Urban planning: create many mass surfaces and extrude from lines imported from Autocad in Revit.

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

Good morning and Merry Christmas!
Is there a way to quickly create many mass surfaces from lines imported from Autocad in Revit to later extrude volumes? When I have to create the "contexts" of my project, I spend a lot of time creating the buildings around them, even if these are simple masses and often have the same height. I have to create the lines belonging to the single building starting from the Autocad lines, create a surface and then extrude. This is repeated for each building. Some colleagues advised me to use Rhinoceros, because according to them Revit is too slow and in Rhinoceros they can select the lines via layers and extrude all the buildings together in a second. Do you know of an alternative and quick method in Revit? I hope I was clear in explaining what my problem is. Thank you.

[barthbradley · Accepted solution]

You can easily trace AutoCAD Linework inside Revit using the Pick Line Tool.  Is that what you are asking?  

TIP: use TAB-Select to select chains of lines.  

[indiana_j0nes · Accepted solution]

Have you looked into cadmapper?

YouTube has quite some tutorials on that.

If you want a very specific cad Line drawing of a neighbour into 3d context then Dynamo can help to an extent. I can imagine making closed polygons and extruding them.

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

@barthbradleythanks, luckily I know this command, I learned it by doing this job. But the process is quite long to obtain the surfaces of all buildings.

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

@indiana_j0nesI do not know these programs, I will have to inform myself. Thank you.

[barthbradley]

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@f.annoscia1XRNMD wrote:

@barthbradleythanks, luckily I know this command, I learned it by doing this job. But the process is quite long to obtain the surfaces of all buildings.

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"Quite long"?  For what?  To convert all those shapes to masses?  Looks like a few minutes of work to me.  

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

@barthbradley 
How do you do it? starting from Autocad lines imported into Revit.

[barthbradley]

Post the dwg.  

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

I am attaching the CAD file. I should make the buildings in the cyan rectangle for now, as the project area is the one in the yellow rectangle. Is it possible to do this in Revit quickly? Or is the area too large? Should it be made smaller? I hope that the CAD file is not too big in size and does not create problems for those who open it. Thank you. @barthbradley 

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

@barthbradley I sent you the file in the previous message.

[constantin.stroescu · Accepted solution]

If you try to work with your 2d CAD file  you will have some problems , cause it contains a very large area (more then Revit accepts) and you'll have to split the drawing into a lot of smaller parts. Beside this when you'll try to explode the CAD file in order to make extrusions you'll be limited at a maximum of 10,000 elements.

How I'll do it in order to have a more accurate build environment( that is my way to do it):

1. I'll use Autodesk InfraWorks in order to capture the building area from the town plan
2. then I'll export 3d Model as .fbx - only buildings
3. load previously created .fbx file into Formit
4. load Formit file into Revit

1. in InfraWorks

2. export 3d as .FBX

3. Load .FBX into Formit

4. and eventually insert Formit file into Revit by using Import Formit to Revit :

For presentation purposes I prefer to work the Revit file apart and finally insert this file in InfraWorks....for a more refined presentation , the FBX file create here ( as mentioned in point 1) can be loaded into 3D Studio MAX and refine and render from there...

[f.annoscia1XRNMD]

Thank you.