Auto Cad to Revit

[George.Patrick]

I have a whole library of 3d AutoCAD cabinets can I bring them into Revit and use them to make Revit family's?

[mhiserZFHXS]

You could create family files and place them in there. But honestly, this should be a temporary "fix" (I wouldn't even bother with it in the first place). You'd do well to just create native Revit families that are parametric.

[barthbradley]

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@George.Patrick wrote:

I have a whole library of 3d AutoCAD cabinets can I bring them into Revit and use them to make Revit family's?

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A whole library?  Sounds like you want to use the AutoCAD content in Revit going forward. You could if you wanted to but I wouldn't suggest it. You'd be hamstringing yourself. I would suggest that you fully commit to Revit.  Use Revit content.  There's plenty of existing content OOTB and on-line that you can use if you want to save the time and effort of building the Families yourself.    

[George.Patrick]

Thank you for your reply. We are thinking about moving over to Revit but we have spent years on our cabinets library and we don't know if sending years to rebuild it again with Revit is the way to go. Our cabinets are for a very custom industry not your normal home cabinets that's why we want to use ours that are very detailed to our needs.

I welcome more feed back.

Thanks George  

[EATREVITPOOPCAD]

I never bought anything 3D from CAD but here are my tips for bringing items from Sketchup to Revit (It should be similar because I exported from SketchUp a DWG file)

Something to keep in mind, is you probably want to apply different materials to various parts, this can be tricky as you can NOT paint imported objects. However, you can apply a material to different layers of imported objects. So not the end of the world as the end result is the same. Not sure if you can apply materials to surfaces in AutoCAD, so if you can I would bring them into Sketchup and 'paint' them.

Here is my process:

1. Open SketchUp file
2. Explode components & ungroup all groups
3. Remove all paint materials to default
4. Set SketchUp model material option to BY LAYER (now each layer has its unique color and each layer is one material)
5. Assign various faces to layers of material you want
6. Export 3D DWG
7. Open Revit & import 3D DWG
8. Assign materials to imported objects layer.

Obviously, this isn't as great as creating a native family inside of Revit, but at end of the day it is all about finding that balance between profitability, workload, and quality of work lol

[barthbradley · Accepted solution]

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@George.Patrick wrote:

Thank you for your reply. We are thinking about moving over to Revit but we have spent years on our cabinets library and we don't know if sending years to rebuild it again with Revit is the way to go. Our cabinets are for a very custom industry not your normal home cabinets that's why we want to use ours that are very detailed to our needs.

I welcome more feed back.

Thanks George  

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I feel you, but that's just part of the transitioning pains. We all went through it.  Revit is not AutoCAD.  You're going to be doing a lot of things different.  

I would strongly suggest researching the subject. There's plenty of in-depth articles online.  If you want to take the plunge and go all in on Revit, you might hire an expert to assist you.  I'll bet your Autodesk reseller could help you find one.    

That's my two cents worth.  Good luck.  

[mhiserZFHXS · Accepted solution]

If you're making the switch to Revit, make the switch. With the way Revit works, it shouldn't take years to build back your library.

If you're just going to import your cad blocks, I won't go as far to say you shouldn't even bother switching to Revit, but you are basically writing off some of the most important features.

[George.Patrick]

Thank to all of you for you information and help.

George