Discover how to model an existing building for a renovation project, using CAD and PDF references for accuracy. Gain insight into the importance of placement, origin points, and the nuances of linking CAD files to other models or site plans.
Key Insights
- The focus is on modeling an existing building for a renovation project, using CAD and PDF references, rather than teaching how to model a building from scratch.
- Correct placement and setting accurate origin points are crucial when creating new projects to ensure seamless integration into site plans or other models.
- The process involves linking the CAD file from origin to origin so the existing building and new elements align properly, which is essential for subsequent steps like adding the model to a site plan.
This lesson is a preview from our BIM Certificate Program (includes software) and Revit Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
For this next series of videos, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on creating the existing building. So that means we're going to 'Import CAD' and we're going to reference our PDF of the existing elevations to model the existing building. And we've intentionally made this a pretty simple building on purpose because the focus of this class is not how to model a building, but it's more how to do Demolition and New Phase work on a project.
And so the first thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to make sure that we place this thing correctly. And so if I were to take a look at my AutoCAD file, which I'll pop up here, you can see that we do have the CAD file in, you know, pretty typical line work. So this is what you would see most often when you get one.
And if I were to do something like draw like a circle, for instance, and set it at the center point of our origin. So I'll just draw this at 00. And this isn't an AutoCAD class, so you have to forgive me on how clunky I am with this.
But you can see here that the center point is going to be at this origin, which is 00 point in AutoCAD. And that translates into Revit to this point here. And so this is the UCS icon that you would typically see in AutoCAD, but it's also showing up here.
And we've also added these reference planes at that point to help us locate the building. So the idea here is that when we link in the CAD file, that we will go ahead and link it in from 'Origin to Origin' so that they're sitting in the same point. And this is going to be a big deal later if we were to try and link it into another model or add it to a site plan or something like that.
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And so it's important to focus on both the origin point, so it's not somewhere random, and also to make sure that we model the building accurately. So those kind of are two of the things that you want to make sure you focus on when creating new projects. And I understand that for our first couple projects that we did, we didn't actually go through that exercise.
So in the next video, we're going to go ahead and import the CAD file that we're going to use as the basis for our new model.
