I wanted to ask here before going through other Autodesk services just in case this is user error there's a setting someone is familiar with that I need to change. Hopefully it's not a glitch/bug in the export process itself, as I doubt a fix would come in a timely enough manner for our project for it to matter.
To answer to question some of you may have while reading this, to frame the situation better:
- No, we can't change the way we're converting from dwg to dgn, as all other disciplines are in non-Autodesk products, and we have to compile their backgrounds into our drawings prior to the flattening/conversion process to dgn.
- No, we cannot import necessary backgrounds into Revit as the sheer volume of references would tank Revit's performance.
- We're about 3 years too late on the argument for all disciplines to be modelling in the same software on this project, and we lost that battle - a loss that we're still dealing with the repercussions of today, as you can see. Apologies ahead of time, but I will not be entertaining suggestions on changing this or comments about why this was a bad idea because it was out of my control and to change now would result in the loss of the contract due to extended delays it would cause.
With the above points in mind, my hands are relatively tied in the solutions I can come up with. Now, for the issue:
Issue:
I have a symbol family for Life Safety egress paths that I made. This family indicates the direction of egress, occupancy count at that point, and, if applicable (only at exit doors), required exit width. To simplify things, in addition to rotating the family, I made the family with two Filled Region arrows, a left and a right, controlled by instance parameters (as seen in the images below) with Left being the default option. This was to reduce the need for creating multiple types to simplify the family for less experienced users and reduce the overall file size of the projects it lives in. Making the visibility for the Filled Regions into type parameters and making two separate types fixes this issue, but adds complexity that, for some other families, requires too many types for something that could be handled more efficiently with just a couple instance parameters.
Additional Info:
We need to export these views to dgn file format, and when using the Export to DGN, the arrows are all oriented in the left hand direction, while the text maintains the correct visibility and text values. All of these aspects of the family are controlled by instance parameters, but the visibility of the Filled Region arrow is not maintained on export.
We can export these to DWG and the arrows are fine, but several other things go awry on the conversion from dwg to dgn:
- We have to use Verdana font, and exporting to dwg causes a downshift with non-Arial fonts which is further exacerbated in the conversion to dgn, to the point text is half the font height lower than it's supposed to be. We cannot use Arial because others are using these backgrounds and require Verdana.
- Conversion from dwg to dgn for any views with a color scheme cause the room colors to "bubble up" to the front of the document, regardless of what I try to do to correct this. As such, the only way to fix this is to export the colors in a separate view and reference them into dgn after the conversion process.
- The leaders of dimension lines using Arc leaders convert into lines with elbow leaders, and often display incorrectly. The conversion process overwrites any dimension styling done from within Microstation file to try and correct this, making rvt > dwg > dgn dimension lines unusable.
These are just the primary reasons I am looking to switch to exporting directly from Revit to DGN file format rather than using DWG as an intermediate step. The only problem is that my egress family (and thus potentially others we may need in the future) do not export correctly. This is the only issue I can find with this direct export that isn't easily addressable. Is there any way we can correct this in our export settings for DGN, or is this a backend issue that needs to be addressed by the development team?
We are currently using Revit 2022, with no plans on upgrading the current project to 2023 or newer unless we somehow make it through the 3 year support period of 2022 (it is a government job, after all, but I find this to be very unlikely). If the only solution without going through the Autodesk development team is to upgrade to 2023, then I have my answer.
If anyone could offer some insight into this issue, I would greatly appreciate it!
Reference Images:
Instance Property values of symbol family instances in example view for export:
Display of these symbols in the exported .dgn file:
