Hello,
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Hello Bjon, fastest way I’ve found out lately is opening the point cloud (.laz) in Autodesk Recap and then save it as .rcp file. The .rcp imports smoothly into revit. As a student you should be able to get a student licence for Recap.
I did a little research for free software to accomplish this and found that the .laz must be converted to .dxf in order to make a readable file for revit, but couldn’t find a script or software to do it for free. Didn’t invest much time into it though, having Recap made life easier.
If someone knows a free pipeline to accomplish this I add myself to bjon’s question.
Cheers.
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Welcome!
From a cursory search it indeed looks like Revit is quite limited on input formats and translation to an exchange format like dxf/dwg/3dm/sat is needed. Quite unfortunate!
I think Ocar has you on the right path!
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Thank you Ocar! I will look into this as quickly as I can.
Maybe this is a future feature? Revit is quite popular and having a simple workflow from field to house design in Revit would help WebODM grow is my guess.
I know some architects in Denmark who might test it out if asked.
Cheers.
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They’d have to have a fully open specification and license for the Revit RCP format to make it worthwhile, I think…
Ahh I see. Autodesk needs to make their extra money somehow I guess…
Vendor lock-in and subcriptions are de moda that way, for sure.
Do you know if ArciCad is any better? Do they have more import options or some open specification?
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Looks like it is a fair bit better in that regard.
Yeah getting dense drone data into AutoCAD products isnt the easiest.
I’ve been able to use the route through Recap as discussed above before. However I’ve found it easier (although more long winded) to get data into Civil3D via Infraworks first, where surface simplification is more efficient. Throw to much data at a CAD/Revit program and it may just fall over on you!
Perhaps try Recap → Navisworks (simplify point cloud, create surface) → Revit? Or pull all your drone and cad data into Navisworks. Navisworks seems to be the architectural equivalent to Infraworks.
Again you should be able to get a student licence on Navisworks easily as well.
Ultimately I have given up on this route and went down the simply your data before you take it anywhere near an AutoDesk product route. For open source you can use CloudCompare to simply and resample your point cloud down to something maneagable. We have now taken out a licence on some third party software which handles digitising from point clouds really well and outputs cad drawings which can be surfaced directly within CAD.
Pix4D have taken this route with Pix4DSurvey. Virtual Surveyor is another. I think both may give free trials for you to use if needed. Dont know of anything in the open source space which could do the same job at this point.
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My experience has been the opposite both with Revit and AutoCAD and CAD suite in general WHEN (big when) dense point clouds data comes from a .rcp format file, I’ve worked with big structures and and at least 5-6 dense point clouds with no big issues…
a couple of examples from what I’ve been doing (@Saijin_Naib a bit of what I’m doing here);
drama for me has shown up when importing the same point clouds from other file formats (DXF for example) in which case the software lags eternally and can barely be used… I wonder if this has to do with the file format or some compression that the .rcp does?
Part of what I found when I was finding a solution for this was this;
that then lead to this;
https://lidarwidgets.com/pricing/
At the beggining the guy was giving the scripts for free but then he realized too many people needed the same and decided to profit from his work (fair enough I suppose)…
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Yeah, DXF is a text-based format, and I don’t think it is indexed or otherwise optimized for chunked reading or rendering.
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