Drawing Setup / Templates / Standards / etc

[carpalmer]

I'm ready to set up my small office's CAD standards, ie: Sheets, layers and classes so that I don't have to go through the excercise every time I start a new project... what's the best info resource out there to help me on this? I've looked at the available books, but they seem very basic and cover loads of stuff I already know. The Model Setup and Issue Manager seem too convoluted to me... any good threads out there please?

Many thanks,

Carpalmer

[Jonathan Pickup]

if the books available are too basic, maybe what you need is an experienced consultant to guide you.

[Jeffrey W Ouellette]

Or, you can take a look at the new BIM sample file on our website.

http://www.nemetschek.net/architect/bim.php

[Charles Chandler]

If you're looking to "define" a new set of standards, I would definitely use an AIA-based system, such as the Architect standards, as the starting point. In each instance where there is an existing AIA name for something, if you use this name instead of making up your own, your drawings will be easier to understand to others, and their drawings, to the extent that they use AIA-based standards, will be easier to understand to you. Remember that as time goes on, there will be an increasing amount of electronic transfer of data. Back in the old days, when everybody just printed out their drawings and red-labeled them to each other in these funny-looking long tubes, the internal structure of the drawing was just a personal preference. But as electronic data exchange becomes the norm, the internal structure of the document gets exposed, and finding your way around in a document that uses standards that you don't understand is a nightmare. Because of this, at some point in the future, you may actually be required (by clients and/or governing agencies) to supply electronic documents that adhere to a specific set of standards. These standards, in the US, will most likely be AIA-based. If you're already using AIA-based standards, this will be easy for you.

If you're looking to figure out how to "manage" standards once they've been set up, you might want to take a look at the Merge Organizations plug-in. Once you've set up one document the way you want it, you export the standards information to an external file. Then you can just apply those standards to other documents. This makes it easy to keep all of your documents compliant with the standards you've defined, even as the standards invariably change over time.

http://softwarecustomizationservices.com/default.php?page=products&subPage=products/merge%20organizations/Default

[carpalmer]

thanks Charles, will read up on your plug ins...

in the mean time has anyone out there tried them and would like to comment?

Regards

Carpalmer