Explore the process of integrating CAD files into your work, focusing on the differences between the Import CAD and Link CAD options. Uncover the intricacies of using these two methods, their implications on your work, and the best instances to use each one.
Key Insights
- Import CAD and Link CAD offer two different ways of utilizing CAD files. Import CAD creates a static element that won't change once imported, while Link CAD, similar to an xref in AutoCAD, can be reloaded and re-referenced from the external file.
- Link CAD is often the preferred method as it is easier to manage in the long run. While Import CAD can be challenging to remove once imported as you have to find every instance of it, with Link CAD, you can easily manage links and remove them from the file.
- When using Link CAD, consider the positioning of the file, often going from origin to origin to ensure proper alignment. Once linked appropriately, the CAD file can serve as a foundation for creating your existing model.
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Our next step now is going to be to bring in the CAD file and you can see here I'm sitting on my Level One view and I am in the 'Insert' tab and that gives me two options. We have 'Import CAD' and we have 'Link CAD.' If we use 'Import CAD, ' that means I'm going to import a static element, meaning it's never going to change.
Once we import it, that's exactly what it's going to be for the life of the import in the file. If we use 'Link CAD, ' it's going to be what you guys might refer to as an xref in AutoCAD, and it can be reloaded and re-referenced from the external file. And these both do operate two different ways. So the 'Import CAD, ' like I said, is just a static thing and it just drops in the file.
But it's also hard to get rid of after you've imported it, so you kind of have to find every instance of it if you've copied it around or anything like that, and it can make it trickier to get rid of. When we use 'Link, ' it's easy to get rid of because we can just go to 'Manage Links' and remove it from the file. And so I like this one for this purpose because we're not going to be exploding it and trying to use that line work for anything; we're just going to use it as a reference.
We're going to use 'Link CAD.' If I go to 'Link CAD' here, I can go to my BIM 301 folder here that we made that shortcut for originally, and then I can go ahead and I can say Existing As-Built CAD File. That's one of the files that was provided for you in our dataset.
And sometimes we'll change this to 'Black and White, ' but in this case, because we're going to be drawing in black and white and then we are going to have a color background, I think it's easier to have this stay as a color element because now we have a reference of what we've drawn over the top of versus what we haven't. And so we'll leave this as 'Preserve, ' and then the other thing we want to look at is the positioning.
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And so we talked in the last video about going from origin to origin, and that's what we're going to do here. So you can see it says 'Auto—Origin to Internal Origin.' And so if I use this one, then it'll allow me to go from the origin point to the origin point.
I'm going to leave this all the same and I'm going to click 'Open.' Now because that origin point did match, you can see that we do have them all lined up perfectly and now we've got our CAD file LinkedIn and ready to be used as our foundation for creating our existing model.
