NCS (National Cad Standard)

[Anonymous]

I was wondering if anyone was using the NCS in ArchiCAD. Is it worth it? Are there any drawbacks to doing it? Is there something else that is more suited for ArchiCAD? This would be for a small mac office doing high end residential. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Mark Wallace]

Mostly those standards were autocad/flatland based drafting conventions. I've incorporated some NCS stuff into my practice over the last 15 yrs; floor plan numbering, detail referencing s well as some of the material conventions and symbols.

ArchiCAD includes a nice NCS folder in their standard library, but alot of the objects weren't stretchy so I do my own or adapt.

The thing that killed a great idea like NCS was the authors charged for it (as well as copyrighting it too)! If you had a decade's worth of good drafting/design experience, you kinda knew 80 or 90% of what NCS was trying to do anyway. Like, they acted as if it was a big secret.

IMO it should have been free like.....20 years ago when we really needed it cause thats when alot of local firms in the US went regional, mutli-state and national as well beginning the slow migration to CAD.

Problem was.... many times what was understood in one locality didn't make sense in another due to simple drafting conventions. NCS tried standardizing certain aspects of project documentation but it really was a time and place thing.

& again....that was so last century.

'Practice' & see what works for you.

HTH

Mark

Dual 2.33 Ghz G5, 1.5 Mb RAM
OSx.4.1,
AC 7, PM 2.3 (still)
Working w/ArchiCAD since '93
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Mark R. Wallace AIA
Mark Wallace Architect
P.O. Box 26537
Collegeville PA 19426

[Anonymous]

Hello Mike -

I am doing the same here, but on Windows XP unfortunately, and I just purchased the "get standardized" template system. What a great addition! Everything is set up so well. AC is integrated with PM, the layer combinations are well thought out and very useful. In my opinion there is little learning curve just a lot of upside.

Cheers - Chris

[Anonymous]

Before purchasing anything ….you might want to take a look at Tri-Services…..it’s tax payer funded and the foundation for NCS….handles both microstation and autocad….and the best part…it’s free

Here the link to the main page……https://tsc.wes.army.mil/

And a link to their cad page…..https://tsc.wes.army.mil/products/standards/aec/aecstdweb.asp

I used this as the basis to establish Merck’s Pa-4…2d/3d Cadd Standards and currently using it to develop standards for another office…..everything you need basically is there…..you just have to do the fine tuning…….now that’s a different story….