Exploding Imported CAD Files in Revit: Best Practices for Detail Editing

In this video, we're going to look at exploding imported CAD files. Sometimes you may want to import a detail and edit it within Revit. In this case, you'll need to explode the detail.

When you explode an imported file like the one we just did in the last video, line styles will be added to your list in the Line Styles menu. You'll get a new line style for each layer in the imported file. The detail lines generated from the exploded file will use these new line styles.

In our ceiling soffit detail view that we've created, select the imported CAD detail. When you hover over an imported detail, again you'll notice the blue box that shows the item selected. So click with your left mouse button to select it.

Let's go to the ribbon, and you'll notice under the Import Instance panel we have the option to explode this imported element. And we have two choices: we can either partial explode or full explode.

A partial explode explodes one level at a time, meaning blocks will maintain their integrity until the partial explode reaches its level. Full explode, on the other hand, fully explodes all the CAD symbols into single lines and shapes. Let's select partial explode.

Now let's review what I mentioned earlier about line styles being created from imported details that we explode. Let's go to the Manage tab in the ribbon, and under Settings panel, Additional Settings, select Line Styles.

Let's expand Lines. And if you scroll down, you'll notice there are new line styles created from the CAD import that we just exploded. For instance, A Anno Dims, A Anno Note, and all the A Detail layers are line styles that were created as a result of our imported CAD detail.

So let's click OK. Let's take a look at the text that was created from our exploded CAD detail. And if you select one, you'll notice under Properties that the text has been exploded, and it creates a new text style.

So to clean all this up and to keep everything a little more consistent within our Revit file, let's select all of our text and then change its type to 3/32" Arial. Notice it updates all the ones that we have selected. And then let's just get rid of the title and scale listed at the bottom.

So select it and press Delete. It's good practice to keep your project file clean. So let's purge the text styles from the imported CAD file.

Go to the Manage tab again in the ribbon. And under Settings, you'll notice there is the option to Purge Unused. So let's click Purge Unused, and it's going to take a minute, and it'll bring up all of the unused items that we have in our project.

So let's select Check None. That's actually a pretty good standard—just to uncheck everything to make sure you don't delete something you may need in the future. Then go in and selectively pick what you want to purge at this time.

And at this time, we want to purge text styles. So you scroll down all the way to the bottom under Other Styles, expand Text. And you'll notice there are the three text styles that were imported from our detail-soffit CAD file.

Select those three and click OK. And now you've purged those text styles. If you go back to one of your text items, click Properties and see what other text styles are available, you'll notice the three that were imported have been removed.

Now, in general, it's better not to explode imported CAD files. Doing so litters your Revit model with many artifacts and often creates inaccuracies and other errors in your Revit file. For best results, clean up the files as much as you can in the original CAD program before importing it into Revit.

In the next video, we're going to take a look at controlling line weights of imported CAD files prior to importing them.