Converting AutoCAD to Revit

[NikkiGZANLW]

My company has many details and schedules in AutoCAD with our preferred formatting. I need suggestions to converting these to Revit. What do you suggest?

[RLY_15]

Details:

If 'many' is a single or low double digit number, consider rebuilding them from scratch in Revit. It'll give you better control over linestyles and leaders.

If 'many' is a high double digit number, consider pulling them in from CAD, doing a partial explode, and then cleaning up line styles, leader arrows, and text/mtext elements. You'll likely need to remake any hatches in Revit, particularly if they use points instead of lines/curves. Explosions are limited to 10,000 elements, so avoid exploding too many things simultaneously. And because of hatches exploding into lines/curves, consider pre-deleting them in your imported file (have a backup of the original or copy your details directory).

If 'many' is a triple digit number, consider learning some Dynamo. It'll allow you to scale up the double digit approach by automating some of the decision making you might do per detail (change CAD line style 1 to Revit line style 1, convert imported text element to Revit text style A, etc..). Dynamo also lets you pull out line elements in separate commands from text elements, so you can stage the process a bit better to avoid the 10,000 element limitation.

Ultimately the menial work boils down to line style association, text association, leader creation/relocation, hatch recreation, Name/Name on Sheet renaming, and visual confirmation that everything actually imported. The more of this that you can prep in CAD (one layer per line style, minimal text sizes/types, hatch removal, leader removal, etc.) the less time you'll spend on the Revit side.

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For schedules, do research into Shared Parameters. You'll likely want to develop a list of common parameters in-house, or start with a list based off of some industry attempt to standardize (I think Daikin had a pretty extensive parameters file to cover most air/water systems).

You can make schedules one at a time (Shared Parameters provide consistency and repeatability in data), or you can learn Dynamo to try and build multiples at one time based off of reading an excel file containing your schedule structures.

[hmunsell · Accepted solution]

Here is a handout I made for my staff a few years ago. It was written with my staff in mind so feel free to adjust things as needed for your environment. 

as @RLY_15 mentioned it is a lot of Menial work. This is usually a task we give to Internes over the summer 😉.  I point them at a folder and give them this handout and let them work on it for a week. Once you get rolling on it, I usually find it takes about 5-10min per detail.

[HVAC-Novice]

Unfortunately lot of manual re-work or correction in Revit is required. The above methods will help. Unless you find a good automated batch-method, I would convert the details you need for each project and not all at once. that way you only have to do a few at a time and can take the time to also update them to match newer methods (like don't just re-use the 1960's detail of a pump, but upgrade the detail to account for more modern controls etc.)

[curtisridenour]

This is typically a task we give to summer interns as well. Preferably as a back burner type of task.

[dbutts7]

Yep - we converted all of ours to Revit drafting views in master project models, and just started using the new Bridge features in ACC Docs to import/link sheets into our projects. It's easier to export them back to plain AutoCAD that fix all of the linetypes and annotation types that show up when you import them directly into a Revit model.