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Turn off CAD layers

Turn off CAD layers

When you insert in Revit the CAD file of a property survey or any another CAD drawing, it generally comes with many layers that are not relevant to show on the Revit model. Right now, it is too many steps to find out the name of a particular layer and then go into Visibility Graphics - Imported Categories and scramble among hundreds of layers to be able to turn off that particular layer. It will be nice to have an icon, like in AutoCAD, where you just touch a layer and it turns off automatically.

5 Comments
Lachlan-JWP
Collaborator

You can use the query function in the Modify tab when a CAD import is selected.

LachlanJWP_0-1715562722169.png

 

Select the CAD instance, click on 'Query', click on the line you want more information about, a window will pop up telling you what layer it belongs to, and gives you the option to 'Hide in view'. This will perform the same function as hiding the layer in Visibility/Graphics.

rmc9WR3X
Advocate

The Query function often does not work on some elements in an inserted DWG (you cannot select them). The alternative is going one by one clicking the checkbox in the View/Graphics dialog window and mousing all the way over to Apply then back to uncheck and then check the next box, back and forth slowly and accurately.

Lachlan-JWP
Collaborator

I haven't yet come across an element in a .dwg link that couldn't be selected with the query tool. What sort of elements aren't able to be selected?

plawton5092
Advocate

The best solution may be to condense the AutoCAD files, to just the layers, linetypes, fonts, etc., that you need, if that's possible.

Some years ago we had a bunch of CAD files to import, so we wrote some quick scripts to move things to new Layers, change fonts, linetypes, colors, etc., then we ran those scripts on the folders of drawings that needed the changes.  It reduced the number of layers from several dozen to around 10, it made the linetypes work better, and it eliminated the importation of many fonts into Revit.

Best of luck

MichaelWolff
Advisor

DWG handling in Revit leaves much to be desired. Almost every surveyor drawing we get comes with gigantic coordinates and it seems every file ever issued to the surveyor brought into the file as a block. To annoy us further site boundaries often use world zero (somewhere off west Africa) as insertion point of their block.

That written, we seldom have situations in which editing cad files is not necessary. Our 'normal' way of dealing with cad is opening the cad application (which may be autocad) find what we need, mark it, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into an otherwise empty fresh file. Blocks with no units or weird inserts get exploded, as do most proxy entities which cannot even be copied without much ado.

Bettering the ability to handle layers inside Revit is just a drop in the ocean, but take my vote anyway.

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