Importing CAD to Work in Revit

Okay. And now the last way to do a single lining Revit is to import it and then leave it in Revit. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna duplicate. Okay. So now this is kind of a blank it's a drake the blank drafting view.

And this time, instead of linking the CAD view in, we're going to go over here to the import button. So now when I go down to the single line and I import it, same thing, just visible black and white. Hit open, and it comes in looking almost identical to the linked CAD, but this one is imported. And, actually, you know what? What good example to show you here, I'm going to gonna delete the previous one and then go down here.

So this is this is the the one that we just imported. And if you go up here to the manage links CAD format, you can see that the imported CAD file is no longer linked. That way if you change something in that external CAD file, you can't reload it in here and you can't change this. But the reason I might advocate this method is that you actually will not go back to the CAD to change anything. So once you import it, we actually wanna go ahead and do a partial explode.

And once that happens, you'll be able to actually make all the changes here directly in Revit. So, like, if you wanted to, actually, I think this is one of the elements that you might need to fully explode. So full explode, and that was, basically, there was, filled regions in here that were too small. So once you did a full explode, now you can actually just edit this directly in Revit. So now let's say you wanted to add another one here. So just copy and paste. There we go. Let's say this one, you know, it's it's just something else. It's a power power branch panel or something. You can make the changes directly in Revit now.

And this is nice as, like, a transitionary step. You've been doing in CAD for years, and now you wanna bring it into Revit. There's gonna be a little bit of a learning curve because the, the detail so if you go up here to so if you need to make changes, you could do annotate detail line. And when you do that, your options are up here. You can make a line, a box, a pentagon, arc, what whatever you need to.

But there's also, you know, the align tool, the trim extends, there's the split with gap. So there there's some of the same features in CAD, but different in Revit. And you might be a little bit slower in the beginning to work with this, but over time, you'll get used to it. And, a lot of people like this so that they don't have links to deal with anymore. You bring it into Revit, and then everything just lives in Revit.

You don't have to worry about broken links. You don't have to worry about, you know, somebody forgetting to reload the CAD file before they print or whatever. It's just it's all in here. So this is a great transitionary step. And once you bring it in here, you can actually start, you know, taking your pieces and start assembling your own version of the this list of symbols.

So, like, over here, like, we started one for you, but you can completely ignore this. You can trash this one and make your own version next to it using your own symbols. I know some people love to do, like, riser diagrams instead of, like, the top down hierarchy. So, like, if you have, like, a riser elevation view of, like, you know, a multimeter arrangement or something, you can take that and put it into this legend here, and then just start grabbing from that instead. And over time, you'll just have your bank of symbols for your own firm and just copy that over and start building out your single line piece by piece.

And if you wanted to, I mean, you could make groups that are in arrangement as well. Sometimes what I like what I like to do is make three versions of it, and then take one and you can change the is this one oh, whoops. Hold on. Explode. Explode. Okay. So you could take one, and you can change the line style. So if you do single line existing, and then here's, like, here's another one. Single line demo. So there you go.

So now I have, like, three different kinds of this family. So if I put this on the legend I come over here and, like, oh, I'm doing demo work. So you can go ahead and just grab this, put it in your single line. Or if you're, you know, building out the existing first, you can use that one, and this is your new one. So you can do this to, like, all your symbology.

If you had, like, a transformer, for instance, let's go down here real quick. So, like, for instance, this transformer here, you can have three different versions, and I did it where you can go ahead and do, an existing. This one over here, it's like a demo. So you can make these in Revit and then just use them as blocks, kinda like how you do in CAD. And you it'll use this to build out your single line then.

So over time, you'll end up with your own legend, and now you can work in in Revit again. Alright. So, yeah, that's the third option is to import it and then just work inside of Revit. So you start with the CAD. You end up with Revit single line diagram. And over time, you can have your own catalog of Revit, families.