Construction & Working Drawings - Discussion
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@chrisglasier said:
@zx10r_gaz said:
As far as things go these are about average/above average as to the end result I need to submit for planning/ building regs. I have tried my best to get an end result to look like this with SU/LO but I'm afraid it just doesn't happen. And if it where to happen it would take far to long.
So it seems to be a matter of method or technique rather SU and Layout being compromised. Would it be fair to say that?
Chris
Chris,
I don't think so as I can't get it to "actually" happen. I have tried, even using images as hatch patterns to create the "look" but it just doesn't look right, and your editing a "2D" looking model in 3D which gets a tad frustrating at times. At the moment its to fiddly, to slow and to basic. I do all my annotations in model space. The only annotations in paper space is the template which contains the title block and spec etc. I use various styles for dimensioning/leaders/text/line weights/line types etc and the whole thing is just more fluid in AutoCAD and its so easy to quickly edit or amend.
@honoluludesktop said:
Gaz, Are you able to get a building permit with the 3 sheets you uploaded? 8-9 hours to design, and draft? Wow, I can't do that. I once worked with a French Architect, and noted a great differences between our practices. Do you do a lot more drawings while under construction? I don't think that I could get a small residence on less then 6-9 24"X36" sheets. Still, I have seen plans from other US states that draw less then I do (little more then you have shown). But, the fellow charged about 1/3 of the fee I expected to earn.
Honolulu,
Yes, I would expect to get full planning permission and full building regs approval from the attached plans. No further draughting would be required unless building control wanted a minor amendment. Or it was declined planning for some reason which I can't see at the moment. I would not do any further draughting for construction either, as there is more than enough info shown on plan and in spec to build it. It is minor "standard" works as far as construction goes. The only other info which would be required is the structural calculations for any steel work or UB's that are required. In this case there are 5 steels required in the new build section and 1 replacement steel in the existing build. The calcs are only required for building regs, so I will wait until planning has been granted before working on the calcs in case there is an amendment required. 8-9 hours is about average for an extension of this nature, as you have to draught existing as well as proposed. In the past have designed a New Build detached 3 bed house in under 6 hours from scratch. including all elevations, floor plans, sections, floor runs, window schedules, spec etc etc... It sailed straight through planning and building control without any further work. It was also built without any further draughting. And all this was on only 1 sheet of A1 media... Now I don't know if SU/LO would have been able to let me do that???
Gaz...
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Gaz, Thanks for the feedback. The French Architect I worked with explained that when he built in Europe, he was the "clerk of the works"; he bought the materials, and hired the various contractors to do the work. However I never saw a set of his plans so I do not know how much drawing he did.
In my part of the world the Architect bids the plans, and specifications with several "General Contractors", one of which is selected to do the project. The General Contractor is responsible to do the material takeoff, and hires subcontractors to work under him. Because the bid is competitive, he is not responsible for work that is not clearly covered in the plans, and specifications.
My drawing typically contains a site grading plan, floor, plumbing, electrical and roof plans; exterior elevations, building and wall sections; elevations, sections, and details of the cabinets, doors, and window details. I include all all the interior elevations, framing plans, foundation plans, and detailed structural sections are also required to get the building built. I see that you have most of these, but there is not as much detailing as I am used to.
A set of residential plans will take at least several weeks to design, and get the Owners approval. Construction documents may take one to two months. It takes 2-3 weeks to bid, and another 1-2 weeks to negotiate. A building permit takes 3-6 weeks to process, and construction may take 4-6 months depending on availability of the materials locally. Of course there are a lot of other things that must be done, and with the stop, and go nature of the work, it is not uncommon to take a year to take a small house from design to construction completion.
Well, different strokes for different folks. I could never imagine using Su, and LO to design, draft, and build a project. Again, thanks for the detailed answer.
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@zx10r_gaz said:
Tim first... I have attached a copy of a set of plans I have recently drawn for a domestic extension in PDF format.
OK, that's an interesting set of plans to look through.
On page 1 I can't see anything that you couldn't do in SU/LO. The site map would most likely be imported from some GIS I guess rather than modelled. The scale bar at bottom left would be dragged from the LO scrapbook, as would the compass rose. No problems with the sidebar texts, obviously. Annotating the elevations and sections is easy in LO. The only part I haven't done myself is the use of colouring for the outlines of the various parts of the house but I expect that creative use of SU styles might provide that.
On page 2 I see a few things that I don't know how to replicate easily. The assorted hatching/brick/soil/insulation 'textures' are something I haven't worked out yet but I think probably use of a suitable SU style along with textures applied to the section cut surfaces ought to work. The details in D3 look like they would be standard snippets either imported as pdf/png/etc or even drawn in LO and made into scrapbook items. D2 could be done in a similar manner if it is a common detail but I did a similar detail direct from SU in my plans. Page 3 looks about the same.
There are certainly things that LO won't do that would be useful, but I really think we can do a lot more than most people believe. But as I've said before, if you have a tool that works for you and you are making money with this stuff - stick with it. Learning a new system costs money.
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Possible learning opportunity for us all; how about posting drawings that you want to be able to do with SU/LO but think it can't handle? I'd bet that in a lot of cases someone here will be able to explain just how to create them.
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@tim said:
Possible learning opportunity for us all; how about posting drawings that you want to be able to do with SU/LO but think it can't handle? I'd bet that in a lot of cases someone here will be able to explain just how to create them.
Yes very good; it would be interesting to illustrate Red's problems with his Building Department in this way; useful for him particularly!
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I have been creating Construction Documents with the same procedure with Layout as I demonstrated at the basecamp with AutoCAD for the last year.
Mitchel Stangl
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Mitchel, do you have any problems in sending your drawings to other professionals, ie electrical, structural engineers, etc in dxf or formats they require, or are you doing all of that work in house.
With some of the problems I have had in dxf conversions this is what concerns me. -
I have not had a problem. I send:
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The project model which most of my subs can use. -
With an electrical engineering I simply export the scene which I base my LO drawings to a 2d dwg in SU. -
I send the drawings as pdf which are really a universal format these days.
Mitchel
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This was done in the first version (beta) of LO which I had abandoned due to super slow speeds but I am going to give it another crack now that there are dimensions! Man would I be happy to get AutoCad out of my flow.
This was one of 4 prototypes presented to my client to discuss pros/cons of various floor plans.
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Linea
I am currently working my way through some projects using only SU and LO. I am at the Building Reg. stage so your drawing 3 is very relevant to me.
My experience so far, using LO, has been that it is quite tricky to use - almost too easy to inadvertently make scale, rotation, and move changes. However by carefully locking layers as you go I think I have overcome this issue.
As regards the section, my approach has been, for detailed work, to draw the roof eaves section in 2D and extrude it, which seems to work quite well. Given that 'hatching' is essentially a drawing board technique, pre-dating CAD, I am accepting that I don't need to hatch everything - sometimes a simple tone will do (just what SU is good at!). I have created a squiggly line to represent insulation, made it into a component and just stick it where it is needed.
I realise (as can be seen on the attachment) that you need to be very tidy in the modelling, as all the little stray bits will show up.
At times LO has driven me mad, but I am sticking at it and hope I can make it work.
Here is some work in progress - still needs more notes and tweaking, but you get the idea.Davd
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Gav wrote
@unknownuser said:
As far as things go these are about average/above average as to the end result I need to submit for planning/ building regs. I have tried my best to get an end result to look like this with SU/LO but I'm afraid it just doesn't happen. And if it where to happen it would take far to long.
I have to agree, like others had said I'd love to get as much cad as possible out of the workflow, and yes LO can handle an A1 sheet but LO still lacks the robustness of a cad system. I do use LO frequently for small jobs but in the same way that BIM probably doesn't suit everybody, I don't need to model everything in 3d to get the drawings out. So some 2d drawing and annotation aspects of the process just wouldn't be worth wrestling with in LO - that is not to say it can't be done, I absolutely agree that it can, but just that at the moment cad offers me a more robust toolset for handling 2d entities.
I've added 3 drawings of pretty simple jobs, not to prove any particular point. All involve some SU. I know that I could have done the layouts in LO or CAD but at the moment cad is the most efficient route for me. The first two drawings are 2d views all extracted from SU but the client didn't need much detail, (so in the case of the second drawing, yes LO did the job). But the third drawing, only a small project, would you really want to draw even a simple section like that in SU?
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Dcauldwell
I've started to draw roof tiles the same way, it makes for a nicer visual rather than a flat plane with a stuck on texture.
Agree on the hatching too, but the end user only sees a paper based drawing, so while hatching isn't needed for digital clarity, once it is on paper hatching is still helpful. -
Hi all,
This is my first post, but this seems a sensible place to put it. Ive been using Sketchup and Layout the last few months now for producing precast concrete and structural steel shop drawings for construction purposes. (see attached examples).
Havent had any problems with getting the drawings approved by the project engineers, and the drawings are generally of better quality thens some others I have seen. I have found the dimension feature of LO2.1 to be extremely useful, as previously I was dimensioning my models within SU and hoping they would come out OK. Any feedback on the drawing would be appreciated!
Anyway, this forums been loads of use, and hopefully continues to be.
Cheers,
Christian
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Christian,
Good to see another Kiwi in here. Those drawings you are doing look fine to me....coming from an Architect and not an engineer.
Stan
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@cmc007 said:
I have found the dimension feature of LO2.1 to be extremely useful, as previously I was dimensioning my models within SU and hoping they would come out OK. Any feedback on the drawing would be appreciated!
Hello and welcome!
Really good to see such drawings done with SU+LO
My question is: The whole model is in Sketchup and the annotations and dimensions in LO?
Or have you done something more with LO? -
The entire model was build within Sketchup in 3d, rather then just producting a 2d line drawing. All annotations and most dimensions were done within Layout. I have just directly inserted the 3 different views of the same model into Layout and gone from there.
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That looks good Christian. I am interested to know is the thick lines of the reinforcing were done within SU? and is fo how?
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Came up with a new procedure for linking the SU - LO files that allows for 'hatched' walls as shown in the file below. No 'make faces' plug-in needed, so walls/hatch all update with the model.
Also came up with a dashed lines routine using a custom sketchup style with dashed lines. The only thing that sucks about it is that you have to have it render in 'raster' instead of vector so the dashed lines are kind of fuzzy looking.
Models consist of a few layers - Walls (e), (r), (n), a floor/details/cabinets/stair/doors layer, and an 'above' layer. I like the looks of the final result and have only a few comments about layout:
LAYOUT: WHY ARE YOUR LINESTYLES SO CRAPPY? WHERE IS A GOOD DASHED VECTOR LINE STYLE? WHERE IS MY BUBBLE LINE? WHY DO YOU CRASH WHEN I TRY TO EXPORT?
Ok so here is the deal: after going through this whole experience with SU-LO, I am seriously looking at buying Vectorworks. Yeah it's not as fun but I'm getting paid to be productive and LO makes it really hard.
I've come up with a nice template file now that should save me some time, but seriously do I want to have to go through this crap every time with SketchUp? Making construction docs, even just a respectable floor plan, is painful at best. As much as I like Google I honestly know that they don't give a crap about architects/designers. It's too bad because they have a product that could be pretty good if they cared to develop a few things about it. Sad, too, I used to be SU's biggest supporter.
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Aw, come on, baseLINE, you're not motivating me to help out here. You can crudely do most of this, keep it on a scrapbook and quickly reuse. There's different styles of drafting symbols in the TB- scrapbooks.
When you mention "Also came up with a dashed lines routine using a custom sketchup style with dashed lines. The only thing that sucks about it is that you have to have it render in 'raster' instead of vector so the dashed lines are kind of fuzzy looking. ", please select the model in LayOut and render as vector (in the SketchUp Model inspector) and they'll look sharper. I've played around with crude hatching patterns doing this, and it's not totally worthlessly sucking bad
.Work with me here, people.
b
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