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Reflected Ceiling Plan Efficiency


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You create the floor plan on your design layers.

There are two classes that make RCP's rather simple to create as viewports.

Create the viewport - in the standard floor VP, set the Ceiling Main class to be invisible, and the Sills class to be visible.

Reverse those two classes in the RCP viewport.

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This is something we are discussing in my office right now. The method of using class overrides is how I would have handled this back in my ACad days.

We are having conflict where some people in the office would like to reference the plan into a clean file and draw the RCP specific information in that file.

The primary reason for this is to have one file for each drawing.

I think the ease of editing everything all at once in one file is a better option.

Sorry thinking in through in the post.

But I think that what is being discussed here is a better system and I will bring it up.

Thanks.

Jonathan,

Why do you prefer annotation in the design layer?

I do also but I need solid reasons to convince the people around here. And VW isn't helping because we have to scale the drawing layers so some people are getting weirdly sized arrows in their sheet layers--an attempt has been made to say all drawings will be drawn at 1/8" and printed at whatever scale they need to be. This obviously doesn't work. But we like rigor.

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I find text scaling in the annotations layer vs. design layer a bit confusing as well. On some text items you really dont have a choice if you want info linked to schedules you have to put them on the design layer (i.e.-spaces, door, window, ect) Which then you have to scale the text on your design layer (ex.: scale-4pt) to match your annotation text (ex: scale-10pt).

On the RCP discussion, I agree with Katie.

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And VW isn't helping because we have to scale the drawing layers so some people are getting weirdly sized arrows in their sheet layers

There is an ?advanced properties? button at the bottom of the OIP that can scale down (or up) items (like line weights or arrow-heads) in your VP.

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Why are you putting RCP elements in a separate file, eas?

I would do it all in one file and CLASS the RCP objects such as lights or light holders.

The idea is to use one file for a project, then use class and layers and the power behind both to control the view of what you need to print (or just show on screen)

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Katie,

We are working on fairly big projects and often have three or four people drawing at once. For that reason we can't have one file. We do a fair amount of workgroup referencing. This works well for our projects.

I agree that RCPs should be in the floor plan file--probably not one class though. I still have some ACad holdover that makes me like everything on a class to have the same line weight--just to keep things simple. So that means a group of RCP classes for soffits, act, lights, other fixtures.

I floated the idea of controlling RCPs through the viewports to our standards person and she is really stuck on one sheet per file. I think it has something to do with looking in a folder and seeing how many drawings there are in the set.

I will keep working on her!

Amy L. thanks for the tip I will investigate.

Edited by eas
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I have the same experience, with a large team working on a large project you could easily have every floor and every reflected ceiling plan in seperate files and workgroup reference between them for the revelent information. This workflow is particularly useful in the crunch times when redlines are being picked up by multiple interns or cad techs.

I think the preferred workflow is dependent on the scale of the project.

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It now makes sense - I didn't realize you were working with workgroup referencing.

You're right - I wouldn't put everything in a single class. I suggested to class the objects, but did not intend that to mean class everything in one class.

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So to print an entire set, you would have to open each file individually? ugh! We do the reverse with work group referencing. We have individual files for the design layers and then bring those in to a master file for printing. All our sheets and VPs are set up in there. That way we can have as many people working on a single project as we do deign layers plus one working on the master file. works great for crunch time efforts.

Edited by dcont
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dcont

So you have one file for printing a whole set?

I like this idea if you can use batch print--can you?

How many sheets do you typically have in a set?

Does this ever cause problems when you need to print one sheet and the print file takes forever to load?

I am _really_ interested in this idea.

thanks

(I agree about the ugh--I used to open all of my files and close them as I printed which was tidy but took a while. And of course doesn't work in VW because of the open file limit.)

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We have individual files for the design layers and then bring those in to a master file for printing. All our sheets and VPs are set up in there. That way we can have as many people working on a single project as we do deign layers plus one working on the master file. works great for crunch time efforts.

We'll, thats brilliant, I hadn't thougt of doing it that way.

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Yup. one file for printing and batch print works. We typically have about 15-20 sheets per project, about 10-15 megs so it isn't that big. I could imaging that if a project were very large we could have a few master files to print from, Architectural master, MPE master, etc...

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I lied, follow up questions for you dcont.

1. Do you have sheet layers in all of the files or just the print file?

2. Where are you putting your notes? Are they in the design layer or in the annotations?

3. How long does it take your print file to load? We have found just referencing in 6 or 7 files will make a drawing really slow to load.

thanks!

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We use one sheet layer per sheet of a set, I think that makes sense. We keep the sheet layers only in the master file. We put our call out notes in the design layer not in the viewport annotations. The only thing we put in the annotations of a viewport is a drawing title with a number.

Tip on workgroup referencing: I set my workgroup refs to update manually, that way when I open up a master file, it doesn't try to update the resources all at once. As one needs they can update the master manually and select specific files to update so that you are not updating files that are already current.

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