BIM-to-CAD Workflow Evolves with Automated DWG Drawings

ARES Commander 2024 can generate smart 2D DWG drawings from Revit or IFC BIM projects automatically, transforming a time-consuming task into a one-click process.

Niknaz Aftahi is the CEO and Cofounder of aec+tech, and a member of the AIA San Francisco Design Technology Committee. Niknaz has worked as both an architecture design professional and design technology director in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This article was written after the keynote she delivered at the Graebert neXt online conference, held in April.

The rise of Building Information Modelling (BIM) was predicted by some to mark the end of AEC professionals’ reliance on CAD — as if the age of dinosaurs had come to an end, and it was mammals’ time to shine.

Today, the AEC world is well into the BIM Era, and yet there are four to ten times more CAD users than BIM users in a typical construction company. Far from going extinct, CAD is the tool of choice for creating DWG-format project documentation, such as floorplans, sections, and elevations.

The reason is that BIM software, which excels at representing projects in 3D, falls short when it comes to creating the 2D drawings needed for project execution.

“Even though BIM is becoming more central and more common in the architect’s and engineer’s workflow, DWG CAD drawings are still used to document projects at a higher level of detail than what BIM produces,” noted Niknaz Aftahi, the cofounder and CEO of aec+tech.

So, it is not only BIM or only CAD, but a concatenation of the two that yields the best results for building projects. But in many firms, the two types of work are conducted in redundant parallel processes, rather than a synergistic sequence. To make their DWG drawings, the CAD users must first recreate geometry that already exists in the BIM file. They are further burdened with manually updating those drawings every time the BIM model changes — and more manual intervention inevitably leads to more mistakes. It’s a workflow that requires far too much work and is definitely lacking in flow.

“In my experience as an architect, it was always very tedious to keep CAD drawings updated,” Aftahi recalled. “For many projects I worked on, we were putting together some of the sheets in CAD, mostly for the details, and all the other drawings were in Revit, and it was just an absolute waste of time and resources to continuously keep everything updated.”

Why Modern Cad Is A Better Partner For Bim

This effort duplication isn’t just frustrating; it’s also time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, “ARES Commander is helping us to solve this problem,” Aftahi said. ARES Commander is part of the ARES Trinity of CAD software, which encompasses integrated DWG solutions for desktop, mobile, and cloud platforms.

In recent years, CAD developer Graebert has integrated features specifically designed to make DWG production faster, easier, and smarter.

These advances have made the broken BIM-to-CAD workflow a relic of the past — and made competing solutions look like fossils.

“I think ARES Commander is the only tool out there in the market that creates a seamless connection between a BIM model and a CAD file,” Aftahi observed.

ARES Commander draws on the intelligence embedded in BIM objects, enabling CAD users to visualize BIM data without using BIM software, access object properties that aren’t visible in the model, and create project drawings without reinventing the wheel. “[ARES Commander] takes advantage of the rich information that is abundant in our BIM files, and uses it to automate repetitive, manual, and error-prone tasks,” Aftahi explained.

To create 2D project drawings, users simply import one or multiple Revit or IFC file(s), adjust the BIM filters to select the content desired (choosing all BIM entities, just the doors, or only the doors on the sixth floor, for example), then generate all the 2D drawings they need.

This process is substantially more efficient than creating DWG files from scratch, yet it is still flexible. After the drawings are created, users can modify them with the CAD tools of ARES Commander, adding any 2D details or other content desired.

And crucially, users never need to waste time generating new versions of their drawings, no matter how many times the BIM model changes. The drawings always retain their associativity to their progenitor project, so they stay up to date with its data. Users can simply load the new version of the BIM model, then refresh the geometry of all the DWG files — or just specific drawings — with the click of a button.

It’s important to note that only the geometry acquired from the BIM model will be updated; everything else stays the same. For example, if an ARES Commander user adds an electrical network on top of a floorplan, those CAD details are preserved when the drawing is refreshed.

“The value that ARES Commander brings to the BIM table lies largely in its ability to keep the drawings updated, even when the source BIM project is modified — it’s just like magic,” Aftahi said.

“Indeed, AEC organizations continuously encounter information-related problems when switching back and forth between CAD and BIM, because they lack a robust bridge between the two paradigms. ARES Commander answered this need by creating drawings that are resilient enough to be updated when the BIM model is modified.”

ARES COMMANDER 2024: INTRODUCING DRAWINGS AUTOMATION

ARES Commander 2024 represents a further evolution of the BIM-to-CAD workflow. The new release features automation capabilities that make the production of 2D drawings from a BIM project literally effortless.

Users can still section the BIM model and create floorplans, sections, and elevations manually, as they did before, or they can generate them automatically, letting ARES Commander do the work instead.

Four new commands — BIMAutoDrawings, BIMAutoLabels, BIMAutoDimensions, and BIMAutoSheets — are now available to create drawing views, insert labels by extracting data from BIM objects, add BIM dimension chains, or make sheets with drawings at a user-selected scale.

The resulting dimensions and labels are “smart”, meaning that they maintain their connection to the BIM file and will update themselves whenever the drawings are refreshed with updated data.

And users can of course make their own changes as well, such as adjusting the style of the BIM dimension chains, editing them with grips, or customizing sheets by inserting viewports or details.

For maximum automation, users can execute all four tasks by running the BIMAutoAll command. First, users must ensure that annotations will display at the correct scale, either by choosing the annotative scale from the list, or entering the CANNOSCALE command. The next step is to visit the BIM settings and select a template with the same scale. Finally, clicking the Run icon in the BIM tab of the ribbon initiates BIMAutoAll, which follows a script to launch all the automation features, one after the other.

If users wish to customize this automated process, they can configure the LISP script that powers BIMAutoAll. For example, it’s easy to remove a step of the process, if desired. “As a result, companies can make their own versions, per their own standards, and apply it to every single project they work on; they just do it once, then they can apply it to all the projects,” Aftahi noted.

Saving Valuable Company Resources With Drawings Automation

Ultimately, there is a wide range of firms that employ both CAD and BIM, and also many firms that only use CAD but still need to collaborate with BIM users. These automation advances hold promise for all of them. “At every type and size of architecture firm that I ever worked in, there was always a time that I needed to connect a BIM model to some CAD files,” Aftahi recalled.

ARES Commander, she concluded, “takes advantage of the rich information that is abundant in BIM files, and uses it to automate repetitive, manual, and error-prone tasks. For organizations both small and large that rely on BIM, this software is a powerful addition to their workflows, reducing the amount of time, money, and effort spent on producing and updating DWG documentation.”

To learn more about ARES Commander’s BIM-toCAD features, download a sample project, or start your free trial of the software, please visit www. graebert.com/bim.

Cyrena covered CAD and related technologies for more than a decade at Cadalyst, where she became Editor in Chief. In 2021 she found a new home at Graebert as the Brand Ambassador for the ARES Trinity of CAD software.

AUGIWORLD brings you recent developments in Autodesk and related software items

This month’s topic is third-party applications.

The Autodesk App Store is full of useful third-party apps for all Autodesk applications, and this month we have gone for some of the more well-known third-party applications that we think you should consider.

Sometimes though, you may have a specific application use in mind, so make sure you search the store, as I’m sure you will find many apps that will help you work smarter, not harder.

So, on that note, here are this month’s opportunities to advance your skills, processes, and workflows with the most current industry-related software and hardware updates available.

Leica Infinity

https://apps.autodesk.com/BIM360/ en/Detail/Index?id=39247916761993

22842&appLang=en&os=Web

BIM 360

Leica Infinity is a user-friendly geospatial office software suite for the measurement professional. It is designed to manage, combine, process, analyse and quality check all field survey measure data, including total stations, digital levels, GNSS data and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). So, whether it’s measuring new survey projects or preparing data for construction layout jobs, Infinity supports your workflow.

Work with raw observation data by processing and deriving accurate coordinate data for ground control or checkpoints. Generate features from point cloud data or use UAV imagery to generate point clouds, DSM and orthophotos that represent the most current state of a project, at the time you need it.

Different data come together on a field project –BIM, CAD, GIS and more. Infinity supports design data that can be combined with measure data to derive quality reports for comparing design to as built or use design data to extract and prepare for field layout jobs. Easily generate and export these data types seamlessly. Using integrated data exchange services including Leica Exchange, Leica ConX and those by third-party providers makes moving data even that much more efficient.

We all know the Leica name. This app provides some amazing tools for survey data!

Civil Cad Learning Solutions Tools

https://apps.autodesk.com/CIV3D/ en/Detail/Index?id=64476373054132

52324&appLang=en&os=Win64

Autodesk® Civil 3D®

Version: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

This suite of apps contains a variety of productivity tools which will help save design time during the different design phases of a project while working in Autodesk® Civil 3D®

• Label at Intersection

• Label Update

• Label at Vertices

• Relink Xrefs

• Profile Thickness

• Profile Thickness Update

• Parking Count

• Parking Count Update

• Pavement Quantities

• Pavement Quantities Update

• Pavement Quantities Edit Rename Parts

• Dry Utility BIM

• Highlight Pipes

• Pipe Network Quantities

• Polyline Lengths

Good Civil 3D tools provide a good civils implementation! This app provides some GREAT civil tools!

IDEATE SOFTWARE BUNDLE - TRIAL

https://apps.autodesk.com/RVT/en/ Detail/Index?id=6300849540418062

587&appLang=en&os=Win64

ENSCAPE™

https://apps.autodesk.com/RVT/en/ Detail/Index?id=2629595860167800

202&appLang=en&os=Win64

Autodesk Revit

Version: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020

Firms that deploy Ideate Software widely enjoy increased benefits. Install all Ideate Software solutions from a single download and empower your team to be less focused on time-consuming Autodesk® Revit® activities.

• Ideate BIMLink is the Revit data management solution that lets you pull and push volumes of information from a Revit file — Architecture, Structure, and MEP — into user-friendly Microsoft® Excel® with speed, ease, and accuracy.

• Ideate Explorer for Revit gives you an easy, intuitive and profound way to search, filter, quantify and select elements in a Revit model. Revit is about project data, and Ideate Explorer has lightning-fast Revit data discovery and manipulation features.

• Ideate Sticky allows you to elegantly link and easily update non-BIM data from an Excel, Word, or PDF file into your Revit project.

• Ideate StyleManager addresses the challenges of Revit style management. Unorganized and duplicated styles can cause publishing errors, end-user confusion, and even Revit model performance issues.

• IdeateApps is a set of Revit applications designed to increase the productivity and efficiency of the entire project team. Ideate Apps includes Ideate Renumber, IdeateQuickSelect, Ideate SmartDelete, Ideate XRay, Ideate SpellCheck, Ideate Annotate, Ideate SheetManager, Ideate Clone, Ideate Align, and Ideate ViewCreator.

If you use Revit, you should be using Ideate apps. If you don’t know who Ideate are, where have you been?

Autodesk Revit

Version: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

Enscape™ is a real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin for Autodesk® Revit® (also for Rhino, SketchUp, Archicad, and Vectorworks). It plugs directly into your modeling software, giving you an integrated design and visualization workflow across all project phases.

Enscape allows you to work intuitively with accessible rendering that requires no prior specialized knowledge to use. You can design, document, and visualize simultaneously from one model. It is the easiest and fastest way to turn your models into immersive 3D experiences.

Used by renowned architecture firms in over 150 countries, such as Foster + Partners and Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), Enscape brings your designs to life and enables you to give clients an unparalleled design experience. A simple but great app with many drawing/project implementation uses!

Typical main use cases are: -

• Design review

• Internal presentation

• Client presentation

• Quick rendering creation

Enscape is one of the most well-known architectural Revit plugins. If you’re not using it yet, give it a try. You’ll be impressed.

Please let us know if you have some news to share with us for future issues. Likewise, if you are a featured product or news item user and would like to write a review, we want to know. Drop me a line at: shaun.bryant@cadfmconsult.co.uk. We’d love to hear from you!

Michael