From the course: Revit: Optimize Your BIM Workflow

Importing and exploding DWG details - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit: Optimize Your BIM Workflow

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Importing and exploding DWG details

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- Once again we're in our '1031 SE Madison PROJECT002'. And in the previous video we set up our 'DETAIL 01 - Roof Parapet Detail' drawing or view. Now when you think about this, this is in essence 2D drafting in Revit as part of your BIM workflow. You're going to create a detail view here that is literally flat. There's no 3D modeling involved. It's just lines, annotation, shading, hatching, et cetera. Now what we're going to do first though is import a CAD detail. It's a DWG file created in AutoCAD. So we would go down the same workflow as if we were importing a CAD drawing into the Revit project but only ever use import for things like this. Don't start linking details because it will just get a little bit more complex and it will also make your Revit project quite heavy as well. If you just import, you'll see as we work through this chapter how we can convert everything to Revit elements in the 'DETAIL 01' view as well. So what we're going to do, we're going to go to the Insert tab on the ribbon. And you'll notice you can't actually link anything anyway. Can you see that? You can link a CAD file but that's the only thing you can link. You can link a DWF markup but you can't link Revit files, IFC, Typography. Now it's great. You can link a CAD file to this and if the detail changes, but if you import a CAD file into the Revit project and explode it, you can convert it all to Revit elements so that you've got a Revit detail in your project instead. So I'm going to use import CAD like so, which is basically a one-off CAD drawing import into Revit. You can't use it again. It's not linked it's just a snapshot a bit like a PDF. So you'll notice we've got 'Roof Detail' there. So if I select that, there's all the roof detail there. And you've got 'Roof Detail M.dwg' and we're going to preserve the colors? No, in this case we don't need to. We want it all black and white. Layers? Do you want all of them? Yes we will and we'll auto detect the units. I know that this is in millimeters, this particular roof detail. And I'm just going to do origin to origin. You'll notice place at is grayed out because we're bringing it in, in a drafting view. So it's not going to be inserted into the model. It's just a drafting view, a detail view. So when I click on open, that'll come in. Just a double-click on the wheel to zoom extents. And there's all the information. When I select it, you'll see it is an imported CAD file. So we've got things like 'Bring to Front', 'Send to Back', 'Delete Layers', 'Explode'. We're going to select 'Explode' and we're just going to do a full explode. That will now explode everything into individual elements, individual bits of text and so on. So what we've got now is a group of lines, a bit of hatching there and so on. And that's all been exploded so what we want to start thinking about now is how we can convert this into our Revit information. So once that's exploded and in place, we can start thinking about converting text to Revit text, converting lines to Revit lines and so on. And we can make this all into Revit elements and make it a Revit drafting view.

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