CAD to BIM

CAD to BIM

Turns the CAD drawings in your Revit project into real Revit content. The lines on a drawing's layers become walls, floors, ceilings, roofs, columns, beams, grids, ducts, pipes, cable trays and other runs. Every repeated block becomes one family, placed at each spot it appears in the drawing, turned and mirrored the way the block was. Everything is checked first and can be tried in a rollback trial before anything stays in the model, the whole conversion is one Revit undo step, and the original drawing is never changed.

When to use it

• An imported or linked DWG plan has to become a working Revit model: walls from wall layers, floors and ceilings from closed outlines, columns and beams from the structure layers.
• A furniture, equipment or fixture layout drawn as CAD blocks should become Revit families: one family per block, with the right count of instances.
• MEP centrelines on the drawing should become connected duct, pipe, conduit or cable tray runs with their fittings.
• You converted part of a drawing before and need to run it again after the drawing changed, replacing only what the plugin created last time.

How to use

1. Open CAD to BIM from BimCode's plugin list inside Revit, with the project that holds the imported or linked CAD drawing.
2. Scan CAD. The plugin reads every CAD drawing in the project (or only the ones you selected in Revit) and lists its layers, blocks and curves. Nothing in the model changes.
3. Choose a workspace. The top switch has two:
   • Bulk & network studio - the CAD catalogue for whole layers and every block at once, the mapping studio for one rule at a time, and the MEP network for connected services.
   • Classic CAD studio - a large drawing preview with coloured layers and CAD text, layer-by-layer mapping, wall and opening detection and MEP size detection.
4. Map. Pick what each layer or block becomes: a wall type, a floor type, a duct type, a family from the project, a family file, or a new family built from a family template.
5. Validate, then run a Rollback trial. The trial really creates everything in Revit and then takes it all back, so you can read exactly what would happen in Audit.
6. Validate again and Create in Revit. One undo step removes the whole conversion if you change your mind.

Good to know

• Your drawing stays as it is. The plugin reads the CAD import or link; it never explodes, edits or deletes it, and never saves the project for you.
• One family for repeated blocks. Twelve identical desks become one desk family with twelve instances. Blocks at a different scale or with different content stay separate.
• Original block content needs AutoCAD. Keeping a block's original text and hatches inside the new family needs AutoCAD or Civil 3D installed on this computer and the CAD to BIM extraction helper installed for it. Without them, the plugin rebuilds each block from the lines Revit can see, or makes DirectShapes - text and hatches are then left out.
• Hosting is real or not at all. A wall- or ceiling-hosted family is placed on an actual wall or ceiling found under it. A family that cannot be placed correctly makes the whole run roll back with an explanation, rather than landing in the wrong place.
• Values are examples, not engineering. The MEP heights and sizes the plugin suggests are starting points to edit, not calculated design.
• Revit versions. Works in Revit 2025, 2026 and 2027. Property lines from CAD need Revit 2027.

The full walk-through is in docs/USER-GUIDE.md.

AutoCAD and Civil 3D are trademarks of Autodesk, Inc.