Working Drawings

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steven
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Working Drawings

Post by steven »

Three months into the transistion from Acad to HD and never a dull moment. Up to now I've been producing 1 to 3 sheets of drawings in HD for a project. Mostly schematic design concepts.
Now - I feel it's time to produce a set of Working Drawings in HD. I would like any advise or hints in producing a set of drawings that would probably be between 25 and 35 sheets total. Architectural, Structural, Civil, Mechanical, and Electrial drawings. As with any project i know there will be changes down the road. What should be my organization be up front?
thanks
steven

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alexwhite
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Post by alexwhite »

I have started moving projects with more than sheet into HD too. My last few projects have been 10-12 sheets with multiple scales.

With my first projects, I relied heavily on Sheets to be used as layers... so one Drawing would contain several sheets, and that is how I controlled visible objects. My sheet stack started to become rather long. Plus I started having problems with the sheet precedence (top sheets over lower sheets) that was complicating snapping with fills and dimensions. So I would work around this by re-organizing the stack, placing the active sheet on top, locking sheets, etc. I wished that HD had a paper space layer command built into the sheet function.

On the last two projects I have migrated back to layers for this kind of control. SO far it is working better. I don't believe the layer stack order effects snapping as Sheets did. I have three sheets "NEW" "EXISTING" and "DETAILS - for differing scaled details". The only thing I wish for now is a layer control box, similar to the sheets box, that could be a floating panel, open all the time, to allow for instant layer selection and operations. I still think some sort of layer grouping would work great, so that several layers could be turned off and on at once, similar to the acad function.

Setting master text and dimension sizes is helpful. The only difficulty I have noticed is working with different scaled drawings, you have to play with the text sizes to equalize.

The last thing I have noticed is managing overall file size. On my base system, which is a dual processor G4 Cube, with 1.5 MB Ram and a geforce 3 video card, I live through extremely long page file swaps (virtual memory via the hard disk) on routine saves. During this time I have to put the mouse down and wait for the save to complete. This can take 5-10 seconds which becomes really annoying. So when my drawing file gets to be > 1 MB, I find myself saving a new copy, then parsing out new sheets for that file... which becomes a little cumbersome managing changes.

I am waiting for the universal version of HD to coincide with Apple's new intel desktops (powermac replacement) this summer to upgrade my base system. Hopefully this will ease the file size limitations I am experiencing.

Alex
fat guy in a little coat

steven
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Wow!!!

Post by steven »

Ybalx, thanks for the reply.

This is diffently not what I wanted to hear. Up to now I've been doing 1-3 pages for basically schematic design presentations using HD. This transistion to working drawings is something I could probably figure out with time, but who in the working world has that. I spend more than half my time producing working drawings. And since this software was developed by architects I just assume that the organization of making mutiple pages for a project had been worked out. Especially with respect to going back and making changes to the original plan. Being new at this software I'm sure there are things that I'm missing.

Ybalx, could you go into more detail about the layer stack order that you talked about as an alternative to mutiple sheets.

Thanks

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Andrew
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Post by Andrew »

Steven,

In HighDesign Professional, Sheets offer a great opportunity of organizing a project in its component drawings. Think of a sheet as one drawing of your project, be it the first floor plan, the site, or an elevation. Each drawing can then be further organized into layers, which allows you a degree of control deeper in the project.

The classic example we use to explain the concept is this:
An architectural project is made of different drawings, such as the site plan, floor plans, elevations, construction details, etc. Each drawing can be placed on its sheet at its own scale. Sheets can be further organized in layers, which group similar items together, like furniture, piping, walls, etc., that is, layers group together items of the same kind, regardless of the sheet they are on.
It is like analyzing all the systems of a construction (layers), view by view (sheets).

The stack order of layers is not relevant, whereas it is very important in sheets. Objects on one sheet hide the others behind, just like a paper you overlay on the other drawings. Try drawing some filled hatches on different sheets, then reorder the stack using the Sheets palette. I am sure you will see how this way of organizing the drawing is much more powerful than using layers and the Arrange commands.

steven
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working drawings

Post by steven »

thanks andrew

I'll try that approach this weekend. I'm determine to make this transistion to HD happen.

Question......in doing the working drawings for a residence I use the base floorplan at different scales on different sheets. Such as site plan,floor plan, electrical plan, roof plan, etc. What is the best way to organize this with the thought that the floor plan might (probably) will need to be changed from time to time. Should it be a layer, sheet, or symbol.

thanks for the support

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Andrew
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Re: working drawings

Post by Andrew »

steven wrote:What is the best way to organize this with the thought that the floor plan might (probably) will need to be changed from time to time. Should it be a layer, sheet, or symbol.
I would not use a layer, and definitely not a symbol. A floor plan contains walls, furniture, technologic systems, etc., and by placing them all together on a layer you would flatten everything.

My advice is to draw the floor plan on a sheet named "Floor plan - Revision #1", using all the layers you need. When you have to modify it, you can choose two options:

A. Modify the sheet directly, so that the drawing represents always the latest version.

B. Duplicate the sheet with all its contents (Organize > Duplicate Sheet) and keep the old sheets as a history of the changes. Change the name of the duplicate sheet to "Revision #2" or use the latest modification date.

This is like a versioning system where you have all the previous versions of a drawing, and are able to get back to any of them in case the latest modifications must be discarted (i.e. late night edits made while watching Conan O'Brien). If you want to archive a version, you can use the File > Save Special > Sheet as New Document command to save the sheet as a stand-alone document. If your Sheets palette gets too crowded, you can use that command to archive old sheets and clean up your current project. Archiving and removing the old sheets also increases the overall performance and reduces save and load times.

When you have all the previous versions of a drawing as sheets, it can be useful to overlay them to check the progress of the project.

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TrevorML
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Post by TrevorML »

excellent description of the use of sheets and layers Andrew... pleased to see that I have been using HD the same way...

I was looking at this thread with the view of answering with my system but you beat me to it... pretty much the same... only yours is worded much better than mine would have been... tried in another thread on a very similar topic... to do with title blocks I think... but turned out a bit clumsy...

to me this seems so logical a way of using sheets and layers as it is simply an electronic version of the physical tracing paper set of drawings... I just put my title block on the bottom layer without the sheet specifics like drawing scales... north points.... drawing/sheet name/details/number... etc... then I can get everything to print out without having to mess around with layers as much... leaving layers principally as a means of grouping like elements of a drawing... test... dimensions... planting... hatching... walls... landscaping elements... etc

Also... the way you describe it makes sense especially for the different uses of the plans... electrical... roofing... building etc... as I always find it is best to have these all at the same scale and position on the sheets (as printed) so that it is easier to read and gives a cleaner and more consistent appearance to the complete set of drawings... something that seems to have sadly been lost in so much of the CAD based drawings one sees... with manual draughting with the old rotrings and tracing paper it was drummed into me to always block layout everything so that everything is balanced on the sheets as the CD's are as much a part of the designing/building process in architecture as the actual built form... old fashioned maybe but it is all a part of quality and care I feel...

cheers and sorry for the ramble... monday morning slow start here... :D
Trevor

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Re: Working Drawings

Post by jmartinarch »

Newbie here.
I see that this string of posts is 6 years old. Has anything changed with HD that affects workflow and sheet organization?
Do I understand correctly that each sheet has its own layers? for example, if on sheet 1, layer "walls" I draw the walls of a bldg, on layer "text-dims" I add dimensions and notes, room names etc.
Then I go to sheet 2, and do basically the same thing for say a second floor. The data or objects on "walls" layer is not somehow combined is it?
And where do you put the titleblock? Do you have one for each sheet? Or does it reside on a "universal" layer?
How would that work when you have different scales?
And I guess mixing scales on a sheet is not possible, right?

JM

macitect
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Re: Working Drawings

Post by macitect »

Hi JM,

As of yet there are no significant changes to the way drawings are organised in HD. It is important however to understand what a sheet is and how it (they) can be used to create pages. If you are familiar with Vectorworks I would make the comparison with their layers and classes where classes are in fact what every other CAD program refers to as layers. If not familiar with VW, then I'll explain another way. Layers work in much the same way they do in other CAD programs - you can attribute to them line weights, colours, line types, etc. Sheets organise sets of information and can be set to different scales. A bunch of lines on the same layer but on separate sheets will not interact, meaning that all your wall layer elements on ground floor and first floor can be edited independently, even if they are right over top one another (assuming that you use sheets to separate ground from first floor).

An important development a few years ago (after this thread began) was the introduction of project views. Project views are able to remember combinations of sheets and layers. This is the way I use to organise my physical sheets (or pages). So on a page you can have multiple sheets at different scales and different layer combinations (if for example this is how you manage reflected ceilings or finish plans etc.)

I doubt that the above is terribly clear, but if you would like a copy of one of my project files I can provide you one to dissect. Just PM me.

cheers,
derek

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matthew.Stanfield
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Re: Working Drawings

Post by matthew.Stanfield »

One thing that has helped me is to think of sheets in a similar way to viewports in AutoCAD. Keep in mind that there is not a one-to-one correlation, but if you want multiple drawings at different scales on a page, simply put them on there own sheet at the desired scale and arrange them on the page.
matthew.Stanfield
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FiELD9: architecture
Mansfield, OHio
http://www.field9architecture.com

jmartinarch
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Re: Working Drawings

Post by jmartinarch »

Derek, thanks for the excellent descriptions. Yes the word 'sheet' doesn't exactly capture its common meaning. And I was under the assumption that a sheet was what would be a printed page (and in some cases it can be). So your use of 'page' helped me see the distinction between the two. I haven't experimented with views yet but I can see it all coming together.
I am somewhat familiar with vectorworks classes and layers.

Matthew, thanks for the acad reference. As a 15 yr user my vocabulary and thinking are pretty contaminated!

So, where do we place our title block? If we have a simple set of 4-6 pages with a few different scales. Site plan, floor plans, elevations, Sections, Details. Can ther be only one sheet for the titleblock, or should there be one for each scale, or each page?

Another topic : symbols. I have placed some symbols and moved them around. Is there a way of selecting the symbol by other than the center of the symbol. I want to be able to pick a corner so as to more accurately place it. I have tried command click, alt-click, etc.... any tricks?

Thanks,
John

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matthew.Stanfield
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Re: Working Drawings

Post by matthew.Stanfield »

jmartinarch wrote: So, where do we place our title block? If we have a simple set of 4-6 pages with a few different scales. Site plan, floor plans, elevations, Sections, Details. Can ther be only one sheet for the titleblock, or should there be one for each scale, or each page?
What i have recently started doing, and am liking very much, is to create a sheet at 1:1 scale for the titleblock that contains all the constant information such as client name, project number, project address, etc... This sheet is used for every page.

I then create a 1:1 sheet for each page in the file that contains the variable information such as sheet title, page number, drawing title, etc... I also keep all my keyed notes and general notes on this sheet.

Then i have a seperate sheet for each drawing that will be on the page so i can more easily arrange the drawings and use different scales if i need to.

I then set up the Project Views for each page to quickly move between them.
jmartinarch wrote: Another topic : symbols. I have placed some symbols and moved them around. Is there a way of selecting the symbol by other than the center of the symbol. I want to be able to pick a corner so as to more accurately place it. I have tried command click, alt-click, etc.... any tricks?
Unfortunately, we can only snap to the key points of the symbol (i.e. corners and center point) not the elements that make up the symbol. Hopefully this will be addressed with next iteration of HD.
matthew.Stanfield
Principal Architect
FiELD9: architecture
Mansfield, OHio
http://www.field9architecture.com

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