Today, I am dealing with two clients who were kind enough to provide CAD drawings of items I need. Severely scaled down. Seem to be different scales on the X and Y axis.
Yes, I know I can rescale both axis separately, but I simply can not wrap my tiny brain around why there would be any reason to scale the actual drawing to any other scale other than 1 to 1.
There are so many options. Paperspace (though I haven't used that for years myself) can show the info at different scales from what I understand. Printing options can accomplish a similar task.
So, please enlighten me: is there any reason (other than stupidity) to scale original CAD drawings?
There is no other reason than stupidity. It's sort of like the idiot engineers that want to rotate my survey so it fits on their paper better.
Well yes and no, consider that Autocad is in essence a unitless system. This allows you to set your own personal preference for the "base units" that autcad is using. This is the conundrum between civil and architecture, where our base units are feet (US or International) unless of course we live in the rest of the world in which case it's meters and theirs are inches (and I don't know for architects in the rest of the world probably meters also. Then of course there are the scourge of the earth GIS guys who want to rubbersheet everything to make it all fit in their nice little container. It's enough to drive a sane surveyor silly.
PS
I have to rescale architects drawings all of the time to make them of use to me, however in all fairness I insert their drawing into mine as an xref and rescale the xref.
True, Autocad is unitless..... but when one has to dimension parts, there has to be some sort of basis for distances, radii, arcs, etc. And when dimensions are shown, that tells me that the parts have (or had) some sort of scale in order to be able to do so.
What I find even stranger about a number of these drawings is that if one labels one of the entities, the label shows the full size dimension. If one types "di" (for distance) the scaled distance appears.
IMO, there is NO reason to scale down ANY drawings. For that matter, there isn't any reason to not use "real world" coordinates for a reference. As much as Google Earth (and other imagery products) are being used today, it's just silly. My $.02.
[USER=791]@John[/USER]
Try to embrace the layout (paperspace), it will make life so much easier along with assigning scales to drawings and not only helping with your drawings but with editing them at a later date.
T
Randy Rain, post: 414048, member: 35 wrote: Well yes and no, consider that Autocad is in essence a unitless system. This allows you to set your own personal preference for the "base units" that autcad is using. This is the conundrum between civil and architecture, where our base units are feet (US or International) unless of course we live in the rest of the world in which case it's meters and theirs are inches (and I don't know for architects in the rest of the world probably meters also. Then of course there are the scourge of the earth GIS guys who want to rubbersheet everything to make it all fit in their nice little container. It's enough to drive a sane surveyor silly.
PS
I have to rescale architects drawings all of the time to make them of use to me, however in all fairness I insert their drawing into mine as an xref and rescale the xref.
For what it's worth, I really wasn't referring to this type situation.
Randy Rain, post: 414048, member: 35 wrote: (and I don't know for architects in the rest of the world probably meters also.
Surveyors and engineers use metres, architects use millimetres here.
Randy Rain, post: 414048, member: 35 wrote:
I have to rescale architects drawings all of the time to make them of use to me, however in all fairness I insert their drawing into mine as an xref and rescale the xref.
No need to scale the xref just set your drawing insert units to feet and set the drawing insert units of the architects drawings to inches. That way when you xref in the architects drawing to yours it will automatically scale the architects one.
I think all the issues surrounding sharing and scaling of drawings can easily be solved if all surveyors, engineers and architects used this method. No scaling, grids preserved, little potential for mistakes with scaling which happens alot.
It's not just scaling issues.
Passed a survey of a road junction on to an engineer for design.
Later had a call from a survey crew asking about my survey as the coordinates they had put them way out in the ocean.
It sort of felt as though "I didn't know my job" from the conversation.
I asked them to send me a copy of the design.
Engineer was working on 2 jobs at once and had taken my survey and pasted it out to the side, well clear of his other job.
Sent his design off to the construction who blithely went ahead and coordinated job from it without even looking at the coordinates and realised they would be off the coast our tiny island.
Clowns!
John, post: 414041, member: 791 wrote: Today, I am dealing with two clients who were kind enough to provide CAD drawings of items I need. Severely scaled down. Seem to be different scales on the X and Y axis.
Yes, I know I can rescale both axis separately, but I simply can not wrap my tiny brain around why there would be any reason to scale the actual drawing to any other scale other than 1 to 1.
There are so many options. Paperspace (though I haven't used that for years myself) can show the info at different scales from what I understand. Printing options can accomplish a similar task.
So, please enlighten me: is there any reason (other than stupidity) to scale original CAD drawings?
Nope - unless you count total non-comprehension as something other than stupid.
Totalsurv, post: 414077, member: 8202 wrote: Surveyors and engineers use metres, architects use millimetres here.
No need to scale the xref just set your drawing insert units to feet and set the drawing insert units of the architects drawings to inches. That way when you xref in the architects drawing to yours it will automatically scale the architects one.
I think all the issues surrounding sharing and scaling of drawings can easily be solved if all surveyors, engineers and architects used this method. No scaling, grids preserved, little potential for mistakes with scaling which happens alot.
"...architects use millimetres here."
Seriously?! Millimetres? That is an absurdly small unit to use for building-size structures.
Jim in AZ, post: 414091, member: 249 wrote: Seriously?! Millimetres? That is an absurdly small unit to use for building-size structures.
Our architects use mm here. Tasmania
But then we are only a small island :yum:
I do all my drawings in AutoCad's default of inches. Makes it easy for plotting.
Architects sometimes call wondering what scale I'm using. It probably screws up the coordinates when they scale it up by 12 and not to mention coordinates and North mean nothing to an Architect.
I've never seen different scales on x and y
Hi jacking a little bit. What's the benefits of using paper space? I've only been taught to draw in model space and scale drawing accordingly. I would assume paper space really shines when cutting multiple plats for route surveys that have to be drawn at different scales.
TXSurveyor, post: 414106, member: 6719 wrote: Hi jacking a little bit. What's the benefits of using paper space? I've only been taught to draw in model space and scale drawing accordingly. I would assume paper space really shines when cutting multiple plats for route surveys that have to be drawn at different scales.
Paper space can allow you to set up borders, title blocks, legends and such in a more standard fashion.
Many people control their drawings by the title block, borders and sheet sizes.
Paper space can allow that portion of the drawing to be simpler.
The unfortunate thing is that for some the border is more important than the actual location of the drawing and they lose the connection to the real world trying to "fit" the drawing to the border instead of the other way around. This is particularly more of a paper space issue (not saying it should be an issue, but some don't understand the importance of actual coordinates).
I have heard people rave about paper space. I have not used it enough to get used to it.
But, since we are on the topic of paper space, perhaps someone will know the answer to another question. Some drawings I get seem to have paper space set up with some items (boarders, whatever) which happen to be on the same layer as the items I'm interested in. When I've looked in paper space, I was unable to find the extraneous items in question.
Any thoughts?
John, post: 414066, member: 791 wrote: True, Autocad is unitless..... but when one has to dimension parts, there has to be some sort of basis for distances, radii, arcs, etc. And when dimensions are shown, that tells me that the parts have (or had) some sort of scale in order to be able to do so.
What I find even stranger about a number of these drawings is that if one labels one of the entities, the label shows the full size dimension. If one types "di" (for distance) the scaled distance appears.
Have you checked to see if the UCS is correct? If they've rotated the UCS in 3D it'll cause things to label one way and scale another.
Stephen Ward, post: 414125, member: 1206 wrote: Have you checked to see if the UCS is correct? If they've rotated the UCS in 3D it'll cause things to label one way and scale another.
Don't think that can be what's going on. At least on my end. We use Autocad light (don't think light has UCS).
Sounds like the issue is related to aligning the original to something that had unequal z values. I have seen this very situation where dimensioning a line or listing it's cad properties gives the same length but using the distance inquiry gives a somewhat shorter length. Only happens when Osnapz is set to 1 thus yielding a "horizontal distance" while the underlying geometry is tilted. It probably happened on the other end, someone used the align command to align 2d geometry to 3d points without setting osnapz to 1.
.....
So, please enlighten me: is there any reason (other than stupidity) to scale original CAD drawings?[/quote wrote:
This was an old method of protecting dwg from editing, but I belive there is a work around using flatten and explode
Paper space was often used incorrectly to set up borders and title blocks, then the coordinated info was moved to the border location which was often 0,0 at the lower left corner of the border. This of course blew up the connection to the coordinate system and caused the new position to be unusable. I haven't seen this happen on my end for quite some time.
If a drawing is scaled at 1/4"=1' or 1"=100' it should come into my drawing without issue as long as the coordinates are the same, then it doesn't matter.
For instance a reservoir drawn at 1"=60' from an engineer copies into my 1'=1000' base drawing no problem.
