VR Sketch for Revit

#1

We have been asked many times to provide a VR Sketch for Autodesk Revit. We expect a VR Sketch version for Revit to be a very useful tool that can augment the popular product. We got to the point of having a working beta version of a view-only version of VR Sketch and decided to discontinue the development.

For those interested in trying it out, we are publishing the source code of the Revit plugin which works with an unmodified version of VR Sketch, using either the tethered or standalone VR headset. It requires compilation of the plugin from source code https://github.com/lightscapevr/revit-vrsketch-plugin/blob/main/VRSketch/README.txt with the detailed technical instructions placed below. You are free to use it for personal use with a valid VR Sketch license.

Baroque Software is not interested in continuing the development of the plugin nor is it interested in distributing the binaries on the Autodesk store. If you are excited about doing that yourself, we are open to sublicensing VR Sketch for commercial sales on the Revit store. Contact us at info@baroquesoftware.com.

Technical instructions:

This assumes you are familiar with building Revit plugins. Refer to Autodesk official documentation and sources found on the internet if you are unfamiliar. We tested the build on Revit 2022 and 2023.

You need VR Sketch installed, either on a PC VR or on Meta Quest.

  • Starting from the sources, you need first to build the solution with Visual Studio. You need to either fix the path to a few DLLs, or make a folder called “RevitDLLs” in the directory containing this README, and copy the required DLLs there. Fish them around from the Revit directories. The DLLs are:

    NewtonSoft.Json.dll
RevitAPI.dll
RevitAPI.xml
RevitAPIUI.dll
RevitAPIUI.xml

  • edit the file VRSketch.addin to fix the path to VRSketch.dll that file should have a line that says:

    <Assembly>Y:\VRSketch\bin\Debug\VRSketch.dll</Assembly>

    and you must replace it with the correct path, something like:

    <Assembly>C:\Some\Path\VRSketch.dll</Assembly>

  • Copy the .addin file to C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit\Addins\20##

  • Start VR Sketch program itself, on PC there is an executable file in Sketchup plugin directory which is usually C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2017\SketchUp\Plugins\VRSketch\VRSketch##.#.#.exe You might need to edit the hardcoded VRSKETCH_EXE_VERSION in VRSketch\VRSketchPlugin.cs You can change it to any more recent version.

#2
#3

Is this because technical issues preventing satisfactory user experience, or do you just not expect enough demand to satisfy expense?

#4

Hi Christopher,

We are a very small company; we have to focus on what is the most interesting from our point of view. Finding and hiring someone comes with downsides, so we’re trying something new with this post. Also note that by “interesting” we usually mean it in the programmer’s sense: the pain of developing a plugin for Revit exceeded our “too much of a mess to be even remotely interesting from a technical point of view” threshold.

I remain confident that it is in theory possible to have a cool user experience and that the demand is there; but I am also sure by now that I don’t want to do it myself.

(BTW maybe we should do the same thing with our older Rhino attempt.)