Our Office Methods

[mockdeep]

In our office we use a series of grids in model space to represent the viewport area in paperspace for different scales. Then in paperspace we have a series of overlapping viewports at different scales. It's far more organized than my last job where we just drew things wherever in model space and crammed everything in paperspace five minutes before printing time. Our grid method strikes me as a pretty efficient method for laying things out--you look at the grid and you know where it will appear in paperspace.

But I was interested in hearing what others think of this method. I was trying to think of a use for annotative scaling but we never use the same detail at more than one scale and the grids make it fairly easy to start at a sensible scale. It is useful to me in that I can just copy an object from one place to another and change the annotative scale rather than try to figure out a scale factor, but aside from that I'm not getting much use out of it. Any thoughts?

[darthyoga]

If you work in model/papers space and have DIMASSOC set to 2 you never have to think about scaling anything. ACAD does it for you using the chosen viewport scale.
Annotation scaling make it easier for people who still haven't embraced paper space yet as far as I know.
The grid looks great, very organised and a nice way of doing things.

[Shinyhead]

It looks very organized, but to be honest, I don't like it too much, but I have reasons that have to do with how I like to work.

I prefer to have my work laid out such that the floor lines are at the same point across all my elevations and vertical sections, and my plans are in a vertical line below my elevations, and the overall plan is above the first elevation.

This way I can shoot a construction line across a section and see if my points are lining up, or I can use it for reference on stretches etc.

Also, we make use of a lot of windowed details, for instance a detail elevation of a panel joint will come directly off the elevation using annotative dims. This way you are actually showing what is there and it reduces the chance that a detail will fail to update.

Its just a preference, but I would rather have modelspace be set up to make getting the geometry and such right, then just to have an idea of how it will lay out in paperspace. To me, all the layout aids in the world only have so much value, but making sure the items are correct and buildable is much more important, and lining things up is one tool I can use to do that.

[mockdeep]

I prefer to have my work laid out such that the floor lines are at the same point across all my elevations and vertical sections, and my plans are in a vertical line below my elevations, and the overall plan is above the first elevation.

This way I can shoot a construction line across a section and see if my points are lining up, or I can use it for reference on stretches etc.

Also, we make use of a lot of windowed details, for instance a detail elevation of a panel joint will come directly off the elevation using annotative dims. This way you are actually showing what is there and it reduces the chance that a detail will fail to update.

Yeah, when I do elevations I have them lined up with the plan and then move them onto the grid when I'm setting up the layout. One reason I hate doing elevations is that every time you make a change on the plans you have to go back and make sure all of your elevations are up to date. That is why we only put vertical dimensions on the elevations and keep all horizontal dimensions on the plans.

As for the details, we only have a couple of simple blowups and those rarely ever change across projects anyway. Who knows, though, it might come down to creating a sort of hybrid where we use the grids but enlarge part of a detail in it's own independent viewport.

I have been playing around with the annotative scaling today and I am finding more use for it, especially when inserting blocks from a tool palette. I had made a dynamic grid block so that you could select your scale from a drop down, but it turns out to be just as easy to scale a non-dynamic annotative grid on the properties palette. Very cool.