Autocad import problems

[jguycote]

We are working on a high-rise office building, and are now at the Construction Documentation stage. Most of the details are to be drawn in Autocad 2006. We want to use Revit for layouts and for referencing the details. When importing details in drafting views, we get all kinds of strange errors such as:

- Some of the text, but not all, turns into numbers (Arial was used in the original Autocad file)
- Some new lines appear in Revit that do not exist in the Autocad file
- Some hatch patterns do not import, or only import in some instances but not in others
- Some blocks which were mirrored in the original cad file do not mirror after import, etc.

The method we have used for the import is as follows:
- Link file
- Current view only
- Import units set as inches
- Preserve colors
- Manually place

We have tried with both versions 8.1 and 9, same problems.

If we cannot resolve this issue, we will have to create separate sheets for details in Autocad for plotting as well as dummy sheets and views in Revit for coordination. This does not look very good, as we are on a fast-track schedule.

Can anybody offer help? Thank you.

[SCShell]

Hey there,

I can not offer you any solutions, other than what I have had to do in the past (and what I am doing right now on one project.) Luck for me, I don't use dwg files very much since I don't even own AutoCAD. But, some of my national clients have standardard details which are a lot easier to simply import into a drafting view, and reference on my Revit plans. (As you are doing too.)

I have to partially explode a lot of dwg imported details in order to clean up certain "glitches" as you mentioned. (I usually do this in a "working" project that I don't save so that I don't bring into my Revit file all of the dwg fonts and line types. Once done, I save it out to be re-imported in the real project file.) In fact, right now, I have a dwg file of a dimension plan that is a real p.i.t.a. because I had to change the size and style of the fonts. Now, all of the slashes for the fractional inches have turned into the # symbol for some reason. And, the original author of the dwg file has two different fonts for every dimension with fractional inches. YUK!

Sometimes you luck out, other times you don't. I usually don't have this much trouble luckily.

Good luck
Steve

[Mike Hardy-Brown]

I have also ecountered this on a large project.

What I did was not to link the file. Some how it seems to work. What I have done is create a referencing point on the dwg, so if there is a change, I keep the referencing import point, delete the original dwg file and re-import the revised one.
Seems to work.
I also found that RB8 used to exclude dwg blocks that were used as components when I exported from Revit to ACad. Seems to be OK in Rel9

[SCShell]

Hey there,
Agreed Mike. I don't link the dwg files either. It does seem to work better that way for some reason.
Oh, nice blog site by the way! I liked your tip on "shared edges".
Keep it up
Steve

[Fishmonger]

I had the same problem with Dimensions and stacked fractions.
If you go to the original cad file and modify the dimension style to be
"Not Stacked" on the Primary Units Tab, under Fractional Format.
See PDF. That allowed fractions to come in correctly.
Still working on a fix for the other part of this problem, where hatches
come in partly or not at all. right now we are resorting to exploding the
hatches that don't work properly. And I'd rather not do that.

[SCShell]

Hey there,
Thanks Fish for that one. I don't have autocad; however, I will send the dwg to an engineer who does, and he will modify the dwg file for me. Now at least, that problem will go away.
Thanks
Steve

[cphubb]

We have also experienced some strange import problems with Autocad import. We notice no difference between import and link. We have given up on importing text and dimensions from Autocad and area about to do the same with Hatch. We find it much faster to erase all that and recreate it in Revit. However we only import a few Autocad details, most of ours have long since been converted with much pain.