Turing old floor plans into Acad drawings

[C_Andruszko]

I need to turn old floor plan layouts from 1988 into Autocad drawings. The original drawings were done by hand. Furthermore, not all the dimensions appear to be written in. These drawings are quite large and intricate. I used Raster Design to clean them up a bit, but identifying primitives and using followers won't give me an accurate drawing. I started tracing everything in Autocad, and, of course, giving accurate measurements as best as I can. But at this rate I'm not sure I'll finish this within one lifetime. Is there anything else I can do to get this job done quicker and more efficiently?

By the way, I still consider myself a novice at all this, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a better technique I'm not aware of.

I attached a photo of one of the drawings so you have an idea of what I'm doing.

[imadHabash]

Hi,

There is a lot of way to convert these papers to CAD files like importing PDF pages as AutoCAD objects from AutoCAD 2017 itself PDFIMPORT command.

But the problem exist in modifying the results, it will took time and effort that we suppose we reduce.

For that.. making effort in draw these papers from scratch is more better - as i see - than making treatments.

Good Luck..

[Michiel.Valcke]

I agree with imadhabash on this one.

Starting from scratch using the old plans as a guideline, and using other measurements will be more efficient in the long run.

[pendean]

Pay a drafter to input it all, if you're not interested in doing it yourself.

[jggerth1]

PDFImport is kinda useless when you're dealing with hand-drawn plans scanned into a pdf file.  That's all raster data - no vectors.

[C_Andruszko]

Turns out my architect professor has a good understanding on how to recreate this using grids in Revit, rather than measuring everything by hand. So he'll be helping me with this. But thank you everyone for the insight.

[Llam.Tech]

Hello, We've done that before. We install a different AutoCAD software called "AutoCAD Raster" and convert it to vector. And then, get one reference line dimension and scaled it up.

I hope this helps.

[kenneth.willette]

What if that isn't an option? Serious question, I know this is an old post, but I need to resurrect it. 

Suppose you had to do this very thing for an organization as a student worker with zero experience in Revit? Also, you had to not only draw, but then/also update the plans you're making to reflect recent/all changes.  

Do you draw the plans by the old building plans, and then go in and "figure out" the changes by walking the building yourself and compare them to the plans you made/old plans?

Regardless of what those answers are, are there any free resources that are an excellent guide on how to read those plans? I have plans that I'm looking at and I can't figure out where to set the elevations (plans appear to show a variable elevation? like 7'-9' for example).  

Thanks for any and all suggestions!

[pendean]

Nothing free is going to do a good job, or even good enough job, to convert printed plans to CAD. The whole AEC industry has been looking for that miracle for 30+ years now LOL

You can sit down and a scale and manually draft every line on the sheet you are trying to recreate. Or pay someone to do it. Or pay a small fortune and some time with high-end scanners with R2V abilities. Then walk he facility and update it all manually.

Or if the building in question is fully accessible you can get into 3D-Laser/BIM Asbuilt/point-cloud scanning it all in 3D today (as a service or buying the equipment from Leica).

HTH

[RobDraw]

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@kenneth.willette wrote:

Do you draw the plans by the old building plans, and then go in and "figure out" the changes by walking the building yourself and compare them to the plans you made/old plans?

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This is exactly what needs to be done if you don't have the plans for the changes.

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@kenneth.willette wrote:

Regardless of what those answers are, are there any free resources that are an excellent guide on how to read those plans? 

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How about this forum?

[kenneth.willette]

Thanks for the response!