Qiuck dumb Auto Dimensioning question

[danielf]

I've noticed that the options for auto dims is 'centerline' or 'face of exterior'. But 'Face of Stud' or structure should be an option as that is the most logical way to dimension given the sequence of construction. Am i missing a settings option for that?

[Keith W]

I suppose the problem is that the "face of stud" is not a defined entity: imagine a building with several different wall styles (as typical): depending on the number of elements in a wall, it might be anything but obvious where to dimension from. One could try to define a "dimension to" element in the wall style definition, but you might have different "dimension to" needs for different purposes... I think it's actually conceptually thorny.

I suppose you could have the autodimension tool pop up a dialog wherein it asks what the "dimension to" element of each wall style it encounters is. But you'd want to be able to save that list (and edit it), for complicated buildings, so you don't have to do that every time...

Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

Keith

[danielf]

Not sure that you are overthinking but rather thinking in regards to how this software is designed and so how there are limits to achieving the auto dims function I discovered in using the tool.

My interest is in using CAD tools which are designed to enable real world practices for design & construction documents.

In this particular case, and perhaps its a trivial one given the full breath and scope of the whole program, it would seem to me that those in the R&D of the software could have backwards engineered this tool looking first at real world dimensioning practices in order to aim the creation of a tool for those practices....or if the challenge was to great to produce a tool to do that then at least narrow its marketing of this iteration of the tool to indicate its limited usefulness. It?s good for early stage stuff, but certainly not useful for more precise and necessary dimensioning requirments for CDs.

Edited July 3, 2009 by danielf

[bcd]

Hi Danielf,

No you're not over-thinking. The components of a wall can reside in different classes. Just turn off all component classes except the wall stud / core and run the auto-dimension command and all will be well.