Learn how to export your Revit model to the Autodesk DWF format to access it in Autodesk Design Review without the need for a Revit license. This step-by-step guide ensures that anyone can review the model without the risk of making unexpected alterations.
Key Insights:
- The Autodesk DWF format is a small file size, accessible to anyone who can download Autodesk Design Review. It's a read-only format, minimizing the risk of unintended changes to the Revit model.
- DWF format is compatible with Autodesk Quantity Takeoff, making it a useful tool for cost estimating. To export all the sheets in your view, your export setting should be set to in-session view sheet.
- It's essential to print at a specific scale, especially when exporting sheets and views. This ensures that the sheets match those in your model and enables you to make markups within DWF that can be overlaid on the sheets in your model.
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Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In this video we're going to take a look at how we can export our Revit model to the Autodesk DWF format and we're going to do this so that we can access it in Autodesk Design Review. This is a good format to use because it's a small file size and it's also accessible to any person who can download Autodesk Design Review from the Autodesk website.
So you don't necessarily have to have a Revit license to use this software. And it's great because it's a read-only format so people who don't normally use Revit all day can jump in and take a look at the model without the risk of making any changes that weren't expected or were definitely unwanted. So what we're going to do is we're going to do the same steps that we did when we exported the model and also the CAD files.
So the first thing we want to do is save to central so that we can pick up any changes from the other users. And then we're going to go to our application menu, export, DWF. Another great thing about DWF format is it's compatible with Autodesk Quantity Takeoff, which is great for cost estimating.
We can use that for it as well. So what we want to do is we want to make sure we can export all the sheets in our view. So to do that, we need to make sure our export setting is set to in-session view sheet.
And then also it says show in list. Make sure it doesn't say views or sheets in the set because it's only going to show us the sheets. But we want to show all the sheets and all the views because we want to export everything.
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We'll go ahead and say all views and sheets in the model. So it shows everything. And because we want to export all the views and all the sheets in the model, we want to make sure that all these boxes are checked here.
So instead of going through and checking every single one of them, we'll just go ahead and hit check all. Okay, next thing, let's check out the DWF properties tab. In here, it's going to be important that we print these at a particular scale.
And this is mainly only because we're exporting sheets as well as exporting views. We want to make sure the sheets are going to match up to the ones in our model because we can make markups within DWF that can be overlaid on the sheets in our model. And then we can actually access that DWF information within Revit, tell it markups have been completed or add comments to them that then somebody like ourselves as managers can review and comment on back to the Revit users.
So let's go ahead and click on print setup so we can make sure that happens. And we want to make sure we're printing to the exact same size as our sheet. So in this project, we're using the Arch E1 30 × 42.
So I'm going to change my paper size to E1 30 × 42. And then I want to make sure I print this to scale. So I'm going to change where it says zoom to 100%.
And then I want to make sure I have my paper placement set to center and not with an offset. And all of this looks good. So I'm going to hit OK.
And let's check out our view sheets again. Make sure we've got everything checked. And then we'll go ahead and click next.
So what we want to do is just like we did with our CAD and our Revit, we want to make sure we have a DWF export. So this one, I'm just going to call DWF. So I'll do a new folder, call it DWF.
And within that folder, we can then adjust the name to include the date because we're going to have a series of these. We want to use the manual specify file name here so that we can specify the file name exactly the way we want it. So I'm going to change where it says user one.
And this is where I'd put the date. So using the same format, the four digits for the year, two digits for the month, and two for the day. And I'll go ahead and hit OK.
OK, and this will take a little while. So I'm going to pause the video while it generates the DWF file. OK, and that's how we can export our entire model into Autodesk Design Review.
So in the next video, we're going to take a look at Design Review and how we can use this model and link it back into our Revit file.
