Description
Key Learnings
- Recognize the appropriate family template to use
- Understand how to import 2D geometry into a family
- See how a family is loaded into a project and how it behaves alongside native Revit components
- See how scheduling works with imported elements
Speakers
- Simon WhitbreadSimon Whitbread is a Revit software and Building Information Modeling (BIM) specialist for enterprise customers at Autodesk, Inc., providing thought leadership, implementation guidance, and product support. He has over 20 years’ CAD management experience coming from a drafting and design environment in the building services and architectural industries. An accomplished author for Revit software products, he is an enthusiastic teacher and technical evangelist.
- FOFernando OliveiraSince 1999 Fernando Oliveira has been involved in sales and consulting, and he has trained users in Autodesk, Inc., software for the architecture, engineering, and construction market and Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology. He is a premium support specialist in Autodesk WWSS-GS-Premium support, working with enterprise priority customers worldwide. Fernando is Autodesk Presales Certified in AutoCAD Architecture 2008/2010 software, AutoCAD Revit Architecture Suite 2008/2014 software, Revit Structure 2008/2014 software, and AutoCAD Revit MEP Suite 2009/2014 software. Fernando is also a Revit 2013 Certified Professional. In addition, he is moderator of the www.revitpt.com Portuguese language forum, international moderator in Autodesk User Group International (AUGI) at www.AUGI.com, and editor of http://Revit-pt.blogspot.com/.
SIMON WHITBREAD: Thank you for coming to see this session on innovating ways to transition from 2D to 3D. My name's Simon Whitbread. It looks like my co-speaker has been unavoidably detained, so I'll try and entertain you for the rest of the hour. We've got a slide deck to go through. I'm just quietly freaking out here, so I'm just going to calm down for a minute or two. I do this fairly regularly and I freak out every single time.
OK, so what I want to do is just look at the agenda-- what we're going to go through this afternoon. So a little bit of an introduction, then 2D to 3D. Why? AutoCAD and the seven Ps. That will become apparent once we start talking about that. And then what we're going to do is look at families to 2D and looking at legends, annotations, 2D to 3D, and then a little bit about 2D in general in your project and FormIt, strangely enough. I'm going to end a little bit on recommended best practice, and then if anybody has any questions, I'd be welcome to take any questions-- any point if you like, but we'll try and keep them to the end.
So anyway, introductions. We only really need to look at the left hand side. That's me. When I get the handout posted up, you can read all about it. I've been with Autodesk for four years. Before that, I was-- been with Autodesk for four years, working out of London in England. Before that, I spent 10 years in New Zealand, working for architectural and building services customers, and also as a channel partner.
What I wanted to do was just skip through some of the notable projects I've worked on over the past 30 years, unfortunately. But just to give you an idea of-- and there should be a common theme running through them all, which you'll see as we go through. And the common theme is AutoCAD. So one of the biggest major projects I worked on was a printing works in London. There's a lot of manual drafting. So that's my background-- is a draftsman. 2D CAD, which is AutoCAD release 10, and some 3D modeling done in Sonata.
Peter Jones in Sloane Square-- It's a big department store. Major renovation in the late '90s. Again, that was 2D, primarily. AutoCAD-- a little bit of 3D thrown in, and I was also doing some expert witness work, where we were taking 2D plans that were supposedly coordinated 2D plans and improving to the legal system. But they were, in fact, not coordinated, and I was having to do this in AutoCAD release 11. And you can see there that the top building has now disappeared. It's been replaced by housing.
So moving on to New Zealand. A couple of projects that I worked on. The first one here, the Vodafone building. It was already pre-done in AutoCAD, and the architects that I was working with wanted to move to something different. So that something different could have been Revit. It could have been Architectural Desktop, Microstation, Vectorworks, or AutoCAD. And I had the job of learning all products, and then doing the best I could to reproduce that project.
NZI-- I was working as the Revit Manager, providing support to the design team. Model produced in Revit 8.0. A lot of detailing done in AutoCAD and a lot of details in there that were not resolved at the time of design. So details like you can see the diagrid curtain wall system. The design architect saying, well, I want this done in Revit. How do I do it? And me asking him, what's the detail of the mullions? And he says, well, I don't know. So how do you go about actually producing the Revit model around that?
Two more to go. This one was a large desalination plant in Melbourne, Australia. 29 buildings, six discipline models per building. So there's quite a lot of coordination work going on in there. Plant modeled in PDMS, which was brought into this large green building on the bottom. So you can imagine that that was a fairly large coordination project. A lot of drawings produced from that, as well.
And then this last project, which most of you should recognize, is the United States Air Force Cadet Chapel in Colorado. We were working with the Air Force base out there to reproduce the building because it's going through a major refit at the moment. We were working with a dispersed team, so there was people in east, west coast of the States, Europe.
So we were using Revit server. We were using DWGs, and DWGs don't quite work with Revit server. So there's that whole thing going through there that I wanted to just touch on to show you that I've gone through the process in a professional sense. I know what the pains are and I can feel for you if you're going through them at this time.
Right. 2D to 3D and why. OK, so what's in it for you? There's got to be something in it for you to make it worth your while. Revit is a really good piece of software. I wouldn't be standing up here talking about Revit if I didn't believe it. I've spent a lot of the past 10 years working with Revit, writing about Revit-- specifically, Revit MEP. It's a great tool to give you a competitive advantage. Just the way that you can leverage all of the database to produce schedules, to do coordinated work-- it's a great tool to work with.
But you can also reuse your historical 2D data. Just because you're working in a BIM environment doesn't mean to say you need to throw it all away and start again. Some people do, but if you've got a lot of details that you've been using for years and years and you really want to keep them and leverage them, and they're standard details that crop up time and time again in your projects, then don't ditch them. And there's a way that we can either work with them directly in Revit-- not work with them, as such, but link them in or make them part of your library so that you can bring them into the project. And you also get to work with a really cool piece of software, but maybe that's just me being a bit of a geek.
What's in it for us? Having you as happy customers, and that's the thing that drives me every day to work. I'm a technical support person within Autodesk. I try and iron out issues that people have when they're working with Revit. Typically, it mostly works around when the software crashes. So they're kind of the hard questions that I get almost on a daily basis.
OK. The next session I've called AutoCAD and the seven Ps. Proper prior planning prevents poor performance. Now, that's six Ps. I had to drop one P because it's not politically correct to say that word in an audience of nice people. But it's kind of the way that I look at things when I'm working with Revit and working with AutoCAD, is that you need to prepare the drawings before you start trying to bring them into Revit.
You can just bring them in, but I know that a lot of architects out there-- and I know some of you will be architects, and I'm really not bagging you at all. I've worked with architects that have been a Revit manager in an architectural practice. But for all the best will in the world, you'll have a DWG, and then you might have some details that you've stuck off a couple of miles over out of the way of everything else, so you can't see in the view port. You don't really want to bring that into your Revit model. So you really want to tidy things up before you bring them into Revit.
And at the moment, Revit and AutoCAD look a little bit like oil and water. They don't really mix very well on the surface. They can do, though, and that's what I'm hoping I'll be able to show you as we go through this next set of slides.
So this is a really good example of a set of details created in AutoCAD. The thing is that if you brought these details into Revit, there would be absolutely no link between what you've got as a building and the detail. So there are several ways of working with it. You could just insert the DWG into your Revit project, as I said before. It's probably not the best practice to go ahead and do. My preferred option would be to link it, if you're going to do it. Excuse me one second.
If you link it into Revit, one of the nice things about it is that it doesn't bring the whole legacy of the DWG into your projects. And I've got another way of working where I'll link it into another project, and then link that project into my working projects, which means that they are completely divorced from each other. And that would be my preferable way of working.
If you are going to bring these in as an insert or an import into Revit, I'd really want to be looking at opening the DWG, purging everything, getting rid of, as I said before, everything that's miles away from the actual objects that we really want to work with. When I say purge-- getting rid of line types, hatch patterns-- all the stuff that's not going to work really well with a database, which is what Revit is.
So there, I've got another option where we can W block out from that DWG. The whole W block process will clean up some of that purging element. And then this part of the DWG-- you can do one or two things with it. You can either just insert it, as I said before, or you can take that into a family-- into a detail family. Taking it into a detail family then means that you can link it when you're doing sections and elevations.
Over time, what will probably happen is you'll start editing this in the Revit family and start taking out some of the lines that you'll end up with in here. You can see the timber sections where, at the moment, they're just lines. You'll probably start replacing those with Revit families of yourself. So gradually, you'll start switching over from a pure AutoCAD detail to something that's got Revit families within it. So it can be a gradual process. You don't need to charge ahead and try and do it all at once, which I've seen a lot of people do, and they get really angry. And it's just not worth the stress of doing it. It really isn't.
So as I said, don't import straight into your new family or project. Use a placeholder container. So if you start a blank project, you can bring your DWG in there, explode it, and then cut and paste it all out into your real life project.
And so these are the types of things that you really don't want coming into your Revit projects. The line types all start with import-- all the line weights and the hatch patterns that all have got a DWG prefix. And I've seen so many times where you go and open a project that's performing really badly, and it's got all of these line weights and hatch patterns, and it really impacts on the performance of the project.
So I said before it's all about housekeeping. Although this drawing looks quite presentable, for me, it's still a mess. What I really want to do is start looking at W blocking out objects in here, so that you can see in this column in the middle of the slide, what I've done is used a list routine just to W block out all the blocks within that drawing file. So I can then start working on crossing over into the family. And we'll see how that works in a few slides' time.
OK. So legends. You've got all these legends that you've created. I come from an electrical background, so that one's really easy for me. You've got mechanical legends. Whatever type of legend you're working with, you might want to have this represented in your Revit project.
And so what I have here is a brief video, which I have no idea whether it's running or not. There it is. Yes, it is. Thank goodness for that. So what I've done here is I've got a blank project. I've created a legend within Revit, and you can say here that I can just go ahead and insert the DWG. It's really simple, but the problem with that is that you end up with all those legacy line types and hatch patterns and what have you. Let's go on ahead and you can drag the legend onto the sheet. But what I really want to do is start with the family.
So rather than working in the project environment, what I want to do with this is create a family of the legend from the DWG. So here we can see that I'm creating a parking legend, and then I'm going to create a new family. I'm using the annotations and creating a generic annotation family. We'll get rid of that mode and then import the DWG into this environment, so it's going to stay as a DWG in the family. I'm not going to bother exploding it. Comes in here. I just move it into the central location on the reference planes and then save it.
So for this, it's now a family, which behaves like a family in Revit. You can see that I've brought it into the project. I can just stick it straight on the output sheet or I can go and stick it in the legend that I've created. You can see there that some of the text is not working particularly great, and we could spend a couple of hours talking about text in Revit and AutoCAD. And there'll be some of that in the handout, which I've yet got to upload into the-- that you can download later on in the week. Right.
So at this point, I also want to look at symbols. It's a little bit small on the screen, but you can just about see these electrical symbols. Where are we? So what I want to do is if you've got symbols or if you've got your own types of symbols that you want to use that don't fit a particular standard, and Revit does come with a whole bunch of standard symbols, what we can do is open an existing family.
You can see here that we've got what's called a nested family, much like a nested block in AutoCAD. And what I'm going to do here is I'm going to insert the DWG into this nested family. It's obviously at the wrong angle. I really want to rotate this through so it matches us at the existing one. Otherwise, all my socket outlets are going to look really ridiculous in the project. So we'll rotate that through 90 degrees, get rid of everything else that's in there, and then load this back into the power outlet that I started with.
One of the main reasons for showing you this is that this symbol for the power outlet-- once it gets loaded into-- it's a static DWG. It's drawn at a scale of one is to one, if you like. So it's about 3 millimeters across when it's actually printed out. But when it comes in as an annotation family, it then becomes like a dynamic block. It's scale independent, so when you change the scale of the drawing, the block-- your AutoCAD block, which was a simple AutoCAD block, now becomes something very similar to a dynamic block.
So you can see here that I've created a call out. The size of the symbol seems to have changed, but when you go and place them on the sheet-- the final output sheet-- those symbols are the same, regardless of the scale. But if we'd have just imported the DWG straight into Revit, then they look horrible. They'd look different sizes across the two drawings. Does that make sense? Great.
OK. So can you remember-- earlier on, I showed you-- we had that drawing of the kitchen units. So what I want to show you here is actually going through that process of creating a family that will then stand up in a 3D environment. So what we're doing here is I'm creating a new family. So for cooker, it's going to be speciality equipment. We're now in the Family Editor, and in here, I'm going to start importing the DWGs. I've got the-- when we actually get into the folder where the DWGs are. What we've got is the top plan view of that cooker. It's going to insert that into Revit. You can see here that-- sorry. You should have seen there that as I went through that process, there were some settings that were checked, like not having it coming in as color. I just wanted it as black and white.
So there we put the front view, and then coming to here and put the side view into the project. Now, let's not look in as if it's positioned where it should be. It looks kind of nasty. So what I want to do is un-pin that and then flip it so that it's in the right location. So we've got it in plan. You can see there that down on the bottom right, it showed that I still had a filter on there so that I can copy that thing that was on the left side. So I'll copy it to the right.
When we spin this around and look at it in 3D, eventually what you'll see is we can then start moving these elements around. So there, I'm moving the top up to the top of the cooker in a position where it should be, and that's what we've got there-- the front part of it. We also want to move to the front, so when we get there, that's now showing us a kind of a wire frame cooker. We can save that and then load that into our project file.
It now behaves like a standard Revit family. So you can schedule it. If you really wanted to, you could stick an electrical outlet on it, but we can create sections so it displays correctly in all of the section views. But it is still just a wire frame model.
So with the wire frame model, we can take this a step further. We can go back and edit this family, and you'll see here that what I've done is created a 3D view, and we're now looking at the wire frame version. And if you do want to do some visualization, that's not really going to present very well. So I've gone back and edited the family, and then really quickly on this one, I've gone ahead and created an extrusion just around that side profile. So you can see I can create the extrusion really quickly. Click on Finish. Look at the front elevation and then stretch that out to match the other side. And then when we look at that in 3D and put the shading on, we'll see that we've now got a solid Revit family.
What we can also do is change the visibility of those DWGs. So what we're doing here is changing them so that in plan view, we don't get to see the sides or the front because they're not necessary. And they're just additional line work that you wouldn't really want to see in Revit. We can also do that the same with the top, so that doesn't appear in the sides or the front. They're just little things, but they add up to making a better presentation when you come into your Revit projects. And then you start altering the level of detail.
So coarse level of detail-- you can see that we've got no detail on there. Medium-- we can see the top. And at fine, we can see the sides. There are still a couple of little things on there. You could just about see the handles poking out from the side. I know for a fact that in that DWG, the detail of the handles is covered by a layer, so in Revit, we can then look at the visibility graphics and turn that layer off because the layer is still visible from the family. That and having the visibility of that layer is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is you can turn it off. The bad thing is if you don't do that certain piece bit, you'll end up with as many layers in here as you have in your AutoCAD drawing.
The next piece on this is going from 2D to 3D in one hit. Here, I've got an architectural detail. I'm in AutoCAD and I want to make this 2D architectural detail a 3D architectural detail. So I'm just W blocking that one profile out, and then we'll go into Revit. So in Revit, what we'll do is I'll create the generic family, and then when I'm in the generic family, what's going to happen is I'm going to create an extrusion. But I'm not going to draw the extrusion. I'm not going to trace over the DWG. I'm going to create the extrusion, and because I'm in the sketch mode, when I import that the DWG, the DWG imports as the sketch. So there's no tracing or anything, and you'll see what happens when I come and insert this. We're in sketch mode. We'll import that DWG.
The important thing there is you can see that bottom tick mark that says, do I want to correct any lines slightly off axis? Well, I don't because there's a lot of lines that are off axis. And so we don't want to change that. You can see the lines have all come in in the sketch mode. They're all pink, so the only thing that we're doing is working in the sketch mode to create the extrusion.
So I've just moved that to the origin and reference lines and gone to change the thickness of the extrusion. And then click on Finish. There's a problem. You can see there's a problem and it's highlighted in the middle of the screen there. It's this little red dot. I've just trimmed up that one portion of the sketch when I click on Finish. And then we'll have a look in the 3D. We've now got a 3D element that was really quick in creating. I didn't have to do any tracing. It was just real quick. OK.
So 2D in your project. Earlier, I was talking about how we work with 2D elements in the project. Now, when I was working on the Cadet Chapel, the only drawings that-- we had some legacy 2D DWGs. We had the original spec for the building, which was a PDF that would have translated into a document about this thick, which had all the materials. So we could go back and reference the materials when we came to model a glass. But I really wanted to work from here, but being able to actually use the DWGs in the Revit environment-- I had a bit of a workflow where I linked the DWGs into a blank Revit model, and then that became a standalone Revit model. What happens with the DWGs-- and I mentioned earlier that we were using Revit server-- the DWGs stay in the file. Even though they're a link, they stay in the file.
So you could literally lose the DWGs. You could delete them off your system. You could open up the Revit model and still see the DWGs there. They're just saying that the link's been lost. So it keeps it cached to copy. What that means is you can store this Revit file that has DWGs linked in on Revit server or C4R, and it's got DWGs on it. That was going to be my sort of parting gift, and then Fernando, who's just turned up, said to me yesterday morning, desktop connector has just come out, and that allows you to link DWGs across C4R in a Revit file if you really want to.
So there's that workflow, as well. So this video just goes through, real quick, that process of creating the Revit project. So there's a blank Revit project here. Here, I'm going to use by linking-- linking the DWGs. So I'll start with the first floor plan, link that DWG. You can see here I'm unchecking that box at the bottom to straighten up lines that aren't straight. And then we've got our floor plan.
I can then go through here, and what I'm going to do in this instance is I want to treat this almost as an architectural project file. I've used this workflow working for an MEP consultant where the architect wasn't using Revit. He was only using 2D AutoCAD, but the MEP consultant knew the benefits of using the MEP side of Revit. So he wanted to have a building in the background that he could kind of coordinate with. He could pick up the fact that some of the stairwells weren't correct when you overlay the DWGs, but he wanted to have a coordinated model.
So he was using this linked file as a kind of architectural model. But it's not. It's a wire frame model, and you'll see that once we get into having all the floor plans linked. Here, I've gone into an elevation. I've got the grids displayed. I can now link in one of the elevation files, and because we've got the grids there, it allows me to line the DWG up correctly. We might need to move it around a little bit because it's coming in the middle of the model.
I was going to drag the timeline across to speed us up to the end of the video because it does go on for another minute or so, but for some reason, PowerPoint's not showing it to me on the screen here. But essentially, you can see what we're doing is I'm creating those elevations. I'm then creating the levels for the building, as well. I'm using the levels that have been shown on the 2D elevations. So I'm going to create those, rename them all, and then import-- sorry. Not import. Link the 2D floor plans onto their respective floor plans in the model.
So you can see here that what I'll have to do is hide-- you can just about see the outline of the elevation drawings. So I'm just going to turn those off and then do the link for each floor plan across that model. So I'll bring the next floor plan in, do the same for the other floors, and then we'll look at the 3D version, eventually.
So there's the different views of the model, if you like. We can then go across the 3D view, and we've now got this-- effectively, a wire frame model of the building. This starts getting useful, especially for the MEP side of things because if you were an architect and wanting to do some massing, you can use this wire frame to generate as a sketch your building mass. So you can then start doing analysis from the 2D objects. So there, we've got our mass model, which was really quick to bring up from the 2D. We can put our mass floors in, and then if we wanted to, we could go out to analysis products to find out gross floor areas or using Insight 360 for building performance.
And finally, FormIt. Pretty much everything that you can do in Revit, you can now do in FormIt, with regards to linking or import-- sorry, not linking. Importing DWGs. So if you did want to do this exercise as a way of creating some Revit content, what you can do is you can import the DWG or series of DWGs into FormIt, create a group, and then with the group, you can name the group and change the category so it looks at that group as a Revit category. It's a limited set of categories at the moment, but you've got masses and then you've got things like generic models, speciality equipment.
When you save the FormIt file on A360, because that's the default, it actually generates a Revit project file. And any of the content that you've created within FormIt is in a family. You can edit the family and save it out, and it's got the detail that you've added.
Just the last piece on recommended best practice. As I said before, seven Ps. Preparation is key, so remove anything unnecessary. If it's miles away from what you're wanting to concentrate on, get rid of it. Just have a bit of a tidy up. Get rid of layers, line types, text, et cetera.
Good point. Fernando just said, if you are doing that editing process within AutoCAD, make sure that the properties for everything is by layer, not changing the color of something or the line type of something. If you want the properties to stay, make sure it's all by layer. Yeah. So then you could potentially, if you wanted to, change that layer in Revit to another line type.
That just about covers what I had to say. Is there any questions?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes, I do. OK. I'll also save you the bother of writing it out. So yeah. You'll be able to. I'll put the list routine up there, as well.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes, everything that you've seen here-- the handout. All the videos will be up there, so you can go just run through it again. I know that I went through some of them pretty quickly. I'm sorry?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Handout will be up there by the end of the week. So it's not uploaded to the AU website yet. I've been a bit slack on that score, so by the end of the week. I'll go out on a limb and say before the end of the conference. What I'll do is I will ping everybody because I've got the ability to message you. I'll put a message out saying that the stuff's-- the content's up there. I've seen a couple of other hands.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: I'm sorry?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: So the question was, is there any way to get an AutoCAD table into a Revit schedule? No. It was a short answer. Unfortunately not. There are ways of going to Excel, and then there's a couple of apps out there that will do a link from Excel into a schedule. But generally, you have to start with the schedule first and do the export at the data that you want in the Excel, and then bring it back in. But then that stays as a live link. But tables, unfortunately, not. I did see a couple of other questions. Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: No, because-- no, you can't copy monitor a DWG, so all I did was I went through and used the Pick Line tool, and then just picked the grids. And the same with the levels, as well. Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yeah, I've seen-- yeah. So the answer to that would be check the scaling units in the DWG first. So do that in AutoCAD. Sometimes, if you know what the scaling is without checking it, you can actually-- on the import process, you can specify the units. But yeah, I'd check it in the DWG first.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes. Yes, so we'll do. Text is a bit of a-- justification, end text, text styles, text fonts. Yeah, I can go on if you like. But it's another topic completely, really. But if you think that Revit was designed originally to use true type fonts and AutoCAD wasn't-- originally. So there's a lot of people who use fonts like Romanesque, which is not a true type font, and when you bring it into Revit, it looks pants. So it's those sorts of considerations. Oh, yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: A pre-formed solid.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes, you can do that. It depends on the format. If it's a free-form solid, it won't stay free-form. It will come in as a solid object. You won't be able to manipulate it. So Revit will only see 3D elements that I've got. Not just straight lines, because you can have curved lines, but it won't recognize-- it won't be able to edit a free-form shape. But you could potentially do that in something like--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yeah. So yeah, good point for that. When you bring it into a family, it will keep the shape.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: When you say huge--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: No, I don't think that-- yeah. I don't think that would-- don't think that would work particularly well.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yep. Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: When you move it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Oh, so if you move the DWG, if it's a link, Revit would-- next time you open the file, it would say you can't find the DWG. But it's still got a path in it, so if it's a link, you can still re-path it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: No, you don't.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yeah, so the example there would be the chapel where the DWGs there were links. But when you activate work sharing and then put it onto Revit server, Revit server can't use DWG links, but it's still got the DWGs in it. So it keeps it there as a background. So if somebody still has a path back to the DWGs, they can still get reloaded. It's just that they're not stored on Revit server. So you could give that to anybody. You could take it. You could detach it from central, give it to another company, and it would still have the DWGs displayed.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it works like an X-ray.
AUDIENCE: Do you have a video of the step by step process available?
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yep, it will be part of the handout, so yeah, it will be. Yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Reference books.
AUDIENCE: Step by step process.
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes, some of the Revit base books-- the mastering architecture. That might have it, but I couldn't say specifically that it does. OK. OK. I saw another-- yes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Thank you. Sorry, say that again.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: Yes. If you had an AutoCAD block with visibility parameters, how would you translate that? I guess that would be addressed with the visibility graphics. So it went through it really quickly on the video, but when we got to the 3D part where that oven had the solid shape in the project, you still had the ability to go through and turn off specific layers of the block. But you could also assign the blocks in the family to have a visibility set so that when you were looking at it in elevation, you didn't see the sides or the top. So there are ways of doing it.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SIMON WHITBREAD: If you want-- yeah, if you wanted to go down that route, yes, you would do. OK. OK. Any other questions? If not, we can give you four minutes of your time back. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]