4 Hours | 2D AutoCAD to Visually Data-Rich Revit Documentation

On Thursday night, our facility engineer showed me an as-built AutoCAD sketch for his toilet room renovation project in our Ohio manufacturing facility.

He asked if I could enhance the sketch with Revit for his Tuesday meeting; with the contractor and facility engineers.

Starting Friday morning, it took 4 hours using Revit –to create a fully coordinated set of

1. floor plan,
2. interior sections,
3. interior elevations,
4. reflected ceiling plan,
5. plumbing fixture and washroom accessory schedules,
6. 3D plan and 3D interior views.

I linked his AutoCAD sketch of field measurements into the Revit file for tracing and as a reference for his ADA-toilet partition proposal.

Using the View Visibility (VV) settings, I set the  Imported Category (Linked CAD file) to Half-Tone to make it less pronounced in the views.

Our interior designer provided a spreadsheet of components with their respective materials and model numbers for each room.

While she didn’t specify the location of components; interior elevations and sections displayed product locations and heights for her review.

Using Bradley’s pre-built Revit Family Library, the interior views and schedules immediately updated as the Revit components (lavatories, toilet partitions, accessories) were added to floor plans.

— Key Costs for Building Revit Families | 1000 Bradley Revit Family Library —

We added a Revit COST parameter to another plumbing fixture\accessory schedule (not printed). We exported the schedules to a spreadsheet to assist with the contractor’s quoting process.

Revit Room Objects accurately reported each room’s square footage for the floor finish renovation of each room. Additional face-to-face dimensions were added to field verify clearances between existing walls.

Cross sections were created to field-verify clearances between the ceiling and structure.

It took 2 minutes to create a ‘blank”, correctly oriented reflected ceiling-tile plan from facility engineer’s photos. He wanted to enhance the discussion of ceiling fixture placement (lights, vents, diffuser) with the lighting and HVAC engineering contractors.

The project was printed to scale –on C-size PDFs; that are easily viewed or printed. Revit annotations (hatch, text, dimensions) automatically re-size and updated as we “played with each view’s scale” to fit them on C-Size title block.

— Revit for Restaurant Prototypes | Core Business-Design Values —

This plant facility is still managed in AutoCAD. However, we can export the Revit views to AutoCAD for inclusion into the facility’s existing AutoCAD master file.

Revit delivered these bottom line results;

• design intention was very clear with accurate, coordinated plans, schedules, elevations, sections and 3D views.
• faster creation of documentation with pre-built Revit 3D/2D product models; that include 3D & orthographic viewing options.
• efficient, shorter long distance onsite contractor & facility engineer meeting,
• the contractor received accurate counts & square footage of product to be installed.
• improved construction communications (less travel) between Wisconsin and Ohio with unlimited 3D viewing.
• improved installation coordination with 3-dimensional documentation.

Like most projects, our facility engineer returned from his trip with red marks, notes and decisions; that needed to be applied to the Revit file.

However, in Revit — changes made to plans, elevations, sections or schedules are IMMEDIATELY updated in all the other views. This is the native functionality of Revit; because all of the  project views are contained in one project file.