Discover the process of distributing CAD files to consultants not necessarily working on Revit, an essential aspect of Revit Project Management. Understand how to export views, ensure version currency, save to central, and navigate through the application for a smooth workflow.
Key Insights
- The process of distributing files to consultants involves exporting views, including three-dimensional views and plan views, and ensuring the most recent version is used.
- Saving to central is crucial to pick up any relevant changes made by other project team members, ensuring the most current model version is passed on to design consultants.
- When exporting as DWG files, it's necessary to take into account file name, version, and naming preferences, with backward compatibility highly recommended for CAD files to cater to older versions users might be accessing.
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Hello and welcome to the CAD Teacher VDCI video series for Revit Project Management. In this video, we're going to take a look at how we can distribute files to consultants who are not necessarily working on Revit. For this exercise, we're going to focus on CAD files or DWG files.
We can export any number of views, including three-dimensional views and plan views like we see here. And for this exercise, we're going to export our first floor plan. So first thing, just like when we export our Revit models, we want to make sure we have the most recent version.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to save to central. That way I can pick up any of the changes that have been saved to the central file by the other project team members. And just like with the Revit model export, we might want to make sure that any changes that were expected to be done by the other team members were completed and saved to central so that we can get the most current version out to our design consultants.
So first thing I want to do is go to the application menu, export, and like I said, we're going to do DWG files. We'll go to CAD formats and then DWG. Okay, from here, we can export, like I was saying, any number of views, simply just the one that we're on right now.
Or we can take a look at our in session view set, which would allow me to show different lists. So this is the views and sheets in the set, and it's still just showing the current one. But if I were to change this to, say, all the views in the set, sorry, all the views and sheets in the model, it will show me all the views.
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Okay, if I were to change this back, it's going to show me just what's in this particular set that we're looking at right now. We're going to just do the first floor plan, so first floor looks fine. I'm going to click next.
Now from here, we need to navigate to our BIM 304 folder, so I'll use that shortcut that we made earlier in the class. And this will be part of our export folder, and I've got a CAD export that I made earlier, so I'm going to go ahead and use that folder. And now we need to ask ourselves a few questions here.
What's the file name going to be, the version that we're going to export as, and then how we want to have it named. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and change the name. So I'm going to keep the same prefix, the BIM 304 Arch, but now because we're exporting individual CAD files, I'm going to change it to read first floor plan.
What I always do for CAD files, since they are backwards compatible, I always like to go back a little bit. So I'll just go to the 2004 version, that way if anybody's using anything earlier than the 2013, they can access this file. And then our automatic long naming is actually what we want here.
The short will give us just the view name or the sheet name, depending on what we're exporting. And then this box at the bottom here where it says export views on sheets and links as external references. When you export a sheet, it gives you the option to export it kind of like our workflow would be in AutoCAD, where we have a XREF for the floor plan and all of the other views that would be imported into it.
Or we can export it as one file. In this case, I want just one file, so I'm going to uncheck that box so that we get just the first floor plan and not the first floor plan. And then an XREF for the structural model, XREF for the electrical model, and XREF for the plumbing model.
That way, every time if I were to go through and export each file individually, it's going to give me a duplicate of each of those, and so I don't want to have that much information. So the first floor plan is all we want here, and I'm going to click OK. And now we've exported the CAD files.
If I were to go into my BIM 304 folder and look at export, CAD export, I can see that a CAD file has exported. At this point, I'd probably go in and rename it to a project standard file, or we could just leave it as is. But either way, it works.
