Revit has Freeze to make sketches a breeze!

Did you know that Revit has a freeze tool? It's a handy dandy little tool that lets you export the view you are in into a 2D drafting view. This is great and lets you quickly sketch your ideas, modify a few lines and send it off to a client/customer for approval. Once you get the OK you can then make those modeling changes!

If you are working with any version up to 2017 you should have this tool under as part of your extensions. If you are working with 2017 bummer, they removed it and are working on including that functionality natively. There is a post about it here.

(Personally exporting a DWG and Importing is the opposite of convenient.)

Here is the nitty gritty! (You must have Revit extensions installed to use freeze! These can be found on your Autodesk account for download.)

Open up Revit and get to the view you want to freeze! Navigate to the Extensions tab on your ribbon and locate the tools button and expand it.

Select the view you are in or pick the view from the list.

 

 

 

Press Options to set up any export options or how you want the exported view to look when you come back in.

Once you set your options press OK and wait for the magic to happen!

You'll get a dialog about when that export is complete. Press OK and head over to your project browser to find your new view. You see it goes under drafting views and that I even call out the view as (Frozen). If I tile my windows I can see my 3D live Revit view on the right, and my frozen view on the left in blue. It's all one big block at the moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is my least favorite part. I actually have to do a partial explode of this drawing if I want to convert this into 2D lines that I can edit. But after that, I am good to go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of things about this tool.

Good things:

It's pretty easy to export a DWG without going to the export dialog.

• It makes doing quick sketches a breeze.
• Great for getting people comfortable in Revit while not "messing" up your model.

 

Not so Good Things:

• CAD Stuff in my Revit model.  This can be partially mitigated by setting it to standard AIA, or another format of your exporting choice. There are still linetypes and filled regions from AutoCAD. Do this for lots of views and you have a problem, one or two views and you are probably OK.
• Exploding - May not be necessary if you are just adding to the view instead of taking away. Exploding is what adds all that extra stuff to your Revit model so use with caution.

All in all its a pretty good little tool and its great to have in your back pocket when you need to do some quick sketches and don't have AutoCAD or don't want to use AutoCAD.

I held off all this time trying not to make a Mr. Freeze pun .. so instead I'll leave you with a Mr. Freeze GIF.