SolidWorks for Architectural Work?

The Autodesk products are more commonly used for that sort of application.

Bob

Layout of anything like that ought to be relatively easy, particularly so with the typical rectangular buildings.

Not familiar with importing a 3D ground plot set of data, but I remember people talking about it.

The question would be what is the best CAD package or multiple packages to get your final product done and done well & on time. SolidWorks obviously is not widely used for architectural construction, unless maybe it is steel frame industrial buildings.

There is no reason you could not but there are other tools which are more geared toward this.. for instance, SketchUp for free, fast has a huge online resource can do most of what's needed, and nearly every modeler is jumping on to support it.. I personally have a full layout out (in SW format) of our house and yard. The negative.. for large 1:1 layouts,.. parasolid has a 1km limit.

Rob has written about his needs/wants for this for a while and recently on his blog...

I had the construction prints so it was easier to model.

What software do the people you have to send the drawing to others to work on? What software do others use that do some of the drawing? For approval you need accurately scaled paper prints. For customers you probably want pretty renderings.Whatever does that with the least effort on your part is what you need?

Bob

Parasolid has always imposed a limit to the size of the model space Cliff. It's gotten larger over the years but is still there.

It's something like that but in the end, a cap was imposed for memory management and allocation issues. This also shows up when you import tessellated data into anything built on ParaSolid. Even the PC based version of UG was a real memory leaker in 1999. UG for Unix, OTOH, was another story completely.

I was told by someone @ SolidWorks that the reason for the 1km limit is to maintain the gap between SolidWorks & CATIA. CATIA, I was told, has no limit.

That might be what you were told. Catia isn't a parasolid based product. There are also one or two other features that differentiate the two products. LOL

I was told that it is there because they want to keep the model geometry accurate enough when using different units...like people do.

br Markku

SolidWorks is increasingly being used to design manufactured buidling products - HVAC equipment, specialty doors and windows, cladding, etc., - but not so much for actual architectural design.

The biggest challenge would be construction documentation. CDs are legal documents that are distributed to the wide range of subcontractors that actually do the work. The symbology used on AEC CDs is radically different from mechanical detail drawings and it would be very difficult to produce a full set of CDs in SolidWorks.

SolidWorks also lacks automation of common architectural elements, such as inserting doors and windows, cleaning up wall intersections, curtain walls, etc.

I tried some years ago. Led to a discussion about tolerances and limits in SW. Here are some major sticking points for SW whether architecture or industrial.

1. The 500M radius limit. Can't build parts bigger than this. On a project built on 14 acres I ran into this.
2. Lack of a contour loft. Was proposed to SW at SWW2000 for dealing with contours from a CMM. No action. CATIA has it. So does Autodesk.
3. Poor performance with models that have huge number so small repetitive features. In the industrial world this means grills, PC boards, etc.
4. Assembly speed. Buildings are notorious for simple highly repetitive parts. Mating these can be a big job. Stability of the mates is another thing. This was a major sticking point to implementation in the RV and manufactured housing industry.
5. SW is sickenly slow when reading the typical architectural/site drawings from ACAD. Just too many lines.

Some plusess that could really make SW take off in Civil:

1. Solidmodeling does have an application in earthmoving/landscaping because it is so easy to remove and add solid volumes.
2. Solidmodeling also has application in actually visualizing what a project will look like before, during and after construction.
3. Solidmodeling can better predict what is going on underground. To better understand this statement you would have had to have watched a project at the end of my road where two high lines, a water main, a sewer, a storm sewer, a high pressure oil pipeline, fiber optics, telephone and a few other things crossed over in a major intersection. And this is a country road.

TOP

Excellent point about the visualization aspect. That was really one of the reasons for my inquiry. I'm working with a company that is laying out building sites in AutoCAD. Everyone is talking about how important it is to be able to visualize the site in 3 dimensions. "So why are you using a 2D CAD package?" So there's the visualization, the ease of use and the fact that Solidworks is parametric while AutoCAD isn't.

Granted, I've been away from AutoCAD for a long time, but the unpleasant aspects appear to still be there. It looks terribly inefficient compared to what can be done in SW.

Thanks.

There are a lot of acad 3rd party add-ins for architecture and civil engineering. Back in the early 90s, I started out on acad 10 (command line on DOS). I remember a couple of add-on packages (i think one called topo and one called desktop?) that would help create 3d terrain and 3d buildings from simple 2d line drawings. For example to do a building you choose the type of wall from a menu (e.g., standard 2x4 studs with drywall) draw the room outline, and the software creates the wall complete with the elevation. Select a symbol for a standard door and place it in the wall. The software would cut the wall, add the jambs, and place the door. It would also generate the elevation views so you could render and plot the front of the building, etc. It was very efficient and very customizable (you could record macros or write your own routines in autolisp). Used a tablet instead of a mouse and had all the standard wall types and symbols programmed on it. Been away from that environment for quite a while, but it was quite fun to use. For terrain, just sketch the contour lines and apply the elevation (or input data from a surveyor's file) and it would generate what would amount to a topographical map. Very simple and quick. I'm sure that industry's software (AEC) has improved quite a bit since then. I think even compared to that software in the 1990s that solidworks would be very difficult to use for AEC.

"CADaholic" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@f36g2000hsa.googlegroups.com... Excellent point about the visualization aspect. That was really one of the reasons for my inquiry. I'm working with a company that is laying out building sites in AutoCAD. Everyone is talking about how important it is to be able to visualize the site in 3 dimensions. "So why are you using a 2D CAD package?" So there's the visualization, the ease of use and the fact that Solidworks is parametric while AutoCAD isn't.

Granted, I've been away from AutoCAD for a long time, but the unpleasant aspects appear to still be there. It looks terribly inefficient compared to what can be done in SW.

Thanks.

On May 12, 8:52 pm, TOP wrote:

I have seen some software for SW that automates building design. In this case it was for precast concrete buildings and it was designed to tie into an ERP program.

SW has the programmability, but not the stability. Imagine creating a program to do some of this stuff and then have SW change the API year after year. One advantage to ACAD is that this stuff doesn't change much (or does it?). My STAR benchmark created geometry from scratch so it can be done.

TOP

See Revit or ArchiCAD