AC-Teamwork, Hotlinked, Xref

[Anonymous]

We are working in a project using Hotlinked, Teamwork and Xref. This is a Condominium divided in 3 connected buildings. I create 1 plp for every building and hotlinked all of them to a master plp. Buildings A, B and C are just for design it doesn't contains any text, dimension, zones or detail.
557,000 sq. ft is our construction area and here is the problem.
We used to attach as xref our electrical/mechanical consultants design which came in Autocad to make our coordination plans which is reflected at Reflected ceiling plans, and roof plans mostly. The case now is that one of our new employees draw a lot of elevations in Autocad and merge them into our master .plp. That makes our file very slow and one of the options that we have to keep work faster is take out all the details from our master .plp and create a new .plp just for details and blow-ups. I know this sound like a mess because that forced us to import and coordinate every detail and blow up from another plp. does anyone have a suggestion to keep this project on track without loosing very good features of AC, PM?

Regards

[Andy Thomson]

For what it's worth, we do something similar for hotels, condos, buildings with podia, towers, big garages, etc.

the main diff. is that we have abandoned teamwork in favour of extensive hotlinked PLN's. One of these is a detail PLN.

We have just had a few too many teamwork disasters, and find that we are often changing workspace on the fly. With usually 5-10 people per team, this becomes a mess, and we always have people coming and going on projects to cover different roles when needed (ie. lobby designer, landscape, detailer, everyday cad people, etc).

Our experience is that the PLN is more robust and stable on a network, faster to load, and backups seem to be more reliable if somebody crashes.

To reference stories below/above the immediate work area, we cross-reference the different hotlinks in each section of the project - and then all detailing and 2D information, viewsets are added in the 'Master file. Section markers have twins in sub-level files (section-mod) and in the top level file (section) - again for cross reference.

This approach has been working very well so far.

Consultant drawings are usually a composite PLN - we bring all of their floors into as merged DWG (check option to import as library part), then explode all of the parts, line then up, save the pln as 'structural composite.pln' and repeat process whenever they update their DWG's - that way we don't have their attributes polluting our files. We bring them in on a storey way below, and ghost to snap/reveiw/make changes, etc. rolling the hotlink up or down in the floorspace to correspond with what's above.

We tried round trip DWG but that ended up creating far too many layers, it was a little scary to be honest, and very complicated on projects of this size. I wouldn't try that again.

A

[Anonymous]

Andyro,

Last night, I read your post from last month regarding the method by which your teamwork your projects by using hotlinks instead.

We are firm about a year and half old with 10 staff using ArchiCad mostly on Macs, but a few on PC all on a Windows server. Half of my staff are past AutoCAD users, so I have my work cut for me.

We have done about 5 projects and attempted using teamwork to some level on all of them. We have had some good and bad experiences with it. On my particular project I am hanging on to the solo method as long as I can, but that is wishful thinking for my 8 eight floor, 350K sf building. Eventually, I believe I will have to sum come.

So, your post caught my attention because I started doing some of the things you were describing your office does with hotlinks. Last month, I started splitting my model down into pieces by order of steel framing, buildings envelope and internal layout. These would be separate model files then linked to a composite. I may further split the last two models into smaller pieces to let teams work on the them separately.

I would like to hear more on your methods.

[Andy Thomson]

Splitting by assembly is a good method too, you can put each group of elements on separate master layers, we use a prefix X for hotlinks, like this:

x | mech
x | steel
x | wall-ext
x | core - (includes stairs, elevators, concrete core,etc)

But we typically split the model by program AND elements, ie.

X | Tower
X | Podium
X | Base (includes civil and siteplan)
X | Parking (sub levels)

All hotlinked files feed into the total project or 'master' file, which we make our viewsets in. BTW, for cleaning up sections (rather than unlinking) we do an extensive round of boolean intersections, these work, even though the parts referenced as hotlinks 'live' in other files).

These operations are done in the master file, with suspend groups on, and are applied to things like, concrete slabs 'penetrating' composite walls, structural beams (we model all with slabs) and floor slabs, etc. Booleans in lower level files do not carry over to upper level files, I believe because the boolean database resides with the PLN, and is lost as a hotlink.

We currently have 15 active projects, all well over 10 stories (up to 58 ), using this method.

A

[TomWaltz]

There was a really great tip on "Publishing to Module" as a Tip of the Month a while back:
http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/archiguide/TipOnPublishingToModuleFiles.html

The big benefit is that you are not directly linked to the PLN file, so you can include only the layers you want in the .MOD file. Also, making unrelated changes to the PLN does not give you the "Outdated" message all over your other files.

We've just started using it, and found all kinds of fun advantages. One of them was the ability to create end-conditions of apartments, varying exterior conditions, and ADAAG accessible variations off the same original unit published to multiple modules (just with slightly different layer settings).

[Anonymous]

Andy,
I like your fore thought. I have created master layers for respective modules as well and really like the control. I had learned quickly that I need to skip nested modules to eliminate circular references. As I remember my acad days, this was common in bad xref management.

What do you mean by BTW?

I'll ponder your explanation and see what I can come up with in a file management schematic.

If I have this right, you are not using teamwork at all?

Jim

[Rakela Raul]

By The Way = BTW

[Andy Thomson]

For the 58 storey project (a hotel), we had 4 different exterior massing options, referencing 4 different Ext.Wall.Pln files (could be one file with some layer management as Tom and Ignacio say), each option was on a different hotlink master layer, so we could easily toggle on or off the different schemes in the master file.

BTW - I have never had issues with circular referencing, in fact, if I work on a building with 8 identical floors, I will only work on the first and hotlink the upper 7 floors to itself, there is no problem with a PLN referencing itself as a hotlink...

Then hit update and all 8 floors are the same, and this 8 floor chunk of building can feed into the larger tower file, with no conflicts. The whole chain needs to be methodically updated though, something I am doing for a condo tower today to prepare a check set.

A

[Andy Thomson]

PS - 'save selection as hotlink' is awesome for balconies, etc. Then you can have one 'live' and the rest memorex, and change the one to get all the rest to follow....


A

[Anonymous]

I was wondering about a file hotlinking itself. Thanks for answering that too.