Workgroup References - Multiple Users

[patrickhubble]

Hi all,

Is it still an issue to have to close down files for other people on other networked computers to update the drawing if it is workgroup referenced? I am asking as we have just received the commission for a large project and will need to have a team of documentors working on the one building.

If there is a requirement for the drawing file to be closed before updating is possible, this may be a serious limitation to the documentation of large buildings (and interrupt a productive workflow).

Thanks for your help,

Patrick

[Christiaan]

File doesn't need to be closed anymore. See:

http://download2.nemetschek.net/www_misc/VW12.5_WhatsNew.pdf

[wezelboy]

It still needs to be saved for changes to show up though.

[patrickhubble]

Thanks very much,

A great improvement to the program (we have 11.5 at the moment and will upgrade to 12.5).

I assume that 2 or more people cannot work on the same file, so I am thinking of the following file structure:

For the Complex:

- Gridline and Site Boundaries File

- Site Plan File and Setout Plan File (which references Gridline and Site Boundaries and dwgs below)

Then for every Block in the Complex:

- Ground Floor Plan File (which references Gridline and Site Boundaries)

- Ground Floor Internals (which references Ground Floor Plan)

- Ground Floor Ceiling Plan File (which references Ground Floor Plan)

- Then for every Set of Repetetive Floors in the Block:

--- Floor Plan Architectural (walls + major openings - references Gridline File)

--- Floor Plan Internals (which references Floor Plan Architectural)

--- Ceiling Plan (which references Floor Plan Architectural and Internals)

- Roof Plan (which references Gridline File)

- Elevations (which references all of the above)

- Sections (which references all of the above)

- Details (which references Sections)

Then a Master Drawing which contains:

- All sheets in the Drawing Set which references all the above drawings

Is this method similar to what you're using for your large projects? In the end, I may end up with 60 or more individual files and 1 Master Drawing, but this allows flexibilty for people to work on different areas of the Complex (for example, the Interior Designer can work on some rooms of Level 3 of Block C without affecting the workflow of the Architect working on the services ducts of the same floor). I am very interested to hear your thoughts.

I am also assuming the live sectioning and elevations works well with referenced drawings. I'm interested if repetetive layering is possible as well (ie if the same referenced drawing can represent multiple floors), if not I may need to organise it so that each floor is represented by a set of drawing files.

I appreciate all your comments, and am interested to hear your views,

Patrick

[wezelboy]

After working on one fairly large project with VW12.5 the main thing we have gotten from it is to split up the master sheets file into seperate files.

Section viewports work somewhat the way they are supposed to, but are seriously hampered by a couple things-

1) They take can take FOREVER to render, and while they are rendering, VW is unresponsive. The "Update all viewports" command does not work with larger projects, so you cannot leave a file to render overnight. This is a huge time sink for a workstation, unless you have the cash for an extra seat and maybe an intern to babysit.

2) While you can supposedly assign objects that occur beyond the section line to a seperate class, this feature does not work, which leads to wonky line weights in your sections and elevations. There are workarounds, but they are cumbersome.

I'm not sure about repetitive layering. I haven't tried it. I imagine such a thing would be better implemented by symbols.

[patrickhubble]

Thanks,

Is the advantage of splitting up the master sheets the fact that it can become very large, and hard to work with? I just thought from a Batch Print point of view it would be quite useful.

Pity about the sections - I suppose I could allocate a 0.1 x lineweight multiplier to the section to get thin lineweights, but then we have to trace over the section cut (but we may have to do that anyway).

[wezelboy]

There's the big file thing of course, but we seem to do a lot of work in the viewport annotations on the sheets. If they are all in one file, you can only work on one sheet at a time (you can copy the file and manually merge changes later if you are really desperate, but I wouldn't make this a practice)

That's just how the workflow in our office has evolved. I'm sure there are better ways to do it.

[patrickhubble]

Thanks wezelboy,

I'll split the master document up - should be no great drama to do so.

I was a bit concerned about Vectorworks capability of doing large elevations - but with the feature in 12.5 of hiding abnormal lines this should be easier.