Thursday

An article about drawing standarts.

Post a Comment Nov-20-2008 | Posted by İbrahim Erda | Printable Version | Level |

Dear Daily Autocad readers,

Seeing some fresh and useful tips and hints in your daily autocad section is very happy news. It is also quite nice that other sites are also emerging just like yours, to show that people are really willing to share what they know. I don’t use AutoCAD that much anymore, as my current job involves project coordination between the employers and project groups. Because of our growing project volume, we are a growing project group. We specialize in coordination, control and management. We don’t prepare the projects ourselves. Our project contractors handle that. We therefore don’t have the time and technical capability to solve the project coordination problems our contractors face while using AutoCAD.

I suggest that a simple user interface managing project compatibility between different project groups needs to be created. In Russia, ArchiCAD is the program that is used widespread and in drawings the assumption 1 unit= 1 mm is made as the drawing standarts in Russia state. In Turkey however some work in cm, others in m and the rest in mm. Time is wasted using the scale command and editing annotations in order to make projects from different sources compatible.

With advancements in software and hardware, people are preferring model based 3 dimensional programs. Therefore, apart from using 2D in simple projects and schemes, we are moving towards a system whereby all projects and disciplines are held in one database. Autodesk’s new program Revit seems to promise a lot more than Architectural Desktop. These programs handle the layering by themselves as different stories are created, without bothering the user. It is a pity that layering is such a big fuss in AutoCAD. In projects using different CAD programs or international projects using the same program, unfortunately means a huge mess in layering. Although AutoCAD has layer filtering options, the names of the layers have to be organized beforehand. I have a suggestion on how to name the layers..

ANT-0701-A-WALL-BRICK

Where
Ant is the company code,
0701 is the company’s work code
A is the project discipline
Wall is the building element
And brick is the material type.

Fig.1

In larger projects, of course, file names will also be included because of the use of XREF. Talking about these issues will help other users to spend more time thinking on these matters. Maybe if a simple interface could be made, users will be able to simply specify the system they want to use in coordinating their projects at the very beginning.

İbrahim Erda, Mimar -İTÜ Works as a project manager in Russia.