Any way to get content from CADmep to Revit, and it be (somewhat) usable?

[tzframpton]

Hello all, we are a 3rd party vendor for MEP contractors. We have a customer of ours that we're doing spooling for at a semiconductor plant. It's a lot of work and they've picked up another contractor's tool installs. This other company has a CAD department who uses AutoCAD Fabrication while we are Revit only. Our customer has come to us to ask if we can pick up spooling their drawings for them as that other company's detailers are saying they can barely keep up with modeling let alone spooling.

We use Revit + MSUITE so we were wondering if there was a way to natively convert their DWG's into Revit, maybe by some type of MAJ export/import, or some other process I'm aware of? It's not that we couldn't do it in AutoCAD, but our process is so fast with our Revit products that it would not be economical, among other things. We don't want to do any modeling, just be able to use Revit as our spooling platform to help our customer and their partner on site.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

[acad2015]

Talk to Msuite. They have an autocad plugin meant for converting fabrication parts into Revit for spooling purposes.

[tzframpton]

Great, thanks for the help. I do just that.

[Darren Young]

Otherwise, just export an MAJ and then import it back into Revit.

That can be a bit problematic depending on the Revit version but there's some tricks. Just post if you have issues and I can go into detail. Something I should post about honestly but I need a good dataset that produces the issue that I'm allowed to share.

[tzframpton]

Thanks Darren, didn't know if it would be that easy. I'll give it a shot and report back.

[audiocycle]

Otherwise, just export an MAJ and then import it back into Revit.

That can be a bit problematic depending on the Revit version but there's some tricks. Just post if you have issues and I can go into detail. Something I should post about honestly but I need a good dataset that produces the issue that I'm allowed to share.

Darren,
Wouldn't they need to have the requesting contractors database to effectively convert from MAJ into REVIT?

[Darren Young]

Darren,
Wouldn't they need to have the requesting contractors database to effectively convert from MAJ into REVIT?

Good catch. I missed that nuance.

Within each DWG is a full copy of the database...except for the separate ITM's themselves.

There is a command to write the database back to disk.

But Revit still may have a hard time importing the MAJ as the ITM content isn't in the database.

When with the same database, small differences can cause the MAJ import to fail. The best way to make that work is to run a script that loads all the content into memory and force it to update the data tables to match the content. Then the MAJ exported out can usually be opened in Revit.

But in this case, that process gets a lot sketchier...but I could also see it getting easier....I'll have to test now as this will bother me until I know.

[tzframpton]

Otherwise, just export an MAJ and then import it back into Revit.

That can be a bit problematic depending on the Revit version but there's some tricks. Just post if you have issues and I can go into detail. Something I should post about honestly but I need a good dataset that produces the issue that I'm allowed to share.

Darren, I'm willing to share our files with you. Probably a best case scenario if you want to see "issues" lol. Would you be willing to work with us on it?