your way around. And because again this data is collected as part of Google Earth, you can go into a Street View and then literally walk down the street and examine that site. So even if you haven't been to the site yet, you get a pretty good idea of what that site looks like.

So the first thing I'm going to do as I locate this project is go into the location tool and I'm going to type in the actual address. I could just zoom in and find it. But I can just go up to that field at the top of the screen there and type in the street address. So this is it, 551 Halleck Street in Bellingham, Washington. Bellingham is a town of about 80,000 people about 90 miles north of Seattle. It happens to be where I live.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID COHN: What's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID COHN: Yeah, really nice town. So anyway, there is the site. I'll go ahead and move that pin out into the middle of the site, but we've just located that building that easily. And as I say, you can turn the terrain data on and off, turn the satellite image on and off, or switch to the satellite image. And then once you're in the satellite image, turn the labels on and off.

A little button down here in the lower right to switch into the 3D view. And then once you're in the 3D view you can reorient that view to the four various isometric points-- the northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest. Or while you're either in that 3D view or the 2D top down view you click on the little man and drop immediately into a Google Earth Street View.

So there's the site before the townhomes were built on it. And again, just orbit around or start walking down the street. And if you look real closely-- so there's a guy on a bicycle that got scanned there. And if you watch as it pans around here, you can see the camera mounted on the top of the car when they went down the street to scan that in Google Earth.

So anyway, at that point I'll zoom in, get everything set up the way I want to see it. And now I can bring that satellite image in as the base view. Now this is the browser version. So I switched from the Windows version of the browser version to show you, now you can see these various weather stations showing up. And so when I select that weather station now I can look at temperature or I can look at wind patterns at various dates throughout the year.

So again, be able to start understanding how this building is likely to respond in the real world because I've got this real world data. And it doesn't matter whether you've started in the Windows version, or in the browser version, or on your tablet, because you're storing the data in the cloud. So now I've brought my satellite image into FormIt and I can position it on the site.

Now when I select it, it's being treated inside of FormIt as an image. So when I go into the pallet over here I can now take that image and let's shade it down about 50% so it's truly going to be a background to everything else that I'm building on top of it. OK, so once I've got that site located if I happen to have started sketching, say, the floor plan of this building in a program like AutoCAD, again because it's an Autodesk program I can immediately read that AutoCAD DWG file-- either a 2D DWG or even a 3D DWG-- directly into FormIt. So I can import DWG and then because it's DWG it's already going to have the scale set up, but I may have to reorient that sketch that I did in AutoCAD on the site.

The nice thing about working with AutoCAD as a base drawing is, I can now start snapping my FormIt geometry to the vector geometry that I brought in from AutoCAD. But if I happened to have been out somewhere and I sketched on the back of a napkin or the back of an envelope or something, I can scan that in as an image file and then bring that image file into FormIt. And again, I can't snap to it and I may need to actually re-scale it. So I'll draw something on. If I'm re-scaling a sketched damage I'll draw a line of a known distance that corresponds to the model in FormIt and then take the image and scale the image so that that sketch geometry in my image approximately matches what I've drawn in the FormIt model and then reorient it.

Of course you can't snap to the vector geometry that was scanned in but you can easily trace over it. And so I'll do that quite often if I just happen to have been sketching a project and then bring it out on the site. So here's how that would look. So again, inside of FormIt I can import. And it says import 3D model.

And you've got various file formats. So one of the things you'll notice is, I can bring in a SketchUp file. I can bring my SKP in that way as well. But also an SAT file, an STL file. In this case, I'm going to bring in an AutoCAD DWG file that's nothing more than a 2D outline that somebody in the firm created of what the base first floor plan of these townhomes might look like. And then I can reorient that.

So what I'll do is, I'll snap that around so it aligns with my street orientation. So you notice it already understands where project North is, where True North is. And then if I want, I can reorient the model and set my project North in here, although project North is one thing that does not necessarily transfer into Revit when you get to that point. But there's my first floor plan.

You can see this satellite view actually had the site because I did this with a newer, more recently and the satellite imagery now incorporated the new site. But when I did it with my sketched version, I'm working on the older satellite image.

And you can see the various image file formats-- I think it's a JPEG and PNG. So I had a PNG version of that floor plan and I'll bring that in. And then again I'll scale it. And I happen to have figured out that it was a scale factor of 38, so again you can scale it down. Then I'll reorient it the same way I did as when working with the DWG file.

And then once I've got it reoriented so it does align with the street, then I can simply grab it and move it over and place it approximately where that building is located on the site. And then again there are two iterations of these townhomes. Again when I bring in my file as an image, you can see that it's showing up over there in the image panel. And so I can now control the layering of the image so I can move the sketch below the satellite image or above the satellite image. And if I select it in the palette I can adjust the transparency of that sketch.

And I'll go ahead and take the satellite image and move it down below the sketched image. OK, so that's kind of my starting point. I've got my basic geometry that I'm going to start building my FormIt model. And now I'm going to use the tools in FormIt to start developing that 3D model.

So the first thing I'm going to do is sketch a basic outline of the building in 2D. Once I've got that 2D model then I can select either that face that gets created, because every time in FormIt you create closed geometry it automatically creates face in the middle of that closed geometry. And then I can select the face and start pushing and pulling it, or I can select those lines I've sketched and start pulling those lines, or I can select any vertex to start pulling and pushing on the vertex.

And then by combining these actions with snaps and referencing other geometry I've already created I can very quickly start to develop this into the actual geometry of this project. So I've created my basic outline of the building. And then just simply click the face, drag it up. And I tap the Tab key I get a dialog box, and then I can put in and start entering precise geometry. So if I know the height of the building at that point, I can tell FormIt that this building's exactly 19 feet high.

Then I'll use the line tool-- or actually, so there's a little recess here between the two units. So the first thing I'll do is sketch a rectangle just in a general location. Again, press the Tab key to get a dialog box so I can specify precise dimensions. Once I've located that rectangle, then I need to move it to the precise location. So if I select the rectangle and go up and use the Measure tool, I can then measure along that side of the building from the corner to the start of that rectangle, press the Tab key or click that dimension, and locate that.

Now of course, I could have sketched the recess as well. But I just want to show you the other tool, possibility of moving it over. And then once I've got that there, if I click on it, drag it down through the building, through that mass, I've now subtracted that from the model so I've created my recess.

Well, once I've got that basic footprint I need to start creating the gable shapes for the roof of the building. And so again I'll just snap to geometry. Notice that when I align with one of the axes once I get within a couple of degrees of that axis, FormIt will automatically snap on the line with the y-axis in this point. By drawing that line to subdivide it I've now created a face. And I can take that face and pull it up three feet because there's some articulation to the roof.

OK, now I need to create my gable. And so I'll simply snap to the midpoint of that line on that side of the building, again snap into alignment on the y-axis. Once I've created that line I've now split that face into two faces. And if I select the line itself I can drag that. And again, if you've used SketchUp, SketchUp works much the same way.

So I'll quickly go through and finish creating the rest of the roof geometry. I just generally created this but I happen to know that this is going to be a 5 and 12 slope. And so I sat down on my calculator and found out what the angle of the 5 and 12 slope is. And so I'll use the Rotate tool, align it with the face of the building, grab the grip so that I can align it with the actual geometry, and then very quickly go ahead and click on that angle and reduce the angle so I've got that slope at a 5 and 12 slope.

And then I'll just, while I'm still in the angle command, move it over to that side, repeat it the other way, and reduce the slope on that side. That's the tallest part of the building. I still have some other intersecting roofs to create. So again, I'll sketch some geometry, align with the x-axis in this case, and then snap to the midpoint on that side. And since I've established the height of the roof, what I can do now is grab that center line, start dragging it up, but then move my cursor over to snap to that vertex that I've already created.

And now it's already snapped in alignment so it's at the same height. And then I can just grab that face, drag it over, and create my roof intersection. So there's a little bit more geometry. This is actually a flat roof with a parapet. And so we'll raise that up. And then I'll use the Offset tool-- let's bring that over so it connects to the roof.

Now I'll use the Offset tool. So again, I'm just right clicking, selecting the offset face. There's an eight inch parapet because there's a wood framed. I'll remove these two lines because they're not really there and then snap that geometry over. And now I can push on that and drag it down to create my parapet. And the last piece I need to do is a similar operation over here on the flat roof on that side.

So again close the geometry so I end up with a contiguous face that I can then tap and push down. And again, all these operations that you're seeing I can do in the Windows version, I can do on my browser, I can do on my iPhone, I can do on my Android tablet. OK, each object that you create in FormIt has properties. So I can now start to subdivide that and add levels.

And once I've added the levels I can display the floor area of the building. So again, at a very early stage if I know that the client has given me a target floor area for each floor, I can start to analyze the building, make sure that I meet the client's criteria. And if I need to, I can start going in and adjusting it. If I include site information in the Properties palette as I'm doing this, I can now actually calculate site usage. So in this case the city says that the building can't occupy more than a certain percentage of the site so I get that information again out of FormIt immediately.

And then because it's been located accurately in the exact location, I can also start to perform sun and shadow studies even though all I've really got right now is some basic building mass. So there's the two townhomes. So I'll enter the target area. I've actually already established-- so if I double click on it now you're looking at the building. So you can see the cubic volume but I don't have any layers turned on yet. So I'll go over to my layers palette and I've already established a ground floor layer level of 0 and the second floor level of 10 feet.

But I'll tell FormIt now for that particular object to use levels. And as soon as I do that, you'll see that the levels have been added to the model. And then I'll double click on that one, because this was simply a duplicate that I then mirrored. And I'll name this one East Townhome, and again tell it to use levels. It's going to use the same levels that I've already established for the other townhome and it's calculated my floor area.

And now I'll go in and tell it that the actual site area is 10,500 square feet. And as soon as I put that information in, it'll tell me that I've got a floor area ratio of 0.7. So I know what my site usage is and I can go to the city and say no, no, you say that I can't be over 80% of the site. I'm at 70% of the site. And simply by turning the sun on, I can start adjusting date and time of day and quickly see how that building's going to cast shadows over the course of the year.

So there's actually a lot more I can do inside of FormIt. If I wanted to do a quick presentation to my client so that he could start to promote this project, I can go ahead and start on the face, sketch in the windows, and then start applying materials to the various surfaces inside of the model. And you'll see I did add a lot more detail to an iteration of that model. And again, at that point I can start to create realistic images. And FormIt even has tools to enable me to create little animation walkthroughs and flythroughs of the project.

But you don't want to necessarily do that to the version you're going to pass off to Revit. So here's a more articulated version of that model. And these are the same materials that are in the Autodesk material library so they do transfer from one program to the other, although as Steve will explain later you probably want to replace them when you start working in 3ds Max. But by simply selecting the material off my palette I can start just tapping on the various services and drop those materials onto those surfaces.

And the glass material I created, I didn't create an opening. I simply drew a rectangle, said there's with the window is, and I'll drag and drop the glass material onto that window shape. And as you can see, I can create really nice little quick study walkthroughs and flythroughs of that project. So this would be useful as a proof of concept for my client but not necessarily something I would use if I'm going to then start walking down the path of taking my model into Revit and into 3ds Max, because any unwanted complexity you add to that is simply going to interfere with what you're going to do downstream when you work in Revit.

So what I'll typically do is, once I've got my massing model completed I'll save that as one version of the project. And then I'll save another version that I'll go in and articulate and add more, add some entourage objects. So at this point, I'm going to hand the project off to the person who's going to start working it up and creating the actual construction documents inside of Revit. Remember I said that there's some things that are more useful when you save your model to the cloud than when you save locally?

Two different ways to hand off the project that you've started working on inside of FormIt. If you save the FormIt model locally it saves it as a .axm file, which is FormIt's file format. And then to get it into Revit you have to use the FormIt converter, which is an add on that you can download from the app store and put into Revit. And that allows you-- actually, I recommend that you download that even if you're working with SketchUp because it does have a SketchUp converter as well as part of that.

So if you've ever worked with SketchUp trying to bring that SKP file into just basic Revit and then you have to break it up and kind of rebuild it, right? So the plug-in will eliminate that step. But if you save it to the cloud onto an Autodesk A360 driver into BIM 360, it creates both the FormIt AXM file and a Revit RDT file. So then you can open that RDT file up from the cloud directly in Revit and start working on it in Revit, whereas if you save it as an AXM file you do need to use that format converter inside of Revit. So at this point I want to hand off to Katie, who's going to talk about how BIM 360 starts to play into this.

KATIE WATTON: OK, so show of hands, how many are using BIM 360 right now? OK, Great. So anyway, first off the BIM 360 platform is not needed for this workflow. You can send what the guys are showing today from AutoCAD 3ds Max. But we can use it.

Since they're all working in different offices, we can use it as a document management, as a file storage system. And so you can upload and download files. And even we'll get into markups and issues a little bit. But all that is able.

So I mean, yes you can use SharePoint, Dropbox, A360, but those are just file storage systems. Document management offers way more. So to begin, BIM 360 is a project delivery and construction management workflow-- it assists with workflows. And so what BIM 360 is, is it's made up of multiple modules and they're all connected. And so what allows these modules to stay connected is BIM 360.

So that's why Autodesk calls BIM 360 the single source of truth. That is because of document management. And so that's basically what I'm going to cover today. But document management supports a wide range of file types.

And so in document management, there are two predefined folders-- there's the plans folder and there's the project files folder. And so the plans folder only supports just a limited number of files as you can see here. That is because it uses OCR technology which I'll cover a little bit more in a little bit. But with the project files folder, it supports more. And this isn't even all of them-- there's 30 plus.

And so even though they support these uploads, some aren't viewable such as FormIt models. You can't really view them in document management. But you can't upload them and Jason can download them and begin working in Revit. And so it allows all these files to be in one platform.

Also you can create additional folders. So BIM 360 allows you to have a custom workflow. So however you want to create your folders and upload these files to, it allows you to create that custom workflow. So with that, project permissions are very important so that only the people that you want to have access on those files and folders have access to them. And also, let's say you want to view a 3ds Max file in document management, you simply click the-- it didn't start from the beginning, I'm sorry.

But anyway, so you can select the folder in document management and it opens. And then from there you can create a markup if you want. So the sidewalk isn't really a line right now, you want to create a markup on that. And so this allows you to create, share, and manage markups in issues. And last week, there was a unified issues that was released for the BIM 360.

So it creates even more capabilities. So with the plans folder, along with issues and markups that you can add, it uses OCR technology which, when you upload design files such as Revit or even PDFs that contain title blocks, that information is extracted. So with that it automatically creates hyperlinks. But also in Plans folder you can create additional hyperlinks, let's say to a fixture within a plan. You can add a hyperlink to that, to the fixture spec.

And so with the project files folder, though, you simply just upload the file, nothing is extracted. And so with that, when you're uploading and downloading files, yes you can download them from here, from document management. But you can also just download desktop connector. And so what this allows you to do is manage your BIM 360 account directly from your desktop. And so you can view and open files, upload and download files, edit and delete files, and create and delete project folders.

And so this allowed the guys here to just quickly upload and download those files. And so also keep in mind that the project files folder is only integrated with Desktop Connector. Jason's going to talk a little bit in a little bit about Revit. And so whenever you-- let's say he has a team, a Revit team, and he wants all of them to collaborate on one Revit model. He can then enable Revit cloud worksharing.

And so this allows all the team to work on one model known as the central model. And so also enabling Revit cloud worksharing, and so this is using BIM 360 design which is the next generation of C4R. And if you needed, you can activate the design collaboration module. If multiple disciplinary firms are working on one Revit model you can activate that design collaboration module. And so with that we're going to take a little break, a two minute break.

STEVEN SCHAIN: So stretch. Just take a quick break. We'll actually take a one minute break instead of a two minute break. Well, do we want to do one giveaway now?

DAVID COHN: No, then they'll leave.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Oh yeah. Well, no, we have two things to give away.

DAVID COHN: Oh, we have two things to give away.

STEVEN SCHAIN: So you guys are stuck here.

DAVID COHN: A few people left. We'll wait till they come back. They took a bio break. Must be present to win.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Yeah. It's early in the morning so we give everybody a few, like a minute or two just to stretch. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask. We've got-- yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEVEN SCHAIN: Right, yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID COHN: No. FormIt is available for free if you're running it on an Android or iOS or in a browser. The only one that you have to actually pay for eventually is the desktop app. Like most Autodesk products, you can download a 30 day free trial.

There is a pro version of FormIt. What the pro version of FormIt allows you to do is integrate with the inside analysis. So almost everything that you saw me do you can do for free in the browser version or the iOS or Android version. If you want to start incorporating the weather information, then you have to have the pro version.

There's a few other things that are only available in the pro version. But 90% of the program is available for free. And again, the only one that you actually have to pay for is the desktop app. So if you want to run the desktop app, which does have some additional tools, then you get a 30 day free trial then you pay for the pro version.

Of course, FormIt comes as part of a lot of the Autodesk packages. So if you buy the engineering construction suite, FormIt is part of that suite along with AutoCAD, and Revit, and 3ds Max, and ReCap, and Advanced Steel. I was amazed when I looked at what's available inside of the suite.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID COHN: Excuse me?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

DAVID COHN: I don't know if rainfall totals are in there. I know that temperature is in there and various wind analyses. I don't know if rainfall totals are in there or not.

STEVEN SCHAIN: All right, let's-- we'll have some more questions at the end. We want to move on to Revit?

DAVID COHN: Yeah, all right.

STEVEN SCHAIN: And Introduce Jason.

JASON BOEHNING: All right, welcome back guys. Can you hear me all right? OK. All right, now let's jump into the Revit portion of this. And so essentially what I'm going to show is creating the model.

And so when you use Revit you have to kind of have the end goal in mind, right? Like, what are you going to be using Revit for? Are you just creating a model so you can take it into 3ds Max? Or are you working on construction documents? Are going to be fabricating off of that model?

So that's going to determine the extent that you build out your Revit model. In this case, we're simply looking to create some nice construction documents and then creating a nice accurate model that we can use in 3ds Max as well. And so we're actually going to-- I'm actually going to jump into a live demo here. And just like David talked about using the mobile version of FormIt, I'll show you how to use the mobile version of Revit to create a model.

Just kidding, just kidding. Just seeing if you guys are still with me here. So OK, all right. Let's jump into Revit here. Can we switch over. Oh, sorry, OK.

All right, so here's the end goal. Sorry I'm sitting here in the corner now. But here is our final Revit model, but I'm going to show how we got to that point. And so I'm going to start from scratch creating a new Revit file here.

And so if you're working with FormIt, you're going to need to use this FormIt converter add in. And so there are actually several tools here. You can download this add in from the Autodesk FormIt website. But you can convert your family files to FormIt models and then you can actually use this add in to convert SketchUp files to FormIt as well. And then here's the tool that we're going to use where we can import FormIt into Revit.

And then the last one that's available here is reload families. So if you're using a workflow where you're converting your family files into FormIt models and then bringing them back in, then you can use this tool to reload those families back in and replace those FormIt models. So that's if you're using a full FormIt Revit workflow.

Right now we're just going to import FormIt into Revit. And I have this AXM file right here. Real quick, I'm going to show the Desktop Connector. And so if you have the Desktop Connector here you're going to be able to see it on your hard drive here, and then you can navigate to BIM 360. And it is cloud based.

It's going to take a little bit. But when you log in here you're going to see your accounts. So any accounts that you're added to in BIM 360, they're going to pop up here. And you can just navigate into there and find any files that you're looking for. Let me go back, though, and-- I just have this on my hard drive here.

And so when you import a FormIt model it should go pretty quick because it's pretty light files. And as David said, you want to bring in a file that does not contain a lot of openings, and I'll show you why here in a minute. But right now we brought in the FormIt model. And True North, it brought that over from FormIt. And if we go over here to the Manage ribbon and open up the location, weather, and site dialog, I'll show you here that the location came in that David set in FormIt.

So we can see that our address is here in Bellingham, Washington. And our weather station is selected here. And so at this point, we want to build out the Revit model. And then we can continue our analysis using the Insight service.

So FormIt is connected to Autodesk Insight, so is Revit. All the energy analysis tools inside of Revit are connected to Insight. And so in FormIt you're using a mass model. Then once you build it out inside of Revit with your building elements and you're actually assigning insulating values and wall thicknesses and materials, then you can just continue that analysis using your detailed building model.

And then also you're going to want to do some basic things like rotate project North and-- I'll just show you this, some of this minor stuff real quick here. So the project North does not come over but True North does. And so here now we have True North and project North in our project. And you're going to have to redo your elevations and all that good stuff.

I'm going to go ahead and close this down. And I'm going to switch over to a model where I've already imported, I've already got the view set up and all that good stuff. So I'm actually going to delete one of these and we're just going to work on one here. And then we can mirror it over. But just a couple of quick things right here.

I don't know if you guys-- how many of you work with masses often? Anybody work with masses often? Show of hands? One person?

OK, all right, so I'll walk through some of the basics here of how masses can be used inside of Revit. So even if you're using another program to create some type of 3D model and then bringing it into Revit, more than likely it's going to end up as a mass regardless of what program you're using. It's just going to be a basic 3D shape here. So as you can see, it's just, like I said, it's one shape here, a mass model.

But I also have these mass floors. So those did come over from FormIt as well. In terms of basic visibility here, I'm sure if you use Revit you're familiar with the visibility graphic overrides. And so you can control masses here. But there's also a setting that's important to pay attention to. And on your massing and site ribbon, over here there's this Show Mass by View Settings.

So you can choose to use the view settings or you can choose to just show mass forms and floors regardless of the view settings. And so it can be a little tricky dealing with masses inside of Revit, and visibility can always be a little tricky. But anyways, so here's our mass model. And I'm going to pull up an image here just to show you once again what we are working with. And so this was the project that we were trying to model.

So you can see that there are different types of walls here. So the structure is all the same. It's a wood stick frame duplex. But you can see there's different types of walls here. And so I went ahead and pre created some wall types here. And I'll just do a quick overview of those.

But essentially, my structure was the same except for the exterior surface because that's how it's actually going to be constructed here. And I didn't use a wood layer. I just used the generic metal. But anyways, this is where you can come in and adjust your materials for your wall types.

And now once again, you've got to be thinking about the end goal. And so if you know that you're not going to create any detailed renderings inside of Revit, then you can just specify some basic information like I have here. And on the Graphics tab you can adjust the shading and some of that stuff so that you can see what you're dealing with inside of Revit. And if you're not going to render in Revit, then you don't have to mess too much with the appearance assets inside your types.