Is there a better way to do apartments?

[Anonymous]

It seems to be working fine, but slow, we are doing individual units in their own pln, then buildings in their own pln, hotlinking the units to the building plans, then using a site plan pln to "put a bow on it." We are using the site plan file as for all the layouts and external sourcing for the views. Is this the best way?

[Eduardo Rolon]

I sometimes keep all the apartments in one pln and use "save selected to module" this helps in consolidating some of the pln.

[Anonymous]

A few years back I set up the apartments in a single PLN with a separate story (or stories for duplexes) for each unit type. I then created views of each and published them as modules. The units were all lined up from floor to floor at project zero to keep a common insertion point (lower left interior as I recall).

In most cases the common and exterior walls were modeled in the main building with partial ones added to the unit plans to publish the drawings. One advantage of publishing modules was that we could turn off the layers we did not want to convey from the unit plan models to the main buildings.

This was in AC9-10. Not sure if I would do it any differently now.

[Link]

In nearly all our projects (especially multi-res and high rise) we have a master file and a module file. The module file has a story structure set up whereby unit types, floor plates, cores, site info, grids, etc can be created in their respective groups.

A pre-made publisher set exists that saves each story out as a module file. Both the Master and Module files are shared on the BIM Server and our mod files are published to another server.

It all works together very well and is easy to manage and use. Much better than hotlinking project stories together and creating a web of links.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link wrote:
Much better than hotlinking project stories together and creating a web of links.

Hotlinking to PLNs for this is definitely a mess to be avoided. Publishing the modules gives fine tuned control. The extra step of having to publish does have its advantages as well. Performance is generally better and you have total control of the update process. Kind of like the difference between manual and automatic gearboxes.