Even though there are many discussion and posts about layouts and efficient workflows, I thought I’d share with you my own experience with a special topic: how to handle layouts and publishing in very big projects.
It is actually nothing that I have discovered, but the need for an efficient workflow in our office brought me to many spent hours in experimenting, consulting others and putting all possible information in one place. The reason why I took this journey is because our publishing process of over 100 plans into PDF and DWG took more than 2 hours. This is too much and is even worse since for a period of 1 hour none of the 9 team members could work in Teamwork (I will explain later why). Therefore, the experiments reduced the publishing time of the same plans down to 30min. It is still a lot but, that’s the maximum I could squeeze. This “slow” case that I am describing you here is the scenario where drawings are placed as views in the same file and updated automatically.
One of the problems with big projects, especially in construction phase, is the updating process of those plentiful drawings in layouts. Some layouts in our case have 4 drawings and some even 12. Some representing floor plans and some section or even elevations and also a combination of all mentioned. Every time you open a layout, the updating process of those specific drawings will begin. In total to update all drawings for all layouts took us around 1h. After this process, we could start publishing PDF and DWG which took another 1h. The PDF was not so painful as publishing DWG. And the reason why nobody could work for this 1h in Teamwork is because the moment someone drew something, the layout saw this as a change, hence wanting to update again, and again, and again... To publish a DWG is more delicate case then a PDF, because everything must be up to date and correct, otherwise you get errors.
For the solution I took something that I hadn’t worked for at least 10 years. The famous PMK file. This is why I am saying that I did not discover nothing new here, because the Plott Maker strategy was introduced by Graphisoft more then 10 years ago. The plotmaker was discontinued but the PMK format stayed though.
Our strategy was to publish VIEWS from the model files (since the project is big, we have 5 teamwork files) as a PMK and store them at our local server. These views will have their corresponding place in an external layout file that was dedicated only for publishing. This allows fast opening of layouts and a very fast possibility to update them. Compared to a normal updating process which took around 1min per layout, updating from PMK is a matter of 3 seconds and sometimes even milliseconds. With the help of the drawing manager you are able to update, control and correct drawings also in a matter of a few seconds. All PMKs are stored at a single folder (a pool) where these documents are going to be overwritten when the publishing time arrives, hence updated in the layout file. File size of a PMK ranges in kB with rare occasions up to 2Mb. The drawings in the layout could be left to “automatic update” since I could not see any rise in file size when switching to manual update (save in project). But for management reasons I left this option to manual, for the users to have better control when updating plans.
Another cool advantage is the change manager which also works in PMK. All changes, respectively change clouds, are saved in the PMK and correctly read and documented by the Index-Table in the Layout file. The only disadvantage of the change manager and separate layout file is the backward synchronization to the main file, which changes have been published or are closed. There are some workarounds for this (I can explain if someone is interested).
In addition, all possible auto texts and especially the ones referencing to drawings are displayed correctly. Scale of the drawing is also correct. No information is missing or displayed wrong… so far.
In the end I also tested a disaster scenario where we lose connection to our server, meaning the link between the PMK file and drawing is lost. It might look like a moment to panic, but the program is capable to reestablish the connection within a matter of seconds, hence again all drawings up to date.
I hope with this “short” resume I could explain and give some hints for those struggling with this matter. Feel free to comment or even give hints
The BIMster @ AllesWirdGut
Currently: Archicad 26
User since Archicad 6.5 (2001)
