working in ArchiCAD and Revit Architecture on the same job

To my knowledge, our division of labor thus far has been that we are working on the interior while the other firm is working on the exterior.

The approach that they've taken thus far is to draw the work in autocad, and have the other firm update the revit model.

I don't doubt the other firms ability to manage their side, they have a strong Revit implementation. Our end is very very new to BIM & ArchiCAD.

Does anyone know of an ArchiCAD consultant that would be able to help us manage such a thing? It sounds like we'll be heading down the IFC path, and some major thinking has to go into the division of labor to keep everyone working as efficiently as possible.

and I apologize for the "oh no the sky is falling" initial post. things aren't impossible, it's just occasionally frustrating when those above look at the boxes with the cords and the wires and the screens and say LOOK ITS MAGIC....you can make it work, right? no problem?

Put a lot of time into test runs. Check the IFC transport in both ways. Use module linking and separated models for your part and theirs. For example once you open their IFC model save it as exterior.pln (example) and link it as a module into your project. Complexity of geometry will also be deciding how you want to do it. You could also separate model from drawings (theirs and yours) by exporting required backgrounds into dwg's and use them for your drawings.

does this mean that the best approach would be to have one firm work on the exterior, while the other works on the interior? this way what we would call composite types etc. aren't shared....?

i'm still looking for anyone who's shared architecture to architecture; i see a lot of posts on sharing revit structure with archicad...but nothing that speaks of revit architecture sharing with archicad. from what i can tell on the revit blogs, compatibility changes with each version of revit (architecture, structure, mep).

thanks, everyone, for your help thus far!!

I would more or less forget trying to coordinate data in 3D -- stick to 2D. You could try meshing 3D models together using DWG format or something similar. I can't vouch for Revit's IFC writing capability, but other AC users on this forum have reported that it's not great. That was Revit 2008, so perhaps things have changed.

If you do try IFC, then each team will be linking in a 3D version of the other consultant's work; do that into a separate file, not into your working file, and that link that data in for reference.

In most cases you can transport information using IFC, but some classes are not recognizable in either software. For Example Revit do not recognize slanted walls (those will import as Straight walls). Or solid Element operation. Or layers support. Most of those can be of course resolved, but it takes time to recognize them and find a working solution.

it looks like for this project we'll continue with the 2d working method.

however, as a hobby project, we are in the process of learning how to "translate" between archicad and revit architecture; step one is understanding the language barrier (composite = ? ). piece by piece, how does this work, what am i actually getting from one to the other...

i'll keep this thread updated with what we learn....

thanks!