Discover the process of converting a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) file from AutoCAD to Revit, a step-by-step guide that entails a thorough conversion of text types, line types, and other attributes. Grasp the importance and methodology of exploding the CAD file, text adjustment, and setting leader lines for a smooth conversion.
Key Insights
- Conversion from AutoCAD to Revit does not merely involve a single click but requires a careful transition of AutoCAD line work into standard Revit text types and line types.
- An integral part of the conversion is 'exploding' the file, a process that intentionally loses unnecessary information, resulting in a cleaner and more efficient file for Revit.
- Adjusting the original text, setting leader lines, and managing line weights are crucial steps to ensure the converted file accommodates Revit standards and improves the overall project workflow.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Now that we have the CAD file imported, we can start the process to convert it from AutoCAD to Revit. And when I say convert, it's not like we're going to click a button and it's all of a sudden going to be a Revit model. What I mean by that is we're going to take away all of the attributes of the AutoCAD line work, specifically the names, and then we're going to convert it to standard Revit text types and line types.
The first thing we need to do, though, is we need to explode it. And so we have this option for explode after we've selected it, and I want to do a full explode. And like I mentioned before, we're going to lose a lot of information, but most of it we don't want anyway.
So you can see here 68 lines were too short and were deleted. And that's fine. We'll say good riddance to those because we don't need them anyway.
We'll say delete elements. And now we have a file that we can start working with. A lot of these things that are on the outside of the detail here are not going to be used for our project, so we're going to go ahead and delete those.
And then you can see here that our text is not necessarily connected the way that we'd want it to. And so when we see things like this, you can see the filled regions given the name BIM 201 HM Door Threshold.dwg-4. Well, it's not great to have many that loaded into our project, so we're going to go through this process where we select everything and filter it out. And so I'll just do a big selection where I select the entire detail, including everything.
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And then when I go to filter, you can see that we have all of these different line types that we don't want to use necessarily. So I'm going to go ahead and uncheck text notes and detail items because I want to change all of these line styles to something else. And you can see here, it's actually quite a bit of elements that are being selected.
- That's not OK. We're going to hit OK here.
And now I can change these from a different line style, which is not one that we want within our project, to one that actually works within Revit. And so I'm going to change these to thin lines. The next thing I'll do is the same deal.
I'm just going to select the whole thing again, filter, and this time I'm going to check none because there's so many fewer things. And I'm going to hit detail items because I really don't want any of these detail items that are coming in. So these are the filled regions that are coming through.
And so to get rid of these, we can do two things. So I can see one of them, maybe two that we want to keep. But the arrows here that you're seeing, those aren't going to be relevant because we're going to connect a leader to our text.
And so what I'll do is I'm going to go ahead and use shift to deselect the one that's going to be the slope arrow because this really isn't text, it's just a symbol. And then I'll deselect the one that's representing the expansion joint. The rest of them, you guessed it, we're going to delete them.
The next thing I'll do here is the ones that we kept, we don't want to forget about that. We need to go back in and make sure we adjust those. So this filled region here, you can see is BIM 201, Hollow Metal Door Threshold 2. Well, instead of that, I'd rather use one that's called Diagonal Up because that one exists within and it uses the same exact pattern as before.
If you're looking at it and you're thinking, that's not so good, then you can use Diagonal Crosshatch or another one, but we're good with this Diagonal Up. It's good enough to highlight our point. The other one that we're going to adjust here is going to be the filled region that we're using to represent the arrowhead.
And in AutoCAD, it probably was a decent arrowhead, but here in Revit, it's adding this filled region type when we already have a solid black one within the project. So the next thing we need to do is we need to address our text types. And you can see some of these actually are kind of odd.
When you look at this one, I clicked on this and it says Expansion Material, but if you notice, the half-inch portion is actually not even part of that text box. We're going to have to fix that. And then we're going to have to make sure that all of these are justified in a way that works for our project.
We want them to line up with each other. So what I'll do is I'll adjust the half-inch expansion joint. So I'm just going to move it to the side and I'll just delete that one because it's not doing us any favors.
But I'll edit the text by clicking into the box here, typing in my half-inch, and then I can use that arrow move tool symbol to line it back up. Now that we've got all the text ready to go, what we can do is we can do the same big selection, filter again, and I'll say check none. And all I want this time are text notes.
The reason I want to do that is because I'm going to change the text from whatever it was assigned to before, which you can see we literally only had one text type in here, but we have four different types of text that came in, and that's not what we want. So I'll change it to 332nd aerial. And you can see it got really big there.
And I'm going to double check to see that our text is actually 330 seconds, and it is. And because of the discrepancy in the text size there, what we'll do is we'll just go ahead and change our scale to three inch equals a foot. And you can see it looks much better now.
What's great is we have all of our text types loaded in here. And when we move it to our project, it's going to be exactly the same. Now we're removing that uncertainty of not having the same text types by using an imported CAD file.
One of the things we can do to help consolidate our text a bit here, as you can see, we've got a little overlap, is I can change my 332nd aerial style here to have a 0.8 width factor. And that'll scrunch it down a bit. So it's more similar to what we were using before.
And then you can see some of the justifications here adjusted in a way that's not working out for us so well. In this case, there was an extra return on that line. So I can just go into that box and hit backspace to bring it into the right location.
And now all we have to do is set our leader lines to be part of each one of these text boxes. And that's pretty easy to do, and it goes really quickly here. So all we do is grab the text, and then you can see you have the options to add your leaders.
So I'm going to add a leader here, and then I can have it point to the door jam, which it's doing here. And then I'll delete the lines that were associated with the old leader. Doing the same thing as we go to the door per schedule.
I'll go ahead and I can add that one in, and then delete the line that was associated with it. Same with the door bottom, just working our way through, making sure I'm pointing at the same elements, and then deleting the old lines. And then we've got these last three here.
We'll add in the expansion material, deleting the old lines, and then the same thing for the concrete slab, and the waterproofing membrane, and making sure we delete all the lines that we no longer need. And that takes care of the text. The next thing we need to do is go in and adjust line weights, and also add in field regions that we would have had we not exploded this.
