VUE
Sign inGet started

How conversion works

What happens after you upload, what it costs, and what the statuses mean.

The VUE teamLast updated

What happens after you upload

Conversion runs in the background. You can close the page — it does not stop, and the model page updates itself when the job finishes.

For a Revit family, the steps are:

  1. the family and its type catalogue are read, and the types are counted;
  2. the number of types is checked against your plan’s limit, and against your remaining conversion allowance;
  3. the family is converted — every type in one pass, keeping the materials the family assigned;
  4. the parameters are captured against each type, which is what the configurator is later derived from;
  5. the result is stored and the model becomes viewable.

FBX and OBJ take a shorter path — they convert on our own infrastructure and arrive as a single type.

What each status means

StatusMeaning
QueuedAccepted and waiting for an engine. Normal, and usually brief. A queue that persists for a long time is worth a ticket.
UploadingYour file is being handed to the conversion engine.
RunningBeing converted. This is the part that consumes conversion time, and it is longer for a family with many types.
SucceededDone. The model is viewable and embeddable.
CachedFinished without running an engine, because this exact file had been converted before. Free — see below.
FailedSomething went wrong. The model page shows why, and there is a retry button.
Screenshot to addA model page mid-conversion, showing the status chip and progress.

What it costs

Conversion is metered in engine-seconds — the time the conversion engine actually spends on your file. It is the unit we are billed in, so it is the unit you are billed in; a large family costs what it costs rather than what a rounded-up unit says.

Roughly: the cost scales with the number of types and the complexity of the geometry. A three-type family is a small fraction of a minute; a hundred-type catalogue family is a real amount of your allowance. The upload page shows an estimate before you commit.

Full detail, including how allowances and top-ups work, is in plans and conversion time.

Why some conversions are free

VUE fingerprints the file you upload. If the identical file has been converted before, the existing result is reused and the job is marked Cached — no engine runs and nothing comes off your allowance.

This is why re-uploading the same family to fix a name costs nothing, and why changing one parameter inside the family and re-exporting costs full price: the file is different, so the fingerprint is different.

When a conversion fails

The common causes, in rough order of frequency:

  • The family will not open. Usually a corrupt file or one saved from a much newer Revit version. Re-save it and try again.
  • A type catalogue that does not match the family. If the column names in the .txt do not correspond to parameters in the .rfa, the types cannot be built. Confirm the pair works in Revit first.
  • Too many types for your plan. Caught before conversion starts, so it costs nothing.
  • Not enough conversion time left. Also caught before starting.

A failure caused by us does not consume your allowance. If an engine fails on our side the time is not charged. A file that is genuinely invalid may have consumed engine time before the engine worked that out, and in that case it does count — the engine really did run.

Retry from the model page. If it fails twice with the same message, raise a ticket and include the model name — we can see the engine’s own log, which usually says exactly what it objected to.