Thursday, August 05, 2010

Better Way of Importing CAD into Revit

As most experienced Revit users know, importing CAD files into Revit can sometimes cause problems. Why? Because many CAD files are not properly made and contain errors, extra info, links of their own etc. While doing some prep work on the CAD files is good, it doesn't eliminate the problems.

I extracted the following nugget from the new Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011, known lovingly as MARA to some. Paraphrasing 'One way to manage many CAD references in larger projects is to create a separate Revit project containing only the linked data.' You will probably need to use the Visibility/Graphics override in order to see the CAD file in question but still, awesome. I can admit that I haven't done this in practice so let me know what you think...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is typically how we do site plan DWGs that we get from our consultants.

I like to call it "creating a sacrificial revit file" because you are basically exploding the DWG into a Revit file and then linking that RVT file instead of the DWG.

Would love to hear what others do on this topic.

Miguel said...

I import/link the CAD file directly my revit project and not worry about lineweight and font appearance since I use the importlineweights-dwg-default.txt and the shxfontmap.txt to automatically map them to the right settings so they appear correctly in Revit.
Miguel