I believe that I am one of the minority in that I maintain the building model through the construction drawings. Perhaps, my rose colored glasses are too deep a tint, or I'm a "true believer" in the BIM concept. Tedious as it may be, the 3D building is almost achievable in VW except ... for the matter of sections!
As I see it, they can be done in three ways:
1. The tried and true method, cut a section or section viewport, convert to lines and then draft away manually. Slow, but very accurate.
2. Use section viewports and annotate like crazy.
3. Use section viewports with very little annotatation and assume that everything will get worked out in the details.
In my opinion, #3 doesn't work. For myself, I need to think through the construction as I draw. A section needs to be predicated on framing dimensions, material offsets, etc. This level of complexity needs to be accounted for in the section drawing process.
#2 also doesn't work. With half of your material in the annotation and half in the model, a change of any kind requires so much movement between views that it takes the fun out of drafting. Let's see: move a wall - switch to VP - annotate - move wall plate annotation, insulation, etc - go back to model view - move another wall ... laborious!
#1 works. But hey, why did I invest all that time in modeling everything if I only get to use it as a rough underlay. With the number of lines that I have to delete from the underlay, lineweight cleanup, and class rework, I could have redrawn the section from scratch (well it still takes longer - but not much!).
So, to this day, the section remains in my opinion the "bane" of VW. OK, I've duly expressed my opinion, and this is old news to most of us, so why am I bringing it up.
I'd really like to propose that Nemetschek take a hard look at the future goals for this side of the program.
If VW is REALLY planning to go the route of BIM, then:
1. We need a section display mode that allows interactivity. That is, a "stack layers" view that displays in section view (Sketchup has a good example of this, Archicad too). That way, you can see the building in section while being able to modify the elements.
2. We also need a floor and roof tool that utilize the same functionality as the wall tool i.e. be able to have multiple cavities that can be classed.
3. Finally, we need the ability for sectioned 3D solids to display a 2D fill (hatch, gradient, etc).
I know it's a lot to ask, but I'm looking way ahead and figure that the release of the most current version is the best time to ask for future functionality.
In the meantime, if interactive 3D sections is programmatically impossible, then we need to consider making the 2D form of sections more workable. To my knowledge, converting a Section VP to lines will now only convert the sectioned objects (not the background objects). In order to do this, one must consistently rescale the lines from 1:1 to whatever design layer they are working on - why not just export the lines to the right layer at the native layer's scale?
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Taproot
I believe that I am one of the minority in that I maintain the building model through the construction drawings. Perhaps, my rose colored glasses are too deep a tint, or I'm a "true believer" in the BIM concept. Tedious as it may be, the 3D building is almost achievable in VW except ... for the matter of sections!
As I see it, they can be done in three ways:
1. The tried and true method, cut a section or section viewport, convert to lines and then draft away manually. Slow, but very accurate.
2. Use section viewports and annotate like crazy.
3. Use section viewports with very little annotatation and assume that everything will get worked out in the details.
In my opinion, #3 doesn't work. For myself, I need to think through the construction as I draw. A section needs to be predicated on framing dimensions, material offsets, etc. This level of complexity needs to be accounted for in the section drawing process.
#2 also doesn't work. With half of your material in the annotation and half in the model, a change of any kind requires so much movement between views that it takes the fun out of drafting. Let's see: move a wall - switch to VP - annotate - move wall plate annotation, insulation, etc - go back to model view - move another wall ... laborious!
#1 works. But hey, why did I invest all that time in modeling everything if I only get to use it as a rough underlay. With the number of lines that I have to delete from the underlay, lineweight cleanup, and class rework, I could have redrawn the section from scratch (well it still takes longer - but not much!).
So, to this day, the section remains in my opinion the "bane" of VW. OK, I've duly expressed my opinion, and this is old news to most of us, so why am I bringing it up.
I'd really like to propose that Nemetschek take a hard look at the future goals for this side of the program.
If VW is REALLY planning to go the route of BIM, then:
1. We need a section display mode that allows interactivity. That is, a "stack layers" view that displays in section view (Sketchup has a good example of this, Archicad too). That way, you can see the building in section while being able to modify the elements.
2. We also need a floor and roof tool that utilize the same functionality as the wall tool i.e. be able to have multiple cavities that can be classed.
3. Finally, we need the ability for sectioned 3D solids to display a 2D fill (hatch, gradient, etc).
I know it's a lot to ask, but I'm looking way ahead and figure that the release of the most current version is the best time to ask for future functionality.
In the meantime, if interactive 3D sections is programmatically impossible, then we need to consider making the 2D form of sections more workable. To my knowledge, converting a Section VP to lines will now only convert the sectioned objects (not the background objects). In order to do this, one must consistently rescale the lines from 1:1 to whatever design layer they are working on - why not just export the lines to the right layer at the native layer's scale?
Thanks for listening.
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