Improving Rhino & Grasshopper 👉 Revit interop

Making Speckle
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Hey @Community !

This sprint our team is working on improving the interoperability of our Rhino and Grasshopper connectors when sending data to Revit.

Did you even know? You can create and update BIM elements in Revit directly from Rhino and Grasshopper?

This feature is currently called schema builder, here docs on how it currently works in Grasshopper and here in Rhino. It basically lets you attach metadata to geometry in your document, so that when it’s received in Revit it is then converted as a BIM element.
You can use it to send lines as walls, points as adaptive components, breps as direct shapes and much more!

@AlanRynne is working on exposing each “Create Schema Object” entry via a simple GH toolbar component for ease of access and use.

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Similarly, @clrkng is working on adding UI buttons in the Rhino interface:

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Both features are WIP and should make it into a release by the end of the week.

We have also thought to rename this feature just to “Create BIM elements” instead of “Schema Builder” or “Create Schema Objects”.

What do you think? Do you have any questions or suggestions on how to create BIM elements from Rhino and Grasshopper? Let us know!

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I agree that “Schema Builder” or “Create Schema Objects” can be a bit of a confusing name. My concern about Create BIM elements, is that it’s a bit too specific, since we use the same component to create structural analysis objects, and hopefully others in the future (e.g. alignments).

You could turn the naming on it’s head, and call Create Speckle Object “Create empty speckle object” or “Create blank Speckle Object”, and rename “Create Schema Objects” to “Create Speckle Objects”. In the usage we see, the Schema Builder is the most common way to create objects, so why not give it the simple name?

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Thanks David, good points! I personally consider a “BIM element” any geometry that has attached metadata to it, so structural analysis objects, alignments etc would all qualify. Don’t you think so?

I’m also afraid a novice user would struggle a bit understanding what schema objects or speckle objects are without reading the docs first…

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I agree that schema or speckle object might be confusing, but my understanding of BIM has always been the ‘physical’ model (e.g. the stuff in Revit) as opposed to analytic elements, and when you call an alignment a Building information model, the infrastructure folks get annoyed :slight_smile: (it’s not BIM, it’s VDC!!!)

Maybe just call the component “Create Object”, with the option to select a type from the schema or choose no type and just get a Base object?

The work to get individual components for all the BIM objects makes a lot of sense and calling those components “Create BIM objects” isn’t confusing.