3D Electrical Dwgs.

[drafting1]

This is a very general question but I will ask it anyway.

I work for an Electrical Construction company who does 2D coordinated Electrical
dwgs on commercial projects.

Our shop wants to go to 3D. I have experimented doing 3D with vanilla AutoCAD by extruding the walls and columns and then drawing in our Electrical Conduits by extruding circles etc.

I was less than happy with the results and quite frankly found it to be very cumbersome.
Our shop is dead set on using plain AutoCAD to do these dwgs.

If anyone has had a similar experience or could shed some light on this subject
it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike in Atlanta

[jason.martin]

You can probably do what you need to do with plain AutoCAD, but you might be more successful with a package like ABS to model conduit as well as the rest of the electrical system. I've attached a couple images that I created of some switchgear using ABS.

[Beth Powell]

I would highly recommend Building Systems. The older versions of this prior to 2004 weren't anything to write home about.

I recently attended a week of training in Manchester on Building Systems 2005 and have submitted to teach an ATP on it to "better educate the masses".

You can get a free trial of it with workshop materials on CD. Contact your local reseller or Autodesk.