Revit DWG Export

Some Background
In the firm I work for, we do not have a person who works on developing revit.  The task of bringing/keeping revit up to date is put onto the engineers working in it.  There are good and bad things that come out of doing it this way.

One of the good things is that the engineers know exactly what we want and how we want it to look.  As we learn more about revit, we learn what it can and cannot do.

The bad... well the bad comes when we get really busy with engineering work (which recently we have been lucky enough to be).  This means we no longer have the time to develop/update families or other standards.  This also means, for the sake of time, we sometimes will do some of our drafting in AutoCAD.  We may do our plumbing and/or hydronic plans in AutoCAD.

The problem comes when exporting the architectural or mechanical background into AutoCAD.  Each update we would need to change the layers in autocad to match our standard plot line weights.  Every background update, it took us A LONG TIME to update the backgrounds in AutoCAD.   That is until export setup was found.

Export Revit to AutoCAD

The file that Revit looks when exporting is a tab delimited text file.  I would recommend editing the file in excel.  I started with the text file named "exportlayers-dwg-AIA.txt".  This file was found at C:\Autodesk\RME 2012. 

- Start by copying the AIA file and naming it something new (I just replaced "AIA" with my companies initials).
- Open the file with excel.
- The columns are as follows
    - Column A:  Category Name (Do not change)
    - Column B:  Subcategory Name  (Do not change)
    - Column C:  AutoCAD Layer name (These can be changed, I just left the layer names as the default.)
    - Column D:  AutoCAD Color  (Change to desired color)
    - Column E:  Cut layer name (I left as default.)
    - Column F:  AutoCAD Color  (Change to desired color)
- When you are finished editing, go to File>Save as... -  Make sure to save the file as type "Text (Tab delimited).
- Open desired revit project.
- Go to a plan view.
- R > Export > CAD Formats > DWG
- Click on the ellipsis to the right of the "Select Export Setup".

- On the layers tab, load layers from standards.  Navigate to file saved above.  Click open.  The file should change the Color ID column to your desired color.
- Change the Export layer options to "Export all properties BYLAYER, but do not export overrides".  If this is not done, I have had problems with some items will not appearing correctly in AutoCAD.
- You can now save this export setup by clicking on the symbol, on the bottom left of the window, that looks like a page with a star.
-  Select the drawings you would like to export.
- Click Next...
- Choose a location, name the file, and I like to uncheck "Export view on sheets and links as external references".

Done!

Feel free to ask me any questions.  I would be glad to help.

Next post... Imported/Linked AutoCAD line weights.