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Revisions Best Practices

archislave
Enthusiast
Hi, I would like to hear how others document revisions to various sheets. The best thing about BIM is having a lot of automatic updating of drawing titles and sheet text. I see pointing out revisions to specific sheets and placing as an overlay on the sheet in the title block still a manual process.

Are there more automated ways to handle these revisions?
Archislave



archicad 26.0 US, M2 Macbook Air
7 REPLIES 7
Anonymous
Not applicable
AC14 almost at 15 and still no real way to manage revisions.
Yes it is archaic and flies in the face of all that BIM is meant to offer.

CADIMAGE have developed a plugin, but last I looked it had some serious issues IMHO. It has since been upgraded so may be worth a look - albeit it is galling as it should be in the base software!
archislave
Enthusiast
I am wondering how the most capable alternative handle this, namely Revit and Vectorworks. Seems like they are getting better and better. I wish Revit was on OSX and I would switch quickly, I think. I am seeing just about every employment add asking for Revit experience now and feel like I am a weird minority.
Archislave



archicad 26.0 US, M2 Macbook Air
Anonymous
Not applicable
Boot camp
& if poss
Parallels etc
AutoCAD has been ported to MAC but dont think RVT will be
NCornia
Graphisoft Alumni
Graphisoft Alumni
First, there is no solution that does everything. Other software titles have their own strengths and weaknesses. Having used ArchiCAD and Revit and tried Vectorworks, I would choose ArchiCAD any day because it is the most graphical and intuitive. Revit for one has its bright points, but be prepared to interface with spreadsheet style dialog boxes for a great deal of your working day vs. the rich graphical environment of ArchiCAD.

And to the actual question, have you tried the Mark Up tools? Graphisoft has illustrated it well in their Advanced Collaboration interactive training guide. Download the tutorial from here and go to chapter 7. Watch the videos. http://www.graphisoft.com/education/training_guides/?version=12&module=COL&lang=en

Graphisoft also has an updated version for Teamwork where the project Mark-up Tools are even more useful. ArchiCAD Collaboration Part 2 Chapter 7. http://www.graphisoft.com/education/training_guides/?version=14&module=COL2&lang=en

Here is a link with all the training guides. They are great and should utilize them if you have not already. http://www.graphisoft.com/education/training_guides/
Nicholas Cornia
Technical Support Team - GRAPHISOFT North America
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Anonymous
Not applicable
... And this is a thorny issue; perhaps not as simple as it seems at first glance. First, some offices number revisions by the sheet (Revision 1 on sheet S1.1 deals with an entirely different change than Rev. 1 on sheet A1.1). Others number revisions by the whole set of drawings. Some even spell out each individual drawing change in a text document (Addendum 1 or Revision 1, or Change Order #12) and number the revisions to match that number. Some tag clouds around the drawing or portion of a drawing that has changed, and some simply tag the revised sheet in the title block with a date and short description of the revision.
Then there is the issue that comes up on "Phased" projects; another scenario that GS and ArchiCAD offer little built-in tooling.
I can understand why GS has not tried to address all these different revision modes. It would be hard to please all, or even most users given the variety of techniques offices use. If users were to work out a standard for all the permutations of revisions and their publication, it would help out software providers immensely. If there is one, I don't know about it.
sinceV6
Advocate
I always try to keep the workarounds as simple as possible, so they´re easy to manage in the long run. For revisions, I would say it depends what you are the revisions for. As Brian said, some offices will do it per sheet, or per set.
Since I usually deal with project wide changes/revisions (moving walls, changing window sizes, etc) that affect other disciplines, I revision per project change; so what I do is I keep about ten revision layers (Revision01, Revision02) and use the Olivier Dentan great revision cloud object and apply it directly on the floor plan, with the label using the format "01.03", which would be "revision#.change id" and a verbose description of each change in a separate layout named, obviously, "revisions".
I place as many clouds as needed in its own layer, so I can turn on each cloud set based by revision#. When moving to revision 2, I just turn off Revision01 layer and since those changes are kept in the verbose log, we don't need to show them anymore, just the current changes are highlighted with the new clouds (i.e. revision02).
Now, remember that layer settings are different for model and layouts, so you can have a different set of layers if you need to revision per sheet and they won't get in the way of the model combos.
So if I had to deal with MEP or HVAC revisions, I would keep them per sheet, since it would be easier to manage as clouds for Mechanical might not be needed on the Electrical layouts, and if put directly in model, you would need a whole other set of layers to manage those.
Hope I explained myself.
Cheers.
Anonymous
Not applicable
one solution could be:
http://www.mad.fi/mad/revisiomatic.html

/Petri