GMcDowellJr wrote:On, what I consider, an average size Revit model (some 500,000 faces according to my SketchUp export... probably a few more now) it takes more than 15 minutes to export and start rendering. That seems pretty long especially when compared to the few seconds it takes from SketchUp.
Is this to be expected or is my model unusual in some way?
We tested the exporter on the sample scenes from Revit and we get somewhere between 7-10 seconds for the beginner sample and 42 - 44 seconds for the advanced one (on a i7 with 3.4 Ghz)
About 95% of the time spent exporting a scene goes into finding the right material for a surface because the Revit API gives us some very inconsistent UVs so we have to export to FBX, and because the FBX sdk doesn't give us any data for the materials, we have to map the Revit materials to the FBX model.
You can improve export times if you can reduce the amount of materials on your objects, especially family instances, best case scenario is having more objects with a single material on them because that doesn't require any extra calculations. There's also some improvement that you will be able to notice as you use the plugin because .NET speeds up execution of frequently used programs by caching some stuff.
Other than that it helps to have a powerful processor, in this case the frequency at which the processor runs is more important because we can't use multi-threading in the export process as Revit crashes when you try to make a call to the api from another thread.
- By lebulb