Even if this is not some PyRevit topic I think it could interested a lot of people.
I’ve awlays dreamt about the possibility of reading the data in a Revit file without having Revit.
I think this dream become true although this is not an open source solution.
I didn’t test for Revit but we are using for IFC to ARCGis Process in my company.
If someone now an open source tool who can do the same with Revit it will be very interesting !
Hi @Yoann.Obry,
there’s no open source project that reads Revit Files directly; the only SDK I know that can read Revit files without using Revit is not open source, and is the BimRv SDK from Open Design Alliance (ODA).
I suppose FME uses that library, but this is only a guess.
I’ve not tested it, so I can’t tell if it’s good enough.
I only evaluated ODA’s DWG library a long time ago, and decided to stick with Autocad core console since it doesn’t expose all the features we needed (namely, the ECW image support is not included, and I got PDFs with white backgrounds instead of ortophotos )
Thanks for this information.
Do you know if ODA has to pay some royalties to Autodesk to be able to modify the Revit files ?
For my understanding, Is this easy to access to the code or Autodesk have to give you a kind of key acccess ? And if someone find how to access will it be considering as a hacker ?
It will. Breaking the license terms and patents most probably
my guess is ODA is basically reverse-engineering the Revit format and its api, that’s why they don’t have all the functionalities available.
I’m not sure if even the ODA solution is fully legal. If I remember right they reverse engineered the dwg format as well, and after they won a lawsuit against autodesk and they provided all the translators for other AEC softwares, like ArchiCAD. Now it is something similar with rvt.
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