How to deal with AutoCAD users?

[panta rhei]

A dear, old friend of mine has a problem. She's not willing to participate in this forum, so I'm transmitting & filtering (including reformulating) some of her concerns, in the hope of advice.

Today we discussed importing AutoCAD files. Technical issues aside:

?Why do these AutoCAD users claim that they use real-world coordinates, if they cannot define the unit??

- Another architect she is supposed to work with sent her a site plan. She imported it and found that in scale 1:200 the site was smaller than a finger nail. I explained that obviously the architect had used metres, not millimetres and that she shoud have told VW to use metres, too. But ?how was I supposed to know that??

-- How was she?

-- When the other architect sends her floor plans etc, are they going to be in metres or millimetres and how is she supposed to know?

--- If an AutoCAD unit can be a millimetre, a metre or a light year, where's the real world in AutoCAD world?

Edited March 16, 2009 by Jeffrey W Ouellette

[bonus]

Hi Panta

This is a common problem with site plans in AutoCad, as it doesn't handle scales as smoothly as VW.

I often get site plans scaled down to 1:500 or similar instead of drawn in 1:1 and presented in a 1:500 viewport.

Don't even try to explain to a AutoCad user what a VW layer is and that you can set different scales to them and still have them all visible. They will be offended and feel personally attacked and claim they work professionally compared to your hobby.

I have too deal with these problems more or less every day and can give your friend just one advice.....let it be!

[Ray Libby]

Every application that imports .dwg has this problem.

Autocad users can even draw with no units defined.

There is no way in a .dwg to find out what units are used until import, .dxf does have a way.

[panta rhei]

Right. Thanks, bonus & Ray.

Now, my friend (the design architect of the project) only works in millimetres. Tomorrow she's likely to get the file into VW and in due course & ripeness of time she'll send The Design to this drafting service architect with a bigger CAD-program.

Is AutoCAD able to register & scale the data? (They're working in ?real world? x/y coordinates, ie. state projection.)

[bonus]

Register and scaling the data is no problem.

We just had this issue today. The site constructor was upset because we sent him a Autocad file in millimeters, called us names and claimed it's obvious site plans always are in meters. So we had to scale it down. Doing the opposite is no problem. Real world is no problem either.

[David Bertrand]

As I recall, the basic unit in AutoCad is 1 inch. Every other scale is a hack of some kind.

Conversion is simple if you know the basic unit of the drawing being sent. If someone sends you a drawing from other software with the basic unit of a foot, you have to enlarge the drawing by 12 and it works fine.

I have little experience with metric, but I'm sure it's the same story: find out the ratio of the drawings and then reduce or enlarge accordingly.

[monkey]

i have had this problem quite a few times, was once sent a drawing from an AC user and could not get it to scale properly until after many many many attempts i found out it was using decimetres as its unit.

i have also had a couple of instances where i could not scale their drawing at all no matter what units i selected on import making the drawing useless. you can get round this by manually scalling the drawing if you have an area that matches in both drawings that you know the measurement of, but this can cause all sorts of problems with symbols etc etc.

i have never been called by an AC user and told they cannot scale my drawing, so i see this as a problem on their side!

[jan15]

Of course this same type of problem occurs when one AC user sends the DWG file to another. In case that's any consolation.

In the Autocad world, the user does the heavy lifting. And that becomes a matter of workman's pride. Software that does the arithmetic for you is seen as effete -- like a car with electric windows.

[David Bertrand]

jan15 is right. The effete AutoCad user is expected to calc the scale and not depend on the software. Once you understand the concept, it's really very simple. You memorize all the scale multipliers and then multiply whenever you insert a block or size the text.

I get more confused dealing with Vectorworks scaling, believe it or not. I think it's because there are so many places that you have to set scales.

[HP Sauce]

...it's really very simple. You memorize all the scale multipliers and then multiply whenever you insert a block or size the text.

In my experience that system is terrible. I'm not saying it doesn't work or that VW is perfect, just that it's not remotely streamlined.

I came from a VW background to an ACAD office a little over a year ago that used such a system (our ACAD "Drawing Tools" help sheet is attached as an example of such wasted man hours), and sufficed to say we're completely switching to VW - mainly to do with all the stupid crap like this we go through. Just to add text?!

Won't even get started on CTB files...

PS Not knocking you, David, just the system.

[David Bertrand]

I feel your pain highpass

That Drawing Tools.pdf brings back memories. Actually, I rarely used such help aids, because we had a standard drawing of every scale saved on the server. I would copy the appropriately scaled drawing over and rename it to the job name, etc. Then I could just start drawing.

I could go back to AutoCad tomorrow, after six years, and not have a problem with scale. Unless I use Vectorworks constantly, I usually forget some setting and end up with a weird result, and wonder what's going on.

I think people's brains are just wired differently and this explains why some are more comfortable with one or the other interface.

I'm glad you decided to go with Vectorworks because AutoCad drawings tend to be ugly, mostly because of the fonts and lack of filled shapes, and there's just nothing you can do to fix that. It's so refreshing to get the desktop published look in my cad drawings with Vectorworks.

[HP Sauce]

I'm glad you decided to go with Vectorworks because AutoCad drawings tend to be ugly, mostly because of the fonts and lack of filled shapes, and there's just nothing you can do to fix that. It's so refreshing to get the desktop published look in my cad drawings with Vectorworks.

Exactly! I think it took all of ten seconds for the boss to realise the benefit of objects actually having a fill in drawings. Certain people here still can't get their head around the fact it doesn't have to be a 3D "surface" to have attributes other than line weight.

You're quite right about the brain comment; one fellow here refuses to use VW in standard white background mode despite it not working well vice-versa or my explanation of VW being more like "drafting on paper" than ACAD's "Oregon Trail" approach. Oh well, works well enough for him i suppose.