New " Merge Revit sheets" plugin for AutoCAD and removal of the Revit " Sheets export" plugin
Introducing a new free plugin for AutoCAD - Merge Revit sheets!
This plugin replaces the recently released Sheets export plugin for Revit, which will be removed from ModPlus today, and allows you to combine sheets exported from Revit into a single drawing. Check out the demo video to see how the plugin works:
If you want to know why we did it this way, read the article below.
One of the few Revit enhancements that our users don't like is the inability to unload sheets with a single dwg file.
To solve this problem we have written a plugin for Revit called Sheets export, but experience with it has shown that this is a bad solution. The API doesn't allow us to accomplish this task, so we'll have to come up with more creative tricks. And the only such trick is the following: we export the contents of the sheets without viewports into separate dwg and then import them back into a single sheet. Viewports from these sheets are also transferred to this sheet. Then we export to dwg this one sheet, on which all assembled. If you meet on the Internet similar plugins, then believe us - they all do the same thing, because other options do not exist!
And this algorithm leads to obvious and not very obvious problems, which simply can not be solved:
- there are annotations that reference the sheets and display their number. When you move all of the viewports to one sheet, all of these annotations get confused and start pointing to that sheet
- when moving viewports, the graphics are regenerated, which in some cases takes a very long time. As a result, the plugin can run for hours!
Therefore, the best and most logical solution is to create a plugin for AutoCAD itself that would collect all the sheets unloaded in the standard way into one drawing. Fortunately, ModPlus can afford it.
The main thing is to take two nuances into consideration:
- Exporting should be so that one dwg file is obtained per one sheet.
- Use the plugin in an empty drawing, so that the imported graphics do not overlap with the existing one.
Enjoy your work with ModPlus!