New work to existing buildings and Demolition

[stanmpd]

We received our latest suite software and ACA was included. In our firm we do a lot of new work in existing buildings. I am new to ACA, and I work heavily in Revit and CAD. Can someone steer me in the right direction so that I can find out how to handle the appearance/layers for existing walls and demolished walls etc. I evidently am not searching the correct areas as most of what I have found is related to new construction only and not modifications/construction to existing spaces. Can someone please help an ACA illiterate? I'm sure it is something simple, but I am not familiar enough with this product to find what I need. We are looking at implementing this in our office, but if it won't handle this in an effecient manner, then we cannot use it.

[dzatto]

We received our latest suite software and ACA was included. In our firm we do a lot of new work in existing buildings. I am new to ACA, and I work heavily in Revit and CAD. Can someone steer me in the right direction so that I can find out how to handle the appearance/layers for existing walls and demolished walls etc. I evidently am not searching the correct areas as most of what I have found is related to new construction only and not modifications/construction to existing spaces. Can someone please help an ACA illiterate? I'm sure it is something simple, but I am not familiar enough with this product to find what I need. We are looking at implementing this in our office, but if it won't handle this in an effecient manner, then we cannot use it.

Did you see this thread in your search? I think it will work for new or existing construction.

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.ph...molition+walls

Basically, you can create a wall for your demo walls with it's own cleanup definitions so it won't clean up with the existing walls. You can also set the appearance, and create a wall tool so when you use it, it will automatically be put on a demo layer that you create.

[stanmpd]

This is exactly what I needed. A place to start. Much more help than I got from the smart @#$ in the Autodesk forum. Dean Saadallah in the Autodesk forum actually told me that if I hadn't used the software, then there was not a need to learn it!!!! unbelievable!!! Big help he was....hahaha

It has been difficult to get a grasp on the workflow for ACA, but this gives me a great start. Thank you very much for your time. I hope this software will help us out in some way.

[dzatto]

This is exactly what I needed. A place to start. Much more help than I got from the smart @#$ in the Autodesk forum. Dean Saadallah in the Autodesk forum actually told me that if I hadn't used the software, then there was not a need to learn it!!!! unbelievable!!! Big help he was....hahaha

It has been difficult to get a grasp on the workflow for ACA, but this gives me a great start. Thank you very much for your time. I hope this software will help us out in some way.

No problem, glad I could help.

If you have any more questions, there's a lot of good people here that can help you out. AUGI is the best peer to peer support site I've ever used.

Let us know if you have trouble setting up your walls. We can walk you through it. To be honest, you're the first person I've heard that's going from Revit to ACA. It's always been the other way around. What made you switch?

[stanmpd]

We aren't switching. We have a lot of properties that are in AutoCAD and there are some jobs that are quicker to do in CAD if the work is not too extensive. We do still work primarily in Revit for the larger projects, but when ACA shipped in our latest suite, it looked like it may be a good alternative to CAD. We will always use Revit and will always have a need for AutoCAD. We were looking at this to see if it was a viable alternative to AutoCAD since it seems very similar to Revit on the surface. From what I have seen so far, we will probably stick with the setup we have. I still haven't found a way to install ACA without it killing AutoCAD, even with putting it in a different directory. This makes it a little difficult to make a side-by-side comparison. I am still going to look at ACA and learn what I can about it, but unless it can work on our space planning projects in our existing drawings, then it will most likely stay in the box. It would have been nice to have CAD with a lot of the Revit features. Revit has spoiled me.

[dzatto]

We aren't switching. We have a lot of properties that are in AutoCAD and there are some jobs that are quicker to do in CAD if the work is not too extensive. We do still work primarily in Revit for the larger projects, but when ACA shipped in our latest suite, it looked like it may be a good alternative to CAD. We will always use Revit and will always have a need for AutoCAD. We were looking at this to see if it was a viable alternative to AutoCAD since it seems very similar to Revit on the surface. From what I have seen so far, we will probably stick with the setup we have. I still haven't found a way to install ACA without it killing AutoCAD, even with putting it in a different directory. This makes it a little difficult to make a side-by-side comparison. I am still going to look at ACA and learn what I can about it, but unless it can work on our space planning projects in our existing drawings, then it will most likely stay in the box. It would have been nice to have CAD with a lot of the Revit features. Revit has spoiled me.

I could be wrong, but I think ACA has everything that vanilla CAD has, plus all the ACA stuff. So why not just run it as ACA? You should still be able to do the same things, and then some.

[stanmpd]

It may have them, but when I installed ACA, it blew away all of my CAD settings and the profiles do not work the same. I also found that some of the functionality built into AutoCAD 2009, I.E. layer manager, did not work correctly. That was the reason for working them side by side. I don't want to lose CAD productivity while learning ACA.

[neje]

Further to our replies (even Dean's) in the other forum,
ACA includes autocad. When you install, select custom and tick the box to get an autocad only shortcut on your desktop. ACA loads autocad then some other .arx stuff on top so it's basically the same with some extra's.
There are items of autocad that don't play with ACA too well. The ACA layer manager contains extra tricks not in std ac hence they have a different layer manager.
Once installed you won't need regular autocad as a seperate install.
Be aware that the service packs for ac don't work for ACA and there is a little delay for the verticals to catch up. sp2 has only just been released.
But really (again) I would suggest just bring in the acad into Revit and go with what you know. Mind you, if you are still using acad, you can use some excellant tools only in ACA that are mutch better. Like AECPolygons for hatching (editable) and even scheduling tasks but for serious modelling you are going to frustate yourself becuase you are going to be quicker in Revit. ACA also includes some great tools for editing acad hatches which are really cool butthey may have madeit into v9.