Construction documentation of custom made furniture and casework

[Anonymous]

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?

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

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

[Anonymous]

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?

[Barry Kelly]

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.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the information Barry.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.