How do you use Divisions?

[dhallett]

When Using Project Navigator, if the building plan extends beyond the limits of a plotted sheet, I assume the Divisions should be used to divide the building into sections, but I don’t understand the process. Our past preference was to draw the entire plan in one file to help maintain coordination between areas, and then use layouts to plot each section on its own sheet. How are people using PN to do this? Do you draw each division in a separate file? How does the PN know where to xref them together? There is no place to input an offset or other means for locating the pieces that I can find. Is there a way to continue to draw the entire plan in one file using PN? Thanks for any advice.

[Steve_Bennett]

A couple of obvious uses for divisions are either large buildings with easily identifiably breaks in the geometry (east/west wings or seismic seperations) or projects with multiple buildings on the site. For a building with your particular case, it sounds as if you may not have a clear dilineation between different parts of the building. I'll give you two scenarios to think about.

One: In the view file of the floor plan anotate everything as you normally would, but create 2 seperate "Named Model Space Views" of the 2 portions of the area you want to see printed. When you get to laying out your sheets, create 2 seperate ones & drag the views to their respective sheets & place the match lines there in paper space over the viewports.

Two: Using divisions you can seperate out chunks of the building, but this needs to be done with care & make sure that everyone on the team is on the same page. You will want to keep things as close to 0,0 as possible when first starting the project (or any file for that matter). Once you've started, everyone needs to understand that the geometry CAN NOT MOVE or you'll run into problems as you've questioned already. Get your basic layout for the exterior of the building drawn & use that to start with. Drag & drop is VERY powerful with Project Navigator (PN). You can drag geometry from model space to PN & it will cut/paste into a new file. Or you can manually cut it from model space & use the "Paste to Original Coordinates" from the Edit menu when pasting into the new file. You can then use the drag and drop function for xreffing in other parts of the building via PN to use that as a based to add to other portions of the building.

[david_peterson]

I believe you can also use them for each different design option you may have. Or if at some point your client changes their mind you can create a different division, use the copy and paste tool to bring in the geometry, and now you can very easily go back to what you started with.

[dhallett]

Thanks Steve & David for your responses. The idea to keep the building as one file and only break it up when we create the sheets is what I would prefer to do, but I’m concerned that the file size will eventually become unworkable. We will leave it that way for now and see how far we can get. What I expected to find in the Divisions was a way to draw each piece of the building near 0,0 and use the Divisions to reassemble the plan for small scale drawings. But it appears that to do that, you would need to locate the pieces “manually” because there is no way to tell the PN where each piece goes.

I think what we will do if the plan does need to be broken into separate files is to keep each portion of the model at the same location relative to 0,0 that they have now in the composite file. That way, PN can insert them at the default 0,0 and they should match up. I guess then if I want to show a part of the plan beyond the match line, I will need to xref all adjacent divisions into one file anyway.

[Steve_Bennett]

Thanks Steve & David for your responses. The idea to keep the building as one file and only break it up when we create the sheets is what I would prefer to do, but I’m concerned that the file size will eventually become unworkable. We will leave it that way for now and see how far we can get. What I expected to find in the Divisions was a way to draw each piece of the building near 0,0 and use the Divisions to reassemble the plan for small scale drawings. But it appears that to do that, you would need to locate the pieces “manually” because there is no way to tell the PN where each piece goes.

I think what we will do if the plan does need to be broken into separate files is to keep each portion of the model at the same location relative to 0,0 that they have now in the composite file. That way, PN can insert them at the default 0,0 and they should match up. I guess then if I want to show a part of the plan beyond the match line, I will need to xref all adjacent divisions into one file anyway.Correct, there is no way to assign a common "point" in each file that references from 0,0,0. The way divisions are envisioned to be used are by having you drag geometry, from part of the building, from model space, in a construct, to the construct folder in PN.

[Kevin.Sturmer]

Just as levels break up a bulding horizontally, divisions break it up vertically. I like the ability to have only the needed portions load for any live section or elevation cut. Cuts the processing and load time down considerably.

We also use the divisions to break up a building to allow more than one person/office to access and work on that level at a time.