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Tyler Grant/5 min read

Linking Revit drawings to AutoCAD DWG: A step-by-step guide

Revit-to-DWG Link Workflow

1

Insert > Link CAD

Choose DWG file; pick positioning method.

2

Set Visibility

Link layers visibility per V/G overrides.

3

Pin the Link

Prevent accidental movement after positioning.

4

Manage Updates

Manage Links panel handles reload, unload, and remove.

Master Revit MEP at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Revit MEP Certification Course covers Revit fundamentals — a strong foundation before specializing in MEP.

This lesson is a preview from our Revit Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.

This Revit tutorial walks through linking revit drawings to autocad dwg, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Welcome back to the CAD Teacher VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. In the previous video, we went ahead and got our Revitized CAD Detail placed on a sheet, and everything is good to go. What we want to go ahead and do now is use this process for any kind of AutoCAD DWG that you have.

So I'm just going to go ahead and do that as one example. Now, what's going to happen is we're going to go ahead and start pulling information from other Revit drawings. And this is typically how people start to do it—they have a base file of all their details already created and Revitized, and then what they do is pull the specific details that they need into the other drawings.

We're going to go ahead and do that now. So let's go ahead—let's go to the Insert tab here. And what I'm going to do is go to Insert from File.

So I'm going to pull this down here and go to Insert Views from File. I don't want to Insert 2D Elements from File because that's only going to bring in the exact 2D elements. I actually want to insert a full view.

So I'm going to go here. Go ahead and synchronize with Central if you need to. I'm going to go ahead—it pops me out to here—I'm going to pull this down. I'm going to go to my C drive, go to my BIM 322 folder here.

I'm going to go to my BIM 322 Details, and I'm going to go ahead and click into my Details and Schedules—the one that you should have downloaded from the Student Information System—and open that up. What we want to go ahead and do now is actually pull and grab the views specifically that we want. So the ones that I'm going to go ahead and pull are the AHU Mounting Detail, the Air Distribution Connection Detail, the Branch Duct Takeoff Detail, and the Duct Through Roof Detail.

There we go. I want to go ahead and bring over the Mechanical Legend. I want to bring over the Plumbing Legend.

I want to go ahead and bring over the Roof Mounted Duct Detail. I also want to bring in the Reduced Pressure Backflow Detail. I want to go ahead and also bring in the Typical FC Unit Mounting Detail, the Water Hammer Arrester Assembly Detail, the Typical Manual Volume Damper Locations, and that is about it.

We've got all the views that we want to bring over. Again, those are the AHU Mounting Detail, the Air Distribution Connection Detail, the Branch Duct Takeoff Detail, the Duct Through Roof Detail, the Mechanical Legend, the Plumbing Legend, the Reduced Pressure Backflow Detail, the Roof Mounted Duct Detail, the Typical FC Unit Mounting Detail, the Typical Manual Volume Damper Locations, and the Water Hammer Arrester Assembly Detail. I'm going to go ahead and hit OK.

And it's going to go ahead and start bringing those in. This little error here is just saying that we have duplicate types, and that it's going to use the types that are in our current project, not the types from the other project. I'm going to go ahead and hit OK.

It's going to take just a few minutes to bring this in—not too long. And it says, "Family View Title has been renamed to View Title 1" to avoid conflicts with the existing element. Perfectly fine, no issues there.

Go ahead and just close this warning. Now, as you notice, we have some information here, and this is our Mechanical Legend Detail. And this will be going on a Mechanical Title Sheet that we eventually create.

Go ahead and zoom up in this top-hand corner, and let's just go ahead and select this piece here and delete it. That's just a little note that was there for some changes that needed to be made. And again, this is all Revit information at this point.

So all Revit text and everything there is good to go. I want to go ahead now and look at my Project Browser. And what you can notice in our Project Browser is that everything is already organized how we need it to be.

That's because in its source project, everything was already correctly assigned. Now, we do have a couple here, so let's go ahead and expand this out under Mechanical, under the Drafting Views, and we can see that the AHU Mounting Detail and the Roof Mounted Duct Detail have not been organized yet. So let's go ahead and select that one, and let's go ahead and change the Sub-Discipline to HVAC.

Let's go ahead and move that one—the Roof Mounted Duct Detail—let's go ahead and change that to HVAC. And there we are. I'm going to go ahead and scroll down and just double-check to make sure that everything is in its correct location—which it is.

We've gone ahead and brought over these drawings, and in the next following videos, we'll go ahead and start putting these on sheets and then start linking them to specific callouts. I'll see you then.