If you have ever exported CAD or DWG files out of Revit, you probably know that Revit has its own way of naming and coloring layers. Now this can work in some cases, but in other cases it can be really frustrating. But luckily there is a solution where you can optimize the approach that Revit uses when it comes to naming and coloring layers. And also you can set up the hatch styles and so on and so forth. And in this video, I'm going to be showing you how to set that up. Let's go. Now, before we jump into Revit, just give me a moment to talk about today's video sponsor, and that is ZWCAD. So if you don't know, as the name would imply, ZWCAD is a CAD software that offers full DWG compatibility, familiar user interface with AutoCAD, complete commands, extreme speed when it comes to installation, and also opening files, hatches selection, and so on. It also supports powerful APIs and most importantly, it has a one time fee with a perpetual license, which is so rare with software these days. Now, if you didn't get a chance to catch it, I've created a whole dedicated tutorial on some smart features in ZWCAD. So if you want to see that, I'm going to link that video up in the cards above. And if you want to try out ZWCAD for yourself, I'm going to also include a link to their trial up in the cards above and then also down in the description of this video. Okay, so now without any further ado, let's jump into Revit. And here we are in Revit. So I'm just going to be showing you first kind of the default approach and just how it works in Revit. So I'm just going to go here to the File menu, go to Export and then go to CAD formats. And the first one is DWG, which is something that you would probably use if you use AutoCAD. Now here you would simply click on Next and then you would define a path to save this file. So I'm just going to name this one Floor plan Default. And then for the file type, I'm just going to leave it at AutoCAD 2018 and click OK. So let's check out what this file looks like. And this is the result. So you can see we have that same floor plan, but if I select any of the items, you will see that AutoCAD or Revit has used its own kind of layer names and so on to name that. So if I select this wall, it's a wall, this is a sanitary fixtures and so on and so forth. If I go here to Layer Properties, you can see that while we have all of these layers and there can actually be more depending on what's actually shown in the view. So it's only going to import the layers that it obviously has in the drawing. So in a lot of cases, this is not going to work for you. So now I'm just going to show you how you can customize the layer names as well as the layer colors. Now, if you want to customize these, you probably already have an idea of what you want to set it up as. So here, for example, I have this simple house project. And if I go to the layer properties, you can see I have set up some layers here. So we have our casework layer curtain, walls, doors, furniture, glass, plumbing fixtures, stairs, text, wall and windows. And I have applied the colors that they want to use. Now, this is kind of an arbitrary file that they have created. You would probably have your own kind of company system of or company naming convention and coloring convention for these layers. So right now let's say that this is our company convention and we want to apply this in Revit, okay? So here I have set up revit and AutoCAD side by side. And here I have my layers or layer properties showing. So now what I'm going to do is, again, repeat that same process of going to export a CAD format, a DWG format. Now here, before I click on the next, I'm just going to go to select Export Setup, and I'm just going to click here to set it up. So we have this in session export setup, kind of the default one, but you can create new ones. So I'm just going to create a new one called Test. Just for this simple demonstration. You can name it perhaps according to your company name or something like that. And then here you can see we have the option to set up layers, lines, patterns, text and fonts colors and so on and so forth. Now, layers are kind of the most obvious one, at least in this example. So I'm going to show you how to set that up. So here you can see we have the categories for all of Revit categories. And then I can just come in here and set up the layer name and color. So, for example, here, let's start with walls. So I can just find walls here and I can expand all of the wall categories. Now you can set it up in the projection and cut, and then you can set up the colors. So for example, what I would do here is I would just select this wall here. So this is the name of the layer I would come in here. And then for all of these wall elements, I would put in that wall. So let's paste this in and it's just going to apply that. Now, obviously, you would want to have different ones for your cut option. In this case, just to keep it simple, I'm going to set it as just simply wall. Now also something that you want to do is set up the color. Now, for color you don't have to select everything for color. You can just select one of them and as long as it's the same layer here, it's going to just apply that change. So here if I change this to color 70, which is the color that we have here in CAD. So if I say 70, hit enter, it's going to change all of these that have that wall name. And you can basically follow and do this for all the rest of the categories. So for example, in this case, for this simple example, we have also Windows. So I would come in here and for windows I would select everything, click here and then I would type in See window, hit Enter, do the same thing here, hit Enter. And now one small change I'm just going to deselect here. And we have this glass layer which I want to use for the glass part of the window. So here I would just type in Glass and I would repeat the same thing here. And there we go. And now we can just apply the color. So in this case for our window color it's 50 and for the glass color it's 170. So you just enter that numerical color value. Okay, so I'm just going to continue doing this and set the rest of the categories that I have outlined here. Okay, so it seems that I have set all of them up. Again, I was careful, for example, for doors to leave the glass as glass and then you can of course use different naming convention for plan swing or something like that or trim, so on and so forth. Now also we can customize the lines here. So if it's solid, what should that be in DWG and so on. For patterns, for example, we can do the same thing. So here I can pick out a pattern that I want to use. So here if I set this to perhaps send pattern, we can see how that solid fill will look like in AutoCAD. And then you can set the rest of these up. I'm not going to go too much into that just because it's a lot of work, it's not something too complicated, but it does take a long time. But I think it's worth kind of the afternoon you take to set this up because you can then use it afterwards whenever you want. So now once we have everything set up, I can just click OK. So it's going to save that export setup and I can use it in the future and I can just go here to next and I'm just going to set this at floor plan. And instead of default, let's call it custom and hit OK. And now it's going to save that. So let's open it up and this is what we get. So as you can see here, if I select this, it's set to our furniture layer. It has the color that we have set it up with. This is a door. Yeah. So as you can see, this one is door as well. We have our plumbing fixtures, so that's set up as a plumbing fixture for the glass. Here in the window, you can see we have that blue for the glass and yellow for the window itself here for let's see if we select this. This is set to curtain walls. So everything is set up as curtain walls. The stairs are stairs. Now here I haven't configured the railing. So as you can see it used up that handrail. And also, I guess for the wall, I left something out. And then we also have some of these saved as a wall layer. So let's see where that is. So, yeah, this was saved as kind of its own wall that's used. And then this is casework, for example. So just by defining those, defining that menu, you can pretty much customize the way that Revit is going to output those DWG files. And of course, if you take the extra time to set up everything, well, you wouldn't get these issues that I got here. You can see we have that sand set up as our hatch pattern. So if you have, for example, something that you like to use in CAD, but you have a different standard that you have to follow for Ddwg files that you export, you can kind of set that discrepancy up in those settings. So there we go. I hope you have enjoyed this video. If you want to get access to all of my Revit and in this case CAD project files, you can find all of that on my Patreon page, which I'm going to link up just below this video in the description and then also up in the cards above. So if this is something that's interesting to you, check it out. Thank you for watching guys. Make sure to check out my website, BalkanArchitect.com for more Revit courses. There I have over 120 hours of content and I'm adding more each week. Make sure to subscribe for more videos. And also I've added a video over there that might interest you as well.