What's the best workflow when working with CAD

General discussion
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Hi everyone,

my name is Jason Tian. I am the BIM manager of SvN Architects and Planners.
I have encountered this problem while our landscape team are still working on AutoCAD for their elements. however, they want their products to be always matching the location data from GIS software. however, when we load their CAD file in, it will always be a huge headache saying the file is out of the range for 23km.
So i found a walk around, i created a new container CAD file, and use xref to “attach” not “overlay” the landscape file to the new file. move the landscape file block to 0,0 where it matches our architectural origin. then if i load the CAD file in, it does not show me the annoying notice anymore. and the CAD file will be “LIVE” file instead of cleaning up their file all the time.

is there a better way to achive this? for example to use shared coordinates? but i do find them not matching UTM sometimes. let me know your thoughts please.

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Hello @tjxme ,

The AutoCAD connector does have an advanced setting for receiving relative to a User Coordinate System (UCS):

image

This may help your workflow, if you save a named UCS (corresponding to the incoming shared coordinate) in your CAD file, set that as your current UCS, and then use the reference point setting = Current User Coordinate System when receiving your GIS data.

We’re aware that reference point coordination between gis and building models is an important and currently under-supported workflow, so hopefully we’ll have more sophisticated coordination solutions down the line :slight_smile: (perhaps an Automate function @jonathon)

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will have a test on this method soon, it will be really helpful if there is a video tutorial too with this workflow. it sounds very excited.

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