Freeze Drawings - Section views into Drafting Views

My architecture team is trying to build a library of common section views as drafting views to insert into projects, instead of recreating the wheel every time. However, they have some 5 years worth of sections to make into drafting views.

I’ve been looking at way to automate the process using Dynamo but also saw that there used to be an add-in in older Revit versions call Freeze Drawings that will do exactly what we need.

Does anyone know if there’s a version of this add-in for 2021 / 2022 or if someone has made Dynamo scripts that will do basically the same thing? It would save hundreds of hours of labor.

Thanks!

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My suggestion would be to export the view to CAD, reimport, explode, and apply line types.

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iHello @jmayesP84R8 …i would try detailcurve by curve from clockwork

The Revit REX SDK samples has a freeze drawings sample extension called DRevitFreezeDrawing if that should interest anyone willing to build and test. I saw it the other day, but haven’t really looked at it.

The other way with exporting to cad and reimporting, exploding and saving as rfa would be a good workflow. Might need some manual work though, but probably worth the hassle if you are building a typical details library.

@Nick_Boyts , you’ve rarely steered me wrong so I’ll try it out. The only issue I see with this is that there might be hundreds of sections to import/export. I’m cautious of the time it would take to write and execute the code as well as the RAM requirements…
Do you have any experience with this to give me an idea how long it might take?

That’s a valid concern, and I can’t guess at how long it will take, but I would assume that this is going to be a huge one time push and then maybe up to a few details at a time for future maintenance. You don’t have to do them all at once either. You can do them in chunks to keep things manageable.

Here are a couple of scripts that I created that will take a view, export it out to DWG, reimport it back into the model as a Detail View and then convert to a Legend View. The first script has checkbox list of views, but your section views have to be named so you know what you are picking. The second script will allow you to select the views from the browser. You must select the views first before running the script.

Neither one works with 3D views though. It keeps wanting to orient the view to a 2D view when it brings it back into the model. Maybe these will help lead you in a good direction.

Create Legend View from View.dyn (149.6 KB)
Create Legend Views from Browser Selected Views.dyn (114.3 KB)

Through a combination of the above answers, a billion videos and tons of failure, I managed to come up with a script that works!
Essentially I had to select a view, export it to a CAD version, then re-import it into a drafting view. The graph has a UI that allows you to select the section you want, where to saved the CAD file to, then gives you the option to import it or not, depending on if you need to make alterations. It’s a bit of a mess path-wise and looks like tangled phone wires, but hey it works!
My next step is to give the user free-reign on naming convention, exporting/importing without color and hiding all the detail components (user request) before export.
Thanks for all the help, guys!
Export-Import Sections.dyn (128.5 KB)