Meeting Notes by Neil Blanchard

• From Anson Courtright, a free online energy calculator: http://designadvisor.mit.edu/design/

• Evan Shu: Keynotes with Symbol Attributes linked to external database – see included handout.

Evan uses MS Works DB.  He is creating some databases for CTW, based on CSI divisions, for example.  Keynotes are another use for a DB link to SA.  You do a Save As from your DB to a "Tab-Delimited" text file.  The first field needs to be the titles for DataCAD to read it.

In DC, in a demo plan, he placed the symbols in the plan and the end result is a table that has all the notes in it.

Making a new symbol with a text attribute.  The first attribute is a hidden attribute that is the description.  Check the "Lookup" field, and select your Tab-D TXT file.

The second attribute is the "Field Filled by Look up".  Do not explode the symbol when you place it -- When you place it, you get the pulldown menu that you can see the actual note, but the appropriate number shows up in the symbol.

You can add notes and/or change the existing, then resave it as a TD file over the old one and then refresh the database.  Then extract the report -- which then gets Copied and pasted into another DB so you can reformat it, sort it -- then paste it back into the drawing as "Paste Special".

• Greg Smith o2c and DataCAD bitmaps:
Pasted and enlarged a bitmap of an aerial photograph in DataAD to overlay a site plan or a deed plan.  A good source for these is Mass GIS.  Insert it into DC.  Use solid fills to highlight the featured areas so that you can see them in the bitmap area.  You can also use textured fills.

It also possible to use a site photo as an o2c texture, you can then do a 3D rendered site from a perspective, instead of just plan.  Greg had a full size plot as an example – which makes this process a lot clearer than my cursory notes!

You will need to get familiar with Move/In Front/Behind/To Front/To Back, and also how bitmaps/fills are handled in the display and/or the Pen Table – in order to get things to look like you need them to on the plot.

• Mike Smith: SketchUp for LARGE Projects – see included handout.  Here are my notes:

They used SketchUp (SU hereafter) & DataCAD in tandem on a very large project, to do a master plan.  Mike highly recommends doing the work in more than one drawing file.  Each building is a separate SU model and then they are "XRef'd" into a central file.  SU has a "GTV" -- which have different types of transistion.  Modeleing undulating curves in SU are quite difficult -- they are much easier to do in DC and then imported into SU as a DWG.  In SU, layers are not nearly as critical as they are in DC -- most buildings can be done on 1 or 2 layers, and each building component must have unique layer names, because in the main model all the layers with the same names are groups.

Grouping is key in SU -- the minute that you create something make them a group.  This makes separating them much easier as things get more complicated.  Kind of like layers are in DataCAD.

SU Components are like symbols or XRef's.  (hold center mouse button to orbit, and the shift key to pan, and hold and scroll to zoom).

Insert Component which is any SU model, BTW, SU shows it with a yellow box which are the extents of the component.  Right-click on a component and select Edit Component -- and this locks out everything else in the file.

Components can be reloaded so you can see the updates that someone else is working on it.  Be careful when you save as a component, because it is possible to overwrite somone elses work in the original files.

Components are important for repeated elements.

Curves can be smoothed -- see handout...

Layers work across components and groups -- to move an object to a layer just select it and then select the layer that you want and the object gets moved.

If you are modeling things in other CADD programs, put them in at the intended Z height and then import it into SU.
 
 
 

SKETCHUP for LARGE PROJECTS
Michael Smith
Signature Architects, Inc.    June 21, 2005
 

• Version: SketchUp 4 (5 is due out this Summer)
• Among other things, most operations supposed to be 2x faster in v.5
• SketchUp can be really cool, but also very frustrating if you use if for days on end. It’s smart enough to be stupid and counterintuitive
• Cheap Tricks Ware SketchUp tutorials VERY helpful
• SketchUp’s own tutorials less helpful

SketchUp Tips and Caveats:

• Buildings created outside the Master Model are brought in as Components
• Because components retain the original layers, you will want to do a Save As on the building model, and move all the entities to a single layer, like “Building 1”.
• To update a building ‘component’ in the Master Model:
• Pick the component in the Master Model
• Right-click on it, pick “Entity Info” at the top of the dialog
• Pick “Reload” from the bottom of that dialog
• An Open dialog will appear. Make sure the file name is correct then select “Open”
• As long as the component model has not moved, or been renamed, the model will remain in its original location in the Master Model
• A component is not an “XREF”. Once a component is brought into the Master Model it is fully editable within that model.  But if you edit it, you will not be making the changes to the original model. Be careful.
• When bringing in complex models, like site models and curved surfaces, use the “Soften/Smooth Edges” option (from the right-click menu, or the “Edit/xxx Entities” drop-down menu) to get rid of all the visible polygon edges

• Must Group things, and must edit by Group to avoid picking things you don’t want. This is THE MOST IMPORTANT TRICK TO USING SketchUp!
• Right-click and use “Edit Group” to edit entities in a group.  You will know if you’ve done this correctly because all other objects not in the group will be grayed out
• To stop editing a group, right-click outside the group and pick the “Close Group” option.

• Another MOST IMPORTANT tip for SketchUp:
• Layers are independent of groups!
• Because of this, you can accidentally have a group with objects that are on a layer normally outside of your group. Will drive you nuts when you turn off a layer and something disappears from your group, or worse, SketchUp won’t let you turn off a layer because one or more objects are in the group being edited
• In the Layer menu there is a circle (called a radio button) and a box for each layer.
• The radio buttons tell which is the active layer; only one can be selected at a time.
• The boxes indicate which layers are displayed as ON.
• Even when editing a group, whichever layer is the ACTIVE layer is the one that new objects are drawn on.  So you MUST make sure, even when editing within a Group, that you have the Active layer as the one that that object should be on.

• In SketchUp you are often better off drawing one building on just one layer, or at least very, very few layers.  It’s just not necessary in SketchUp to use many layers, and because of the “problems” listed above, they can actually make your life more difficult.
• A Master Model of just 20 MB will slow a 2.5 GHz processor to a virtual crawl
• Textures slow down the model speed, so best to wait on those
• Importing bitmap base images slows down the model but adds outstanding realism, especially once you start rotating the model
• Highly detailed parts of a model, like windows and doors, are often not needed.  Windows made of 3D frames, muntins and glass will just slow down the model, especially if you are using many of them (they are not “instanced” the way DataCAD symbols are).
• Instead, do simple windows and doors
• Curves are easier modeled in DataCAD
• If you have a series of curves and/or lines, best to combine them into a single polygon/polyline
• “Offset” tool really cool for stepped buildings and for cornices
• V.4 does not import 3DS models, but DataCAD does, so you can bring a 3DS model into DataCAD, export via DXF or DWG, and bring into SketchUp
• V.5 will have direct SketchUp import
• Not very effective to bring models back and forth between DCAD and SketchUp, since SketchUp models are very tessalated, and don’t allow you to break up and edit the model very easily in DataCAD.
• Mark Madura said that direct import/export between SketchUp and DataCAD is in the works, including the transfer of all textures and colors
• Even while in the middle of other editing operation, use the Middle Mouse Button to “Orbit” around model.  This is a great feature so that you don’t have to stop what you’re doing to move around the model by first picking the “Orbit” button from the menus.
• Hold down the Middle Mouse Button AND the Shift key to do the same thing for “Panning”
• Learn to type distances and quantities:
• For distances, get the cursor going in the right direction, then just type xx’-xx” (make sure you use the feet/inch symbols; it’s not like DataCAD)
• For quantities (like Copy X times) type the letter “x” then the quantity, like “x12”.  Like DataCAD, the object being copied counts as the first of those 12 objects.\
• When creating models in DataCAD for export to SketchUp, especially for large projects where you bring components into a Master Model, it pays to have the Z-base set correctly in DataCAD, so that when it comes into SketchUp you don’t have to worry about moving the model to the correct Z-height.
• SketchUp has the equivalent of Goto Views (“Window/Pages” and “View/Page Tabs”).  Use them.