ACA Dimensioning --- Z-Coordinate Issue?

[momarch]

I recently started using ACA after about 7 yrs. of using vanilla Acad. Am very perplexed -- it is sort of like Revit, but really not as good. The person I'm working for (freelance) did not want the house in 3D, but I used the AEC walls/doors/etc. objects to make life easier for myself. In the end, however, I found out (for some reason) that when you look at it in 3D, the dimensions are all over the place! ... Some begin at the top of a wall and end at the bottom of wall, for instance. I decided to just flatten the whole drawing and have tried "flatshot" but that doesn't work on AEC wall objects. I exported to Acad 2007 and that partially worked, but some things (like dimensions) still didn't flatten.

What is the "best practice" workflow for this in the future? Shouldn't there be a way to define the workplane for dimensions? ... or have I missed something obvious?

Things were going well until I started having problems with copying and copy/paste where I was copying a floor plan to another spot in the same drawing and only part of it showed up. This happened repeatedly. There was also a problem printing two of the seven layouts.

I am wondering if this is somehow related to the z-coordinate issue?

[david_peterson]

Best practice for someone just getting into ACA IMHO is to read up on Paul Aubin "Mastering ACA" series. He has Chapter 5 available on his website. This goes through the whole process of using Project Navigator and setting up constructs, Views, Sheets and elements. ie why things should be done using this method.
Then you could start to look at the Archived Augi ATP classes offered here for Free.
If it was just the dimensions that were all over the place in 3d, I believe there was a sysvar that changed it and forced all dims to be at z=0, but I could be wrong on that.

[momarch]

David, thank you for the advice. I do realize that learning the whole program would be best, but what does one do when working with other people who are on AutoCAD LT? I am finding as a newbie freelancer that sole practitioner architects are using ACAD LT and are not open to the idea of 3D. We are emailing files back and forth, but I kept a master file that only I updated -- but sometimes copied & pasted from other files. I suppose I should just stick with plain ACAD, which seems a bit more robust.

Also, it appears that other lines besides the dimensions have snapped to points above or below the Z=0 plane. I put part of the drawing into regular ACAD and used "flatten". It worked well, but not so well with the dimensions.

In addition, in ACA all the doors I inserted ended up 4" below the wall bottoms. I had to manually move them all up.

I am so discouraged with this mess that I'm contemplating doing everything in Revit next time and just exporting all the views as dwg. Do people actually do that? I'm very tempted.

I looked at sys. variables and could not find one for the z coordinate in dimensions. You would think there would be one, but I didn't find it.

I will probably buy Aubin's book if I have to stick with this program in the future, but am finding ACA to be kind of delicate and erratic. Again, thank you for the tips.