When working in Revit, it's important to work with flat CAD files. Copy and paste the following commands one after the other in your AutoCAD file.
Command 1:
(command "_change""_all""""p""e""0""")
This command will change the Z-coordinate for all the objects to zero.
Command 2:
(command "_move""_all""""""0,0,1e99""_move""_all""""""0,0,-1e99")
This command will stretch the objects in the drawing in the Z-plane up to infinite and then down to zero.
Why is this important?
We often assume our AutoCAD files are flat, and this is mainly because we often look at drawings from a top-down view. Though more often than not, CAD files are not flat with lines drawn all over the place in 3D space. This causes a lot of problems especially when working in Revit as lines may appear at a different elevation than expected. Coordinating with these non-flattened files becomes a nightmare. The only solution is to flatten the files.
What's most frustrating is that the out-of-the-box tools in AutoCAD may not be effective in flattening drawings. For example, the FLATTEN command doesn't actually work every time, leaving lines floating in 3D space.
Instead, to flatten your drawings 100% every single time, initiate the two commands listed above one after the other. Simply copy and paste each one into the command line and hit run. If the commands don't run automatically, press enter to run the commands.
After initiating the commands, your CAD drawing will be completely "flat" and can now save your drawing with peace of mind that your drawing is clean, ready for linking. Not to mention, all your teammates will love you for doing this.
Be aware that this will remove any 3D data and therefore if for any reason 3D data needs to be preserved, it is recommended to save this as a separate file before flattening.
Pro Tip
Here's a trick to draw "flat" CAD files every single time. Always draw with polylines instead of lines. This is because polylines are always horizontal, and changing the Z-coordinate of a polyline will change the height of the entire line. Lines on the other hand are drawn with two points and each point can have a different Z coordinate which means at least one point of the line can be accidentally elevated or lowered in 3D space. Customize your line shortcut to polyline. There is no particular disadvantage to drawing with polylines.
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