Mr. New User, Don’t forget that you still need to produce printed documents

I find many new users get obsessed with modeling and don’t want to hear about the 2D world. This is both great and a disaster. I love to see people excited about modeling, about leaving the world of flatcad for good. But… We need to produce legible prints in a timely manner.  If you ignore dimensions, notes, sheeting drawings, etc. it’s very easy to fall into The Ugly Trap.

What’s The Ugly Trap? It’s when you spend a week working on a new project, but at the end you have an ugly unresolved model and horrendous (or non-existent) drawings that someone who doesn’t understand BIM won’t see the value of. They’ll ask questions like “What have you been doing all week?” or “I hate computers” or “if we were doing this in AutoCAD or by hand…” Your work is clouded by ugliness. And it’s easy to get disheartened and disgruntled. You’ll want to scream “It’s early! There’s so much information in there. It’s coordinated! Look past the materials. Look past those lines, they’ll be resolved later, I swear! I promise!” Meanwhile the one guy still using a legacy program turns out a pile of trash that looks amazing. Too bad none of the sections match the elevations or plan. Early in SD no one cares (much). They should, but it’s easier to value 3 pretty drawings that don’t connect than 30 ugly ones that do. You might want to focus only on 3D modeling when learning ArchiCAD, but remember you still need to produce pretty drawings in a timely manner. Don’t get 80 hours into a project and then realize you can’t show anyone what you’ve done in traditional formats. Because face it, for the foreseeable future most of us will still be creating sheets and sheets of plans, sections, elevations, details and schedules.

Ms. New User, Remember that your layout book should progress at the same pace as your model

Here’s a rhetorical question: when should you make sure your sheets are laid out? Once your floor plans are blocked out. At that point you can lay out every section, elevation, interior elevation, and plan on a sheet. Don’t worry that your elevations have no roofs and your sections have no floors. That’s okay. And don’t worry that there might be some views to add later. You should know the scope of your project early on and be able to print progress sets whenever necessary. Do not wait until the end or until ‘it’s ready to sheet’. Think of the first pass of the layout book like the cartoon sets many of us once sketched out by hand on scrap pieces of paper. But better. And smarter. And much more useful. Every marker on every plan should be linked to a sheeted view before the first printing of that plan. This cartoon set will help you avoid The Ugly Trap because you’ll be very aware of how legible your work is at the end of every day.  And unlike the static cartoon set of yore, the ArchiCAD version continues to automatically update and evolves into your finished product.

When this roof plan was first sheeted it was kind of dull…

…but by the time I was finished detailing it, the layout was complete.

A Question for all of us

If you have 40 hrs to learn ArchiCAD, how much of that should be spent on modeling and how much on text, dimensions, sheet layout, masking (it happens, learn it), theory on how to work in ArchiCAD, etc. I don’t have an exact answer, but my gut tells me half the time should be dedicated to non-3D. How does that sound? Am I crazy?

note 1: If you’re lucky your office has a template that already has placed views on sheets so the task of creating a cartoon set should be that much easier. If your office template doesn’t have placed views in the layout book, update your template so that it does.

note 2: Clearly blocking out your layout book early in the project won’t completely save you from The Ugly Trap. There are many other techniques and tricks you should also be aware of (like fast, clean plans, smart use of default materials, hiding clutter, choosing your 3D battles, smart masking…), but those will have to wait for future blog posts.

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