The Content Browser included with AutoCAD Architecture has a tremendous amount of organization capability for a company when used for more than just the default installation. It is a repository of tool catalogs, tool palettes,and tools that can be shared among AutoCAD Architecture users within a company. To assist users who desire to understand and get more capability from the Content Browser, this is the first of a multi-part series of articles on the Content Browser.
The AEC industry is seeing more clients requiring Building Information Modeling (BIM) on projects. Some clients have very detailed standards and expectations for the BIM process, and some clients say that they want BIM but have not idea what they really desire or how to get BIM. And then, there are clients that fall somewhere between those two types. Many clients (especially in the private sector) that have BIM standards in place have not publicized their standards, but will provide it to the design/construction team for specific projects. However, there are public entitites that have established BIM standards and have posted those standards on the internet and are accessible to anyone with internet access. Since it is nice to reference those BIM standards, I thought that I would list various public entities which have BIM standards that you can reference.
It is now the last day of 2012 and I am looking back over the past year and considering what has happened in my world of design software. Working so closely with the software, it is sometimes easy to forget how much has changed or occurred in the past year. Technology and software continually changes so it is never boring keeping up with it. Since I am an architect in the United States who deals with Autodesk software, that will be the focus of the article.
Many times when you are working with one of the AutoCAD-based products you will need to make the same change to a large quantity of drawing files. It takes forever to do this one drawing at a time, so you want something available to you to batch process the drawings. Autodesk has a free utility software available to do this, which is named ScriptPro.
Autodesk University 2012 is just over 5 weeks away at this point and I thought that I would just write a few comments about it for those going to it or considering going to it. If you are a user or manager of an Autodesk product, I highly recommend that you attend this annual conference which will be held in Las Vegas November 27-29, 2012 at Mandalay Bay.
External References (xrefs) are an important part of working with AutoCAD and its vertical packages. I consider xrefs a critical and key feature of AutoCAD in the AEC industry and encourage you to look into them if you are not currently utilizing them on your projects. There are many aspects of good utilization of xrefs, but I thought I would list a few tips in this article.
Whether linking files in Autodesk Revit or xreferencing files in AutoCAD, choosing to Attach or Overlay is an important decision. As I perform software training at companies, I routinely encounter many users who do not understand the difference between using the Attachment or the Overlay options. There is not a global right or wrong answer to this decision, but understanding the difference helps you to determine which option to use to achieve the results that you require. When you link or xref a file into your current file, you are doing that to see information that is in another file. The Attachment/Overlay option determines how that file will be seen downstream in other files.
Windows have been being placed at corner intersections of building walls for a long time, but they have not necessarily been an easy thing to show with design software. AutoCAD Architecture users have found workaround solutions for them since the inception of the software, but that no longer needs to be the case with the 2013 release. AutoCAD Architecture 2013 now has a new command tool specifically for placing Corner Windows.
Since Autodesk added tool palettes to AutoCAD-based products in the 2004 release, they have been an important feature to the products. Tool Palettes provide an easily customizable and readily accessible means of utilizing important tools to increase speed and “encourage” company standards. While Autodesk provides a few tool palettes to get a user started, there are endless possibilities for usages of tool palettes.
In this article, we will look at some methods of adding a Command Tool to an existing palette in AutoCAD Architecture, and modifying the properties of the Command Tool. A Command Tool allows any command string to be executed, whether that is AutoCAD Architecture related or AutoCAD related.
Mtext within the AutoCAD-based products typically has a bounding box that forces text to wrap to another line when the text line length reaches the edge of the bounding box. While this is very commonly the desired effect, there are times when you desire a line of text to remain on a single line and you do not want to keep resizing the Mtext bounding box to accommodate the length of the text line.
With the new Autodesk 2012 releases being announced this week, Autodesk also announced some new suites of software. These are bundles of multiple software packages that Autodesk offers and is meant to give you a significantly better value than buying each of the packages separately. With each of the new suites, Autodesk has 3 different levels of packages available (Standard, Premium, and Ultimate) which get progressively more expensive. As the AEC industry moves more into Building Information Modeling, utilization of multiple software packages becomes more integrated into organizations and makes purchasing suites more attractive.
It seems that navigating the 3D world of a design software file can sometimes become a pain and it is easy to end up in a strange viewing angle causing you to just want to get back to a default view that you like. Most of the Autodesk products now utilize a tool that allows you to create a default viewing angle and save that view so that you can get back to it with one click of the mouse. That tool is part of the ViewCube.
