topic Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework in Documentation

Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Wed, 17 May 2023 07:17:46 GMT

Hi,
we are evaluating usage of ArchiCAD in our small Interior Design studio. One of the topics, which i didn't find proper answer for, is creating construction documentation of custom made pieces of furniture and casework such as coffee tables, chest of drawers, kitchen cabinetry, etc. Sometimes, it is enough to use interior elevation. But most of the times I would like to have 3 views of the piece, and sometimes even cut, with deatiled dimensions. All of it on one sheet for every piece of furniture.
In 2D AutoCAD workflow, I am using external references to achieve this. In Revit, there is assembly functionality to achieve this. I was trying to find functionality to solve this problem in ArchiCAD, but was not successful. It seems I would have to create 3 interior elevations for every piece of custom made furniture.
Does anyone have a solution for this problem?

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 18:36:16 GMT

Interesting question. If you have your furniture modeled there are basically two ways.

1. You can make drawings like for normal building element with sections, elevations or 3D views. Then you can just do Layout for each piece of furniture consisting different drawings.

2. Firstly I was thinking that you want to do it in the more automatized way. If yes you can try to make GDL out of your model and then try to do schedules with elevations and plans. I'm not sure if dimensioning will be automatic but you can always add later. Note that schedules also can show basic dimensions and show other important info like a number of elements used in the project, rooms where are placed etc.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 19:44:55 GMT

Hi kzaremba,

thanks for the suggestions.

1. this is solution, which I am trying to avoid, because at least in Revit, this leads to having too many sections in the whole project, which leads to unnecessary complexity. It might be manageable on ArchiCAD, I am not sure.

2. I tried this in Revit, but wasn't successful. Sure you can have three views of the furniture piece, but the object view and annotation abilities are too limited for proper CD creation. I am not positive ArchiCAD will be better, but I will try when I will be testing it.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 05:05:07 GMT

Tomas,

For custom joinery / casework I have a separate file for each item where I can annotate etc and just hot-link in the storey that contains the model elements into the floor plan.

Scott

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 08:09:03 GMT

sboydturner, this is exactly what I was looking for! The problem for us is that I am evaluating ArchiCAD START edition, which doesn't support hotlinked modules. It seems START edition can do 95% of what we require, but the last 5% will be problematic. It seems Revit LT is the same way.

I have one more question. When using this workflow with full version of ArchiCAD, can you batch publish to PDF from multiple files at once?

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Barry Kelly — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 08:32:14 GMT

Tomas wrote:
I have one more question. When using this workflow with full version of ArchiCAD, can you batch publish to PDF from multiple files at once?

No.
If you have multiple files you have to open each one to publish anything.

However, you can have multiple publisher sets in any one file, and you can set them all to publish at once.

Barry.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 11:27:55 GMT

Thank you for the information Barry.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 11:44:41 GMT

Tomas wrote:
can you batch publish to PDF from multiple files at once?

There are several ways of building up more complex documentation. Usually, If our documentation exceeds 50 drawings we do separate file just for Layouts and link bunch of pln/pmk to Documentation File. Then you control the whole doc from one place. It still takes bit more time to update Drawings but it's done mostly automatically (AC opens other files in the background).

Hotlink shall also do the trick. Definitely, it will be easier to manage than GDLs.

About scheadule, you can draw almost everything as an annotation. But I'm not sure what the lifespan of this info. Defiantly if hotlink method is fine for your workflow I would stick with it.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 16:54:43 GMT

Since I am evaluating ArchiCAD START edition which doesn't include hotlinked modules, separating furniture into independent files is not an option. I will try to use views on schedule when trialing ArchiCAD, but I know I ran into some problems when trying this workflow in Revit LT. One of the problems was that you cannot create a cut in the schedule - only views.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 10:13:30 GMT

Tomas wrote:
separating furniture into independent files is not an option

Why? We do it for big and small projects whenever we got multiple instances of the same element. It's a very efficient way to in terms of management and performance of the project.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 10:44:06 GMT

kzaremba, ArchiCAD START doesn't support hotlinked modules and has also "Limited External Drawing support". From what I understand that means having other files linked into your master model. Am I understanding it wrong, are "hotlinked modules" different than what is known to CAD users as "external references"?

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 13:29:14 GMT

Tomas wrote:
ArchiCAD START doesn't support hotlinked modules

You can just download a trial of the full version and run it in demo mode. SE is dedicated for one man jobs. Anything bigger I'd suggest going into the full version.

I went thru SE functionalities and it doesn't have:
- Publisher either - it's a critical function handle bigger sets of drawings.
- Multicore support for unlimited numbers of cores - Not sure how many SE supports but if check if you will be able to use full CPU power if you stick to SE.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 14:51:59 GMT

Well I would definitely like to jump into full version, but the cost is prohibitive for us. Lack of Publisher is even more important restriction. Lack of multicore CPU usage is not a dealbraker. It's a bit frustrating to see the software be able to do 95% of what we need, but the last 5% is only available in the full version.
I am now gathering information before we test the trial version. Thank you all for giving information, this thread has been helpful.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Eduardo Rolon — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 20:10:47 GMT

Tomas,
Just to make you aware that you can "buy/rent" the full version by month you don't need to buy the hole package.

Re: Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 21:46:46 GMT

Tomas wrote:
95% of what we need, but the last 5% is only available in the full version.

This is why it's cheaper. Its main customer is solo practitioners. As far as I know, the price range is always better compared to others. Renting is always a solution.

You have to consider also an efficiency boost..