Alternatives to Autocad

I practice residential architecture in the Los Angeles area. I am
currectly running Autocad 2004. I find it tedious and unintuitive. I
am not interested in investing in Autodesk's Revit. I would like to
know if anyone has experience with any Mac design/drafting programs?
How do they work when coordinating with consultants using Autocad?

 

I started on a Mac back in '90 on MiniCAD, now VectorWorks. I won
Graphsoft's Masterworks grand prize for some condo drawings I did for my
then employer in '92. It was only the second building I had drawn with CAD
at the time.

It WAS far more intuitive than acad but much less robust, and the
limitations on job prospects, the expense of the hardware, and the constant
issue of how to share files with consultants who were then just beginning to
draw with computers made me train myself on AutoCAD. DXF never worked
adequately back then, and you still see posts on the topic here from time to
time. You might try a Mac user's group.

There are still a few Mac-heads in the city, and a small pool of experienced
people who they can hire. I still get cards from my old employer seeing if
I'm looking for work, but I'd never go back to him or to the Mac or to being
an employee, despite the monopolistic tendencies of Adesk. You do eventually
get over the hump, and if you are good with a computer, you can get good
with Acad. (I might be teaching it in a local college next fall.)

 

Sorry to highjack the thread, but . . .

Michael,

You would probably be in a good position to comment on this.

I get a lot of drawings of building sites from ACAD drafters that have
none, or very few, of the 3d points I require to use in Terramodel for
the preparation ofa site terrain model which I require for automated
grading using, for example, Trimble's Sitevision or GCS900 GPS-based
systems.

The drawings will usually contain blocks of text with no specific
elevation on the block itself, but describing in the text the
elevation required.

It is clear that the entire object of the acad exercise is to produce
a correct 2D drawing on paper, subject to currently accepted loose
standards, such as the placement of crossed lines representing a
"tic"? close to but not AT the location of the elevation.

Do you suppose there are some limitations in ACAD that prevent the
placing of a 3D point at exactly the correct location, or do you
suppose I am just looking at an education exercise here, to tell the
suppliers of the drawing what is required to make their digital model
as technically correct as their paper one has become to be accepted
as?

If the ACAD drafter/designer is learning LDD (isn't everyone just
"learning") then I get some really weird stuff.

Does ACAD not have a good way to visualize in 3D what you are actually
creating when you do this stuff, so you can see where your bad
elevations are?

Any comments?

- Tom

Happy Trails To You

 

I think you have a people problem not a software problem. A buddy of mine
who is prone to "Spoonerisms" coined the term "Slappy Droofing" (Sloppy
Drafting), although something else may be at work here.

Your problem may be that there is a tradition from the days of paper
drawings in architecture of "spreading out" the elements of a drawing in
order to improve legibility. This flies in the face of CAD practice which
attempts to use the "model" to extract precise numerical relations from the
precise placement of precisely placed objects in the drawing. This obviates
the need for all the memory work that we used to do on paper, and is one of
the obvious advantages of CAD. (The foremost being the Delete key.)

I have a routine on my site that is a 2d grading tool which is based on
precise placement of elevation markers. (I now look forward to grading
exercises, and astound my civil guys with my turnaround.) Given the
tolerances involved in site grading, I still often pull the marker just off
of the exact position for legibility.

An interesting and profitable routine for you might be one that takes the
numerical value in 2d and inputs that as the Z coordinate of a point for
your purposes. You could use some of my code as a framework for such a
routine, and blow away the rest.

 

Speaking as a consultant, I know of no Mac product that converts well to
Autocad. For that matter, the only PC program that I've seen work even
reasonably well for coordination is Intellicad. vDraft would probably
be OK, but it seems to be stuck at the R2002 level.

I've worked with architects who use ArchiCAD, Datacad, Vellum, and Chief
Architect, and in every case I've had to do a lot of extra work to get
the backgrounds usable and to make the text match the original. I've
tried a number of other CAD programs looking for a viable alternative to
AutoCAD. None have interoperated well enough for me to convert the
office.

If you move to a different program I would urge you to keep a copy of
AutoCAD around and do the conversion to the .dwg format yourself, or at
a minimum look at the the files you're sending out in AutoCAD to be sure
they look as you intend. Most jobs I've worked on where the architect
used anything other than an AutoCAD product ended up with a different
variation of the title block from each consultant. Some of us spend the
time to try to match the original (if we have hard copy to match). Most
use whatever the default conversion gives them.

Martin

 

Sorry. Forgot the last part.

Acad is pretty good at letting you view the model.
The VPORTS command splits the screen into an array of ports which can be set
to different views of the same thing. You could have one in plan, one as an
axonometric, and a third "on end", or plan in the Z dimension. This
combination of views eliminates all confusion about where things are in that
deep black Void.

 

I agree. Most likely a people problem, except I don't have enough
experience with ACAD to know this for sure.

Which is why I actually had some questions hidden in my post. I guess
I hid them too well - hahaha.

So ACAD can actually draw 3D points, but the reality is that most site
designers/drafters do not bother to use them. They are too used to
describing the project with lines and text in 2D, is that it?

How about the visualization process - does ACAD have something like
Terravista in Terramodel to easily show you a 3D rendering so you can
see where your mistakes are?

As far as the "text-to-point" or "block-to-point" functions, these
routines are already available and in popular use in Terramodel, but
why I asked my questions was to determine if it would be a good
project to embark on to educate the ACAD etc crowd so these would nopt
be necessary.

Rather than write obscure code in some "C"-like language (TML in my
case) that is then viewable in source to the world, I prefer to
DXF-out the questionable stuff and process it in a compilable tool
than I am slowly adding to that does all this identification,
interpretation and manipulation in my own completely separate software
tool, then DXFthe 3D points it creates back to Terramodel. No
restrictions or interface problems, and marginal additional work to
use.

I also do road work, and handle the spreading out of the surface model
vertical faces this way when I get the cross section templates from
the design engineers.

I had an inquiry late friday afternoon, passed to me second hand, from
a large consulting engineering design company requesting info &
guidance on the requirements of the automatic grading systems. I can
only hopefully presume that they want to improve the interoperability
of their designs with my company's and others auto grading setup
processes, about which they apparently know very little, but at least
they asked.

So this way I can solve the people problem, but I need to know that
what I will ask them to do in their drawings is feasible, logical, and
not overly time-consuming.

Happy Trails To You

 

You got me with that change in thread.

Okay - forget one of my questions.

- Tom

Happy Trails To You

 

See mine below interspersed...mb

Yes. Full Acad has 3d capability.

You have to use a mesh or 3dfaces or other 3d entities, but then RENDER will
do the job. HIDE aslo works. See my previous about VPORTS.

They may not have it in their fee to do 3d. It's much more work.

The first part is easy, the second doubtful, and the last one is the killer.
You might come off as a guy who wants to get others to do his work for him,
so he can spend more time on his own private beach... ; )

 

Michael,

Thank you very much for some useful comments on ACAD.

If they are already providing elevations on some items in their
drawings, then they are already drawing in 3D. If they are coding
text blocks indicating elevations at specific points, then all I would
be asking them to do is code a point with elevation instead of or as
well as the text.

If the coding is now automated to some extent for existing points
around the proposed new perimeter, as it should be since the elevation
& location info is coming from a surveyor's data collector, then I can
see the need for changing this automated process slightly for these
items, to add the points.

For the proposed new elevations, I can't see that adding a point at
the correct location is anything but easier than adding a text block
and typing in the elevation. I suspect that both will be necessary,
since they will still have to produce a correct-looking paper drawing.
A "text-label-from-elevation" function is quite quick and automatic in
Terramodel, and I assume as easy in ACAD.

The only place I can see anything taking any small extra amount of
time is in the correct placement of the points - at a line
intersection for, say, edge of pavement against a curb face for a
parking area, rather than merely nearby somewhere in space.

There are also some standards I would ask for, such as if they provide
a slope arrow, make it go from a point to a point - otherwise it may
be construed as wishful thinking rather than correct design, hahaha.

If I had initiated this exercise I would agree that is a valid
criticism of my desires, however I am being asked by the consultant
engrg company to tell them how systems like ours work and what they
can do to provide more useful drawings, not only for us but for
others, so I think they will at least make an effort to comply.

Another thing I find them fairly cavalier about is the exact location
of the things they are drawing. Not so much that you cannot always
scale stuff off the drawings without taking the dimensioning into
account, but as far as location within the property bounds. In order
to calibrate a sight for layout for GPS, we need co-ords & elevations
on 3 or 4 points around the job, and it is sometimes a pain to try and
get these when they are not repeated on the drawings I receive.

I just have to indicate that it is a nice idea to repeat these on the
grading drawing, not just the property drawing. It's also a good idea
not to change co-ord. origin willy-nilly throughout the drawing set,
or from phase to phase of projects, as I have seen done, with no
indication of this until you try to match drawings that have few or no
common points.

Again, I suspect that it is easier to draw something at a specified
location rather than one of your own random choosing, so I can't see
this adding much actual work, if any, to the drafter's day.

Thanks, again,

- Tom


Happy Trails To You

 

Didn't know that. Go for it.

 

On Sun, 1 May 2005 08:36:54 -0400, "Michael Bulatovich"


Hey - you're in TO (least york or leastside?) - haven't you got
something better to do on a sunday morning, or has the frost got you
stopped cold today?

I've just come back last year from 24 years in SE Asia - working for
Dagmar Constr. Markham Inc.



Happy Trails To You

 

Least York...hehe...I like that.

I'm headed to the Rex Hotel 'cause my kid's band is playing,
and then back to the office to write proposals.

 

In a previous post wwsmca says...

Do you need 3D? If not, then there are many programs that can save DWG
format files. For example I use Visualcadd -- a 2D drafting program
because I don't need 3D.

Many architects send me their DWG's which I usually have to clean up
before I can use them. The files have to be cleaned and layers renamed
because the drawings were poorly drawn in the first place, not because I
have problems with DWG format.