yes you can overide dimensions, but should you?

[cr_gixxer]

Just learnt a trick from a consultant, and wish I could unlearn it.

I REALLY don't like the idea of overriding dimensions, and maybe shouldn't be sharing this.
Kind of undermines the whole system....

should I post the tip?

[cdatechguy]

Do you have to post this in multiple threads?

[cr_gixxer]

Do you have to post this in multiple threads?

no, it was in error. thanks for drawing attention to the matter, it is duly noted.
if I could delete the thread form the other forum I would.

[DaveP]

should I post the tip?
NO
You pretty much answered your own question:

Kind of undermines the whole system....

[damon.sidel]

Dave, I hear ya when you say so emphatically, "no", but overriding dimensions DOES have it's uses with one caveat: when you don't type in a new dimension! I use the override occasionally to add a note. I think this is a valuable tip. IMHO, just because a tool can be used for evil, doesn't mean it should be censored.

[DaveP]

Oh, I emphatically agree with you there, damon. In fact, I like to take credit the to ability to override a dimension. Many years ago in one of the betas, I suggested that you be allowed to override a dimension as long as the overridden text could not be interpreted as a Dimension About two years later than became a feature.
Which, of course, people are now looking for ways to abuse.

I agree with you if you want to override the text to say "SEE STRUCTURAL" or "VERIFY IN FIELD", but the original question said "
overriding dimensions and it was to THAT to I had the big fat no.
I do NOT want my 7'-10" corridor width to read 8'-0" !

[antman]

I do NOT want my 7'-10" corridor width to read 8'-0" !

That's easy to do! .-P

[JonTheBIMGuy]

I really don't think it matters much if you post the tip or not. If people want to learn how to override a dim, they will just Google it... Posting it here will just provide a faster route to what people are looking for.

[cr_gixxer]

what I find concerning, is that once overridden, there is no feedback that the dim has been changed. I would hate for a junior person to start overriding everything, and then I can't trust the model. Checking for overrides in revit is more time consuming than acad.

I have a project on the go using both revit and acad, and in taking over others' drawings, the overriding of dims in acad is driving me crazy.

jhill is right about the google search, quickly found another trick to override..... I don't want to facilitate poor standards.

My thoughts are if the overriding of dimensions is allowed in the program, it should at a minimum change colour, become halftone, italic...something to distinguish it, or even better, will not print. Otherwise I'd like to see these programming holes closed to not allow overriding.

[MikeJarosz]

I have been deeply involved in a new project that the owner wants to take from concept to facility managent entirely in BIM, which of course is a euphemism for Revit. We will be handing over the model .rvt file at every landmark submission. If a corridor is modeled at 7'-10", that's what it is. In fact, dimensions won't even appear in the model until after the model has been shared many times over. The dimension annotation is irrelevant. It is the dimension that is wrong, not the other way around. The time has come for architects to stop thinking that the dimension annotations plotted on paper are the final determination of size.

These people will be left behind. As fine an art that hand drawn construction documents with pencil and paper were, how many people are still around that can do this? As they retired, no one replaced them. The Acad cheaters days are likewise numbered!

Quick! can someone tell me what the hardest pencil grade was?:?:

[antman]

Perhaps 5H?

Edit: Close! http://www.pencils.com/hb-graphite-grading-scale
Interesting that F had no numbers to keep it company...

[MikeJarosz]

WRONG!!!!!

next contestant.....

[cr_gixxer]

The dimension annotation is irrelevant:?:

maybe at some point, but for now almost every job I see, framers still carry around paper plans and build from the dimensions printed.

[damon.sidel]

WRONG!!!!!

next contestant.....

9H!!! (Found it in 5 seconds on Wikipedia...)

[Mike L Sealander]

I still have some 9H leads hanging around the office.
As far as cheating on dimensions, there are a couple reasons out there to do so, but they are and should be few and far between. And isn't this a question of degree? Is rounding a form of cheating? Is coarse detail mode a form of cheating?

[MikeJarosz]

9H!!! (Found it in 5 seconds on Wikipedia...)

9H! you win. I had a 9H pencil for years. I found it useless. It was more like a stylus for scratching hard surfaces. To get any visible linework out of it you had to press so hard it damaged the paper.

[MikeJarosz]

isn't this a question of degree? Is rounding a form of cheating?

Because of construction tolerances, I wouldn't call rounding cheating. But it can still get you into trouble. I was working out the site plan of a tower in Manhattan. NYC developers want to squeeze every square millimeter out of their site, so we build closer to the property line than most other parts of the country. We had two basements and the owner wanted them right up to the property line. The front of the site was Broadway, which has a subway under it. We would have to shore up the subway and underpin parts of it. Then the fun starts. The owner's surveyor hadn't been paid so they wouldn't give us the CAD file. We had to work from prints. The surveyors computed their angles to great precision, but rounded to 2 decimals on the prints. With the distances and angles as given on the prints, I could not reproduce their results. We were dealing with angles like 89D 59' 35"! I then drew the building and property lines and did all the calculations on the site plan, forgetting that Acad had an automatic roundoff on dimensions. It can be turned off, but I forgot. Well, the shoring collapsed. (contractor's fault) The subway was shut down during rush hour and the whole ruckus made it into the newspapers. We later discovered that the dimension was 1/32" into the subway. Fortunately, no one who could make an issue out of it ever learned about that dimension.

I now do all survey related calculations in Excel to 8 decimals. I put numbered control points on the drawings, and a table of their xyz displacements from the project benchmark. Building and property lines are drawn from point to point and are never dimensioned.

And I never trust a dimension!

[Mike L Sealander]

9H is for lightly sketching on opaque paper when doing a perspective. It can also be used like a stylus for creating mortar courses, which you then fill in with an HB.

[DaveP]

Not to get back to the original subject, or anything, but the reason it was OK to fudge a dimension when you were hand drafting is that it took a lot of (re-)work to have the drawing reflect the change in the dimension. Basically, it was just too expensive to "do it right." And you're not not supposed to scale off the linen, anyway.

Then when we got to CAD, it was only slightly less acceptable to fudge (aka "overide") dimensions. It wasn't right, but it didn't really matter. If that showed up somewhere else, it was re-drawn anyway.

But then we get to BIM ! And its a big no-no to fudge anything, because everything is only in the database once. And its the database that matters. If you override (aka "lie") about a dimension, you may have another View that contains the same elements. And there probably is a dimension to those elements. Now what do you do? You have one View with a false dimension and one with the accurate dimension. You better hope your contractor reads the "right" one!