Using a consistent layer naming philosophy

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our course where we're preparing our CAD drawings to go into Revit and as you can see, we've got a new CAD drawing in AutoCAD 2018, and it's 02_OFFICE_ReceptionArea.dwg. As usual, you can download that from the website to follow along with the videos. Now this particular chapter, we're going to look at layer management in our CAD drawing before we take it into Revit. Now, it's always a good thing to have a good layer naming philosophy before you even consider taking any CAD drawing into a Revit model.

I've got the drawing open as you can see in the model space and that's basically what would get taken through into your Revit model when you either import the CAD file or you link the CAD file. What we need to look at is our layer naming philosophy. So I'm gonna go to the Home tab on the ribbon. Into the Layers panel, I'll click on Layer Properties, and jump into the Layer Properties Manager. Now you'll notice there's quite a few layers in this particular drawing and they actually adhere to the American Institute of Architects CAD Standard, AIA.

And as you can see there, you got various ways and means of obviously adding information to the AutoCAD drawing. For example, S-COLS is Structural Columns, S-GRID is Structural Grid, S-GRID-IDEN is the bubbles at the end of each grid line, and you've got things like TITLETEXT. Now, the TITLETEXT is the title block that is being created within obviously this particular AutoCAD drawing. So if I jump into something like, say, Layout1, like so, you can see that there are no page setups at all.

It's all just one layer. There's no page setups set up, so I can close that for the moment. That comes up automatically when you actually go into any layout in newer versions of AutoCAD. And as you can see, what I've got there if I look, just close the Layer Properties Manager, is I've got my title block. All I've got is a layer there called TITLETEXT but no title block set up. So what I need to do is go back to my Model tab, first of all, so that we can see the actual drawing and then go back to my Layer Properties.

So that particular layer could perhaps be renamed and it might come under something else. If we come up here, for example, you've got A-ANNO-DIMS, so you've got your annotative dimensions, for example. So you might want to give it a different name, something like A-TITLE-TEXT. So you might want to give it a different name in the layer naming philosophy. So you just select the layer, right-click, and you rename the layer. So the layer now might become A, for architectural, dash, TITLE, and then you might put a dash there as well for TEXT, like that.

As soon as you rename that and then click on Name once, click on Name twice, as you can see now, it goes up towards the top of the list here, like so. Now it's up to you how you work with these layer naming philosophies. You can either follow an industry standard, which this one does. It follows the American Institute of Architects Standard or you could perhaps follow your own company standard or internal standard. It depends on how you work and it might be a project by standard. But make sure that your layer naming philosophy is consistent.

So you can see there that all of those layers are nice and consistent. They've got their prefixes, their descriptions, their suffixes, and so on. Make sure that all of that is set up correctly before you even consider importing or linking your CAD file into Revit.