From the course: Revit to Unreal for Architecture, Visualization, and VR

Prepare your Revit model for export

From the course: Revit to Unreal for Architecture, Visualization, and VR

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Prepare your Revit model for export

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- [Instructor] If you have much experience with exporting Revit models for renderings or video, you'll know that the process can be arduous. The Datasmith pipeline is a boon to the ArchViz community because it automates so many processes and preserves data so well. There's two export pipelines we're going to cover in this video, the direct Revit to Unreal process and the more indirect Revit to Max to Unreal, all using the Datasmith pipeline. An important note if you're following along, the Revit exporter only works with Revit 2019 and Unreal 4.21 or later, while the Max plugin goes all the way back to 419. Begin by opening the project and selecting the 3D view you want to export. Because it's view-based, we can use visibility overrides or templates to control which categories are included in the export. Use vv to open graphic overrides. Here you can check or uncheck different categories to include them in your view. We're going to take it all so let's close this window. The goal is to make sure that the view contains everything we want to export to Unreal. At this point, you could use a turnkey VR tool like Iris or Inscape to fly through the model and make sure it's correct, or you can crop the model using a Section Box. Make sure this is checked and then grab the Section Box and drag it through the model. Looks like we have all of our walls and furniture, so we should be good to go. We just have to make sure we disable this Section Box before we export unless that's an effect you're going for. If you have the Datasmith exporter installed, you can click the button, choose the destination, and you're done. For our purposes, let's select DatasmithExport. That's really all there is to it on the Revit side. Choose a 3D view, export Datasmith file. For Max, there isn't much more to the process. Simply export the file to Max as normal and then you can clean up the file and prepare it for Datasmith export there. Unfortunately, you'll lose much of the Revit metadata in the process. Speaking of, the Datasmith exporters have slightly different levels of compatibility so you might find materials translate differently between these two pipelines. However, we'll be upgrading most of the materials in the scene anyway so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

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