Examples???

[Anonymous]

We've been using Archicad for about a year in our office and still aren't satisfied with how our construction drawings look on paper. I would love to see examples of carefully drawn plans, sections, elevations & details that have good line quality (weights and hatches). If you prefer not to post here, contact me and you can send via email. I don't want to copy information, just get an idea of how you've accomplished what you're proud of. I've attached a sheet of drawings we created using Autocad and we'd like to have the same quality in our Archicad drawings as well.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm still searching.

[Anonymous]

Have a look at 3DCADCO (Florida AC distributor)
Since the site is flash based I cannot give you a direct link - but navigate to 'gallery' (top row) and then 'construction drawings'
They have PDF drawing sets of the six projects in the attached image

[Anonymous]

Seeing someone else's drawings won't help you with how they are accomplished.

It is nearly impossible (or at least unrealistically difficult) to get the construction details you show in your example to be drawn automatically from the model. But I assume that is not what you are looking for.

What I have always done for frame construction is to make all the walls, floors and roofs with the same section fill and add the details with 2D parts, fills, etc. This is not really too difficult since once you have a few of them done you can keep the details in your template file to be copied and adjusted in the sections. This works well whether you are doing 1/4" wall sections as you have shown or 3/4" wall sections or 1 1/2" to 3" details as many of my clients do.

For the uniform fills I make a copy of the empty fill and call it "! Section Fill" (the exclamation point is to put it at the top of the list). For composite walls I simply male multiple layers of this same fill. The result is that all the walls, floors and roofs clean up to each other leaving a simple heavy outline in section.

There are ways to get more detail in the sections but these would actually interfere with what you are going for.

Oh, and one other thing, pens and colors are a bit different in ArchiCAD than in AutoCAD. For one thing there is no "by layer" setting in ArchiCAD. You should get to know pen assignments and pen tables to get control of the quality of the output. This is too big a subject for me to go into depth here, but the most important tip I can offer is to assign pen numbers to particular functions. For example I typically use pen #1 for the outlines of cut elements (in plan or section) and pen #2 for the fills in those cuts.

There has been quite a bit of discussion of pens and their uses here so I recommend doing a search. There is probably some good stuff in the Wiki as well.

[Anonymous]

Thanks amonle, I'll check out the website you suggested.

And Matthew, that's exactly what we've been thinking for how to accomplish what we're looking for. I understand that we will not get an "automatic" section/elevation drawing, I'm just trying to make it a efficient as possible.

Thanks again, and I look forward to more suggestions.

[Anonymous]

I like Matthew's workflow on this issue. Elsewhere in forum, someone mentioned that their workflow on details
is to create an independent detail and strip out all the lines, then turn on the fill borders (normally not visible in sections).
Similar concept to Matthew, in that you rely on the model generated fills, not model generated lines.
Of course you will still add in all the studs, etc.

Snap

[Arcadia]

Check out Cadimage Tools "rapid detailer" tool which has heaps of useful objects based on fills hatches and lines for overlaying onto your basic archicad section. I use this extensively and I get sections and details that are (in my own biased opionion ) better than the Autocad example you have shown. I too was worried about the quality of the 2D documentation before using Archicad but now I would have to say that my documentation actually far exceeds my previous drawings in detail and quality and realism.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Arcadia. I'll check out the cadimage add-on. We already use their stair builder, so I'm sure it's a great product. Would you mind posting an example of your section drawings? I'd love to see them.

John