File Setup When Refrencing Files

[kwhitsett]

Hello there,

I am a new VW user with much more AutoCAD experience. In my previous office we organized our job files in this format:

plan1

plan2

ie1

ie2

ee

roofplan

then each drawing as a separate file: A1, A2, A3, etc. So the A sheets referenced the interior elevations which referenced the plans. These were all just dumb 2d line drawings,

With VW it seems like you would want less drawing files so that you can still use the batch plot feature. Also, because we are drawing in 3d, that seems to complicate things. Furthermore, we would like different people in the office to be working on different parts of a project.....

Any suggestions on how to organize a multi-story residential project in a relatively small office? Should each floor be a separate file? Should one file be the "print" file that references all of the floor files (with plans, sections, elevations, etc)?

Thanks for the help and the suggestions!!

[Jeffrey W Ouellette]

K,

Check the BIM sample project, Ellicott Heights:

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

Start with reviewing the 'BIM in Practice' white paper, then download the rest of the files of you want to see it in action. Be forewarned that it is a BIG project, many MBs.

[dcont]

k,

I think you are on the right track. There are a many ways that you could incorporate workgroup referencing with VW depending on how you draw a typical project.

What we do is break down a project by plans/elevations/sections/details/etc... where each of those get a separate vw file. I then reference all those files into a print set vw file where all my viewports/drawing labels/ title blocks live. This way I can open this print set file, update and print the entire set while others are working on the referenced files.

This seems to work for us and is quite flexible for the many different project sizes we have. If we were to ever get a very large project where it would not make sense to bring all the referenced files into one print set file, then I could imagine adapting this method to have multiple print set files such as Arch, Mech, Elec, Struct.

Just keep in mind that this is something that you will need to see what works best for you. You could break the files down however you like.

Edited November 7, 2008 by dcont