Mathematical Closure
I get architect plans that show where house are to be placed on some of the subdivisions I have done.
Why clients want such complicated home plans amuses me.
There is a consistent ratio that shows the more offsets in the wall plan relates to the more the closure is out.
They never consider overhanging roofs and elevated patios and resulting drainage not working with the lay of the land.
Most of the time their location of the boundary appears to be altered so their plan will fit on the lot for any other reason than for presentation value.
I just let the client that I will make it fit on his lot and that the builder will put the pieces together within the area where I till him they go.
B-)
Well, thanks for all the great responses on this subject. This particular architect I'm working with today seems careful, and this is a simple project, so I'd like to work with him in an efficient way.
But the stories told point out that one can not assume anything. And, the stories also remind me of a problem we had years ago regarding stakeout, where I had set the points to be staked out based upon the endpoints of supplied linework, assuming that the linework accurately expressed what was intended to be built. I discovered discrepencies in the field, and we were able to correct, but not without alot of extra work, which of course didn't make the client happy. The bottom line was that the dimensions on the plan were supposed to be held. God knows if even the dimensions closed.
The XREF option sounds good.
Al
> Microstation has the answer. You can specify secondary units allowing you to see the length of any given line in feet, inches, vars, meters or light years. This would be a great feature in AutoCAD or its knock-offs.
So, how does this work? This sounds like what I was thinking. The primary units for the drawing might be, let's say, feet, and the model would be created so that 1 unit equals one foot. Then if an Architect got a drawing such as that, he could set the secondary units to inches, and everything he would see would be in inches? And if he dimensioned an element on the drawing, it would also dimension in inches? Sounds like a good system.
I agree this would be a great feature for AutoCAD, IntelliCAD, etc. to implement....
Sending a site plan to an Architect ALWAYS results in this problem. They will twist the site to "look pretty on their sheet" and they will blow everything up 12 times so they can label all dimensions in fractional values that NEVER add up to the total exterior dimension label. ALL of this is a given.
You soon learn to expect this. You must pre-plan provisions that will allow you to rescale, move and rotate everything back to the world. You will ALWAYS have to do this.
Why do they do this? Because they are Architects, and, unlike you (in their opinion,) THEY are PROFESSIONALS. You are simply a Line Bender and a Cadmonkey. Get used to it. I do not see this changing anytime soon.
Mapman...
So you allow external access to your servers?
If I were in the business, I'm afraid I would be a royal pain to the architect until they learned to do it right or refused to work with me any longer. I would send EVERY discrepancy I found in their plan dimensions back to them for resolution, and would not proceed until closures were consistent.
A recent example of a small misclosure even in the high end world of the WTC was shown in a [msg=257999]recent thread[/msg].
Servers...
> So you allow external access to your servers?
External? No. Since we do it all in-house. We have had several issues in the past where our data was actually changed by the engineers. So this is how we stop that.
If the file is to be sent out, I would hope there is a method similar to making it read-only for security. Possibly encrypted or maybe a "Lock" file routine? I'll have to look into that.
I have a good friend who is an Architect and he often recounts that there are 2 types of Architects. One group does the 'visuals' for presentation to the client. They do not care about scale or lot size or even the local building codes! Their job is to capture the client with fancy graphics. After they land the job it takes more experienced Architects to attempt to create or detail the plans with the building codes and actual construction dimensions. Often, there is a lot of friction between the 2 groups. One lives in fairy-tale land and the other in the real world. It is the sales Architect that get all of the glory. The detailers are considered second-class. What a world.....
To be honest, every software I use except AutoCAD (and its knockoffs) has this capability. You can change the units at any time in LGO, LisCad, GPSurvey, TGO or TBC to name a few. Microstation just gives you the ability to display two units at the same time. The software just has to be smart enough to really work in a system other than the random system AutoDesk uses.
You and your architect might want to explore the INSUNITS, INSUNITSDEFSOURCE and/or INSUNITSDEFTARGET variables discussed in [msg=200149]this thread[/msg]. Be aware that AutoCAD customary "Feet" units via the INSUNITSDEFSOURCE and INSUNITSDEFTARGET are (I believe) specified to be International Feet.
