Families

[nybecc]

I am new to Revit and trying to train myself through books and the software tutorials. My question is about when creating a families from scratch. My company has a directory of standard details for Autocad. If I wanted to convert these to revit would I places these in the family location and would this be a directory to pull from for all projects or is this project specific? Can I also do this with our standard general notes?

Thanks
Summer

[bbeck]

I am new to Revit and trying to train myself through books and the software tutorials. My question is about when creating a families from scratch. My company has a directory of standard details for Autocad. If I wanted to convert these to revit would I places these in the family location and would this be a directory to pull from for all projects or is this project specific? Can I also do this with our standard general notes?

Thanks
Summer

Years ago I began the process of having new staff members convert cad drawings to Revit dafting views. These all reside in a "Detail Project". As these details are needed they can be brought into any Revit Project.

[nybecc]

So are you saying that you had the CAD files imported into revit through the drafting view area or that you had them redrawn in the drafting view. When I import a detail for cad the hatched areas become a solid hatch instead of the original pattern.

[bbeck]

So are you saying that you had the CAD files imported into revit through the drafting view area or that you had them redrawn in the drafting view. When I import a detail for cad the hatched areas become a solid hatch instead of the original pattern.

A combination of the above techniques. In the end the important part to me was that there was no longer a ".dwg" hanging out in the "Detail Project". IF (big if) your CAD details are clean and follow a company standard ".dwg" colors can map to Revit line weights. You can spend the time cleaning up the CAD prior to import/explode and more Revit cleanup. Or, you can use the opportunity to teach staff to draft 2D in Revit using real detail components and possibly keynoting and coordinating nomenclature back to your Master Spec. People seem to forget that you can draft 2D in Revit.

Yes, the "hatches" are solid until you then redefine the filled region inside Revit or have that filled region already existing under a cleaned up CAD import/explode procedure. It can be done but I found that it's just too painful.

I know it's a bitter pill to get Sr. Management to swallow. "What do you mean we can't leverage XXyears worth of details to expedite our document process!!??". My only consolation is to try and wrap that process into some sort of "review/field lessons learned/agency update" wrapper. We spent 4 years going through our entire detail library division by division, 67 years worth of firm knowledge. You know what? when we hit the end we went back to Division 2 and started the process over again.

24years in the industry now and I've yet to see a firm that doesn't have details on the books that don't work anymore. I just made it part of our process. Moer then your looking for in an answer but the old saying is true, "devil is in the details".:beer: