heavy manners Posted November 6, 2024 Share Posted November 6, 2024 Is anyone else working completely in 2D? Let's talk strategy and share some tips! I've been at my current small office in France for about 18 months now. I'm experienced in AutoCAD (2D) and Revit (3D) but this was my first stab at Vectorworks. We only work in 2D except wall objects that are in 3D but flat. As I had the most experience, I have become the unofficial BIM manager of the office, and I have to set up a workflow, reference and template files, and so on. I've experimented a lot and I try to balance the workflow imagined with the expectations and knowledge of my colleagues. I am very frustrated with the lack of very basic BIM tools in Vectorworks, like the ability to create custom plug-in objects (PIO) with parameters set by either instance or style. This is one of my biggest concerns, and I would like to discuss getting around that, for starters. Otherwise I'm generally interested in how you manage things like phasing (existing, demolition, new), doors and windows, quantities, how you use layers and classes and data visualisations... I have many solutions but many of them I feel are lacking so I am very happy to hear about other workflows. I'll try to update this thread with concrete examples in a week or so when I have more time. Until then I'm happy to hear from you and to build what I guess is a rather small 2D community on here (that I couldn't find by searching the forum). All the best! Quote Link to comment
E|FA Posted November 6, 2024 Share Posted November 6, 2024 I had 20 years experience using VW in 2D only, but without BIM data. Having transitioned from manual drafting, we set up each sheet as a separate VW file, and ignored Sheet Layers and Classes. We used Walls with Windows and Doors to draw walls and also used the Wall tool to draw sheet goods (GWB etc) in details so that corners would auto join. Everything else was drawn with 2D tools. I’ve moved “up” to generating 2D sheets from a 3D model. I don’t think I produce drawing sets much faster but there are definitely other benefits. Quote Link to comment
shorter Posted December 19, 2024 Share Posted December 19, 2024 On 11/6/2024 at 3:34 PM, heavy manners said: Is anyone else working completely in 2D? Yes! It is the most satisfying way to work! Quote Link to comment
heavy manners Posted December 20, 2024 Author Share Posted December 20, 2024 12 hours ago, shorter said: Yes! It is the most satisfying way to work! Happy to hear! How do you like it in Vectorworks? I like the graphical capabilities a lot but I find that the lack of some basic BIM abilities like assigning custom data to 2D symbols or controlling them parametrically really annoying. Also, how do you handle text? Coming from Revit, I am normally quite keen to annotate everything in the viewport annotation and treat the 2D objects on the design layers almost as if they were 3D objects. But this doesn't really hold in real life because you want some text to orient according to, and move with, objects, and besides, it's very useful to be able to see dimensions and labels as you're drafting. Now before I had the idea of trying to use two classes for everything, like one "work dimensions" and one "display dimensions" but that was way too complicated, so now I'm looking into ways of annotating almost everything directly on the design layer (this was also what most colleagues requested) but it gets really annoying when cropping or rotating viewports, and I have to have a separate class for almost all annotation objects because I cannot control them by placement (in which viewport etc.) but have to do it by class visibility. Just some rambling thoughts. Do you share these problems? Do you have others? Quote Link to comment
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