As of last week, Landscapeforms now has all of their products available as Revit (2015) families. This is certainly good news and step in the right direction, but there is a slight downside: all of the geometry is dwg import (not native Revit).

This shouldn’t be too surprising since they already have all of their products in SketchUp, and it would certainly be easier to use imports than make Revit geometry, but it is still disappointing.

It is not impossible to work with imports, but it is usually advisable to limit their use as they do have some drawbacks. Their materials must be managed from the Import tab in Object Styles, which can quickly become tedious. Import geometry is often inferior, especially if generated in SketchUp, where curves are segmented, so they tend to look a little sloppy.

On the plus side, they did incorporate basic Yes/No parameters, effectively reducing the number of families. For example, there are 7 Tables families (one for each type of top), instead of 52 (though I will continue to use the table that I made).

But regardless of imports, it is slightly easier to download a ready-made Revit Family than to make one yourself from a SketchUp file.