Autodesk keeps making improvements to Inventor to allow it to work more easily with Revit.  This is great news for the collaboration between the AEC and PD&M worlds.  I am thrilled that Autodesk sees a benefit in this.  Often times it is difficult to work between the two worlds, but it keeps getting better between Revit and Inventor.

In Inventor, you have the ability to link to the Revit project file directly.   Inventor can do this by placing an imported CAD file using its AnyCAD.  You would just deselect items that you may not want to see in Inventor.  Using the Revit project file as a reference in your design will ensure that your design fits the space and works around any structural boundaries.

Once you are done with your design in Inventor, you can save the assembly as a native Revit project file.  That means that you will not have any issues opening the design in Revit and confirming the fit.

To keep things clean and easily transferable, Inventor has updated the Simplification tool.  There is no need to send a detailed model of everything with all the hardware and gizmos; that would potentially overload the whole process.  You can choose your level of detail quite easily.  You can filter out parts and subassemblies by size; that would take care of all the little nuts, bolts and washers.  That right there would seem like a huge improvement, but you can also filter out by feature.  They have included the ability to filter out individual features within each of the parts.  You can choose to remove all of the specified features, like holes or fillets, or you can specify a range and only remove a range of sizes.

To completely take all of the detail out of your assembly, you can use the Envelopes option.  It will replace components or subassemblies with bounding boxes.

If you work with the AEC industry often, you can save your presets.  With presets saved, one would only need to select the preset from the dropdown at the top of the dialog to change all the settings of how you want to simplify your assembly.  This could potentially save a lot of time.  You won’t have to configure the dialog each time you want to save it as a Revit file.  It is all done with just a couple of clicks.

Hopefully, you recall from the beginning of this post that we are using a Revit project as reference.  Because we are doing this, the coordinate systems match.  This makes for a quick and easy insertion of the Inventor Revit project file.

The exported Revit model can be linked to the project.  Each top-level component can be scheduled and tagged inside Revit.

If you have made changes to the Inventor assembly, you can use the presets to export the assembly again to update Revit.  Because it is linked, all you have to do is reload the model.

Please feel free to view their video describing all of this.