Miele Launches BIM Website

From Smarthouse.com.au—

“Miele says that since the launch of this initiative five months ago, more than 300 building and design professionals have already signed up for access to the Miele BIM files. The BIM website presents a library  of architectural 3D models of Miele’s product range for use in architectural drawings, renders and fly-throughs”

So….I went to the Miele website, registered, and downloaded a couple of the models. Here is what I found:

For each item (they make high-end appliances), there are four sets of files available,

• .3DS and .max files for 3Ds Max. –including the bump maps
  and other files needed for rendering.
• 3D .dwg  3D .dxf and a set of four 2D .dwg plans and
  elevations.
• A .rfa Revit file.
• And finally, a .obj file

You can download whichever set you need in a zipped folder, or choose the Download All File Formats option. I tried the big download on a couple of items, and the file came up empty each time, so I went the long rout and downloaded them separately, which worked fine.

Having no .iam or .ipt files, I had to convert. First I converted the 3D DWG file, and came up with an assembly with 15 parts, a sketch of the door swing, and curiously, the base part also comes in opened as a separate part. No idea why.

I rounded the edges, changed the window material to polycarbonate, and added colors according to the included PDF cut sheet. I ran into problems in many of the edges would fail to round, and half of the parts had one of the origin planes stretching way behind the assembly causing poor rotation. The center of gravity looks correct, but it flipped around like crazy when rotating.

Next I opened the .rfa part in Revit, but not being a big fan of Revit, I exported it to DWG (you cannot go directly between Revit and Inventor –or any other program for that matter). From there I imported the file into Inventor and tried the same edge rounding,  — which worked fine with this version! The Inventor Assembly is shown to the right….

The image to the left is the model in Revit before it was exported to DWG. I couldn’t find any way to get a perspective view as seen in the Inventor file above, so I was stuck with Isometric. I can definitely see how Revit would be better for Architecture than AutoCAD, but anyone who comes from Inventor will likely find it a very clumsy program. There is no 3D Connexion plug-in so you are stuck with the program’s lousy interface.

But it is nice the way the information is stored. With Inventor, I normally insert the cut sheet into the model using Insert Object, but unfortunately, as was in this case, it mysteriously fails to do so quite often, which forces you to store the info separately.

Below is the Family Types information you get automatically with the Revit file…

Autodesk really needs to get these two programs talking to one-another. Both programs have their strong points, but they are not interoperable in any meaningful way. Real-time collaboration with the two is impossible, and even file sharing is cumbersome. Hopefully the 2011 versions that will debut soon will show some improvement.