Working with Consultants: Revit to CAD Workflow

[Anonymous]

Howdy techs, long time reader - first time poster here. I am looking to see if any of y'all have good workflow suggestions for working with consultants who are stuck in the CAD age.. I know there have been posts regarding this before, but perhaps you can help me with my primary issue: 

Our structural consultants are still using CAD and my firm made the switch to Revit relatively recently.  We do a lot of multi-family and therefore use a lot of repetitive elements. We provide our structural consultants with CAD backgrounds consisting of all of the wall layers broken out. We have no issues with getting these to layer out appropriately, BUT the biggest issue are wall joins/clean-ups.  Our structural team is primarily concerned with the stud layer, but it is of course still important for them to receive the full wall assembly. 

On one of our largest multi-family projects to-date, it took a team of three individuals 7 hours each to sweep every CAD export cleaning up wall layer joins and QC'ing all of the structural layers...

We use model groups for all of our unit types, and it would be incredible if model groups could export as blocks or xrefs so that we could simply clean up each unit type ONCE and then propagate the units appropriately throughout each level. Instead, we are left cleaning up every unit on every floor. 

Does anyone have any similar experiences? I have dredged through the internet looking for efficient solutions to this time/money-suck but while many have issues with Revit-CAD exporting, I haven't come across any write-ups about this specific situation. 

Any thoughts/advice would be much appreciated! 

Thanks, 

Vic

[RobDraw]

Get the structural guys to start using Revit or find a firm that does. If they refuse, tell them you are going to charge them a premium for exporting to CAD.

[dgorsman]

If they're just looking for reference information, perhaps publishing an NWD file would be sufficient.  Those can be XREF'd into AutoCAD for several versions now.  You can't use them as you would actual CAD elements for creating drawings, but may be enough for their needs.

[Corsten.Au]

Hi

work on the standard to export.. its like ctb/pcp files where different companies

may differ in layer standards..

coordinate between firms to set a standard and plan it out..

( there is no shortcut to get clean DWG... but one View template for dedicated structural drawings

Plans, elevation, section etc might be helpful...)