What happens after you upload, what it costs, and what the statuses mean.
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:
FBX and OBJ take a shorter path — they convert on our own infrastructure and arrive as a single type.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Queued | Accepted and waiting for an engine. Normal, and usually brief. A queue that persists for a long time is worth a ticket. |
| Uploading | Your file is being handed to the conversion engine. |
| Running | Being converted. This is the part that consumes conversion time, and it is longer for a family with many types. |
| Succeeded | Done. The model is viewable and embeddable. |
| Cached | Finished without running an engine, because this exact file had been converted before. Free — see below. |
| Failed | Something went wrong. The model page shows why, and there is a retry button. |
A conversion continues whether or not the page is open, so you can close the tab and come back. VUE emails whoever uploaded the model when it finishes — once when it succeeds, once when it fails, with the reason and a link straight to the model.
A few details worth knowing:
A model made by combining others does not convert anything: the pieces have already been through a converter and been paid for, so it reads what those produced and puts them together. Its entry in the list below shows no conversion time, and re-placing a piece shows none either.
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.
VUE fingerprints everything the conversion uses — the family file, the type catalogue and the material library. If all three are identical to something converted before by the same version of the converter, 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 usually 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.
A revised type catalogue counts as a change, even when the .rfa beside it has not been touched. That matters most for a parametric range published as one base family with a different catalogue per product: those are different products with different sizes, and each one is converted and charged on its own. It would be cheaper for us to treat them as one — and you would get one model wearing another product's type list.
The fingerprint covers the files and the converter that produced the result. When we ship a converter that changes what comes out — a fix that carries something across from Revit that used to be dropped — every family converted by the older one stops matching the cache. The next time you upload that file it converts again, for real, and comes off your allowance.
Until August 2026 the fingerprint covered the family file only, so uploading a revised catalogue beside an unchanged .rfa was treated as something already converted — and you were handed back the older type list without being told. Correcting that means every family converted before the change no longer matches the cache.
The effect is one real conversion, the next time each of those families is uploaded, and then it is cached as before exactly as it always was. We would rather charge you once than keep giving you a model that quietly has the wrong types in it.
That happens once per family per converter release, and then it is cached as before.
The alternative would be worse: a cache that ignored the converter version would keep serving you the old, wrong result forever, and the fix would never reach the models that needed it.
So if you are re-uploading a family specifically to pick up an improvement — bump and relief maps are the current example, see materials and finishes — plan for it to cost conversion time, and check the estimate on the upload page first.
The common causes, in rough order of frequency:
.txt do not correspond to parameters in the .rfa, the types cannot be built. Confirm the pair works in Revit first.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.