Building Information Modeling

Introduction to the AutoCAD Architecture Toolset



With the introduction of the industry-specific toolsets included in the AutoCAD 2019 subscription, identifying the right toolset for …

All right Thank You Ashley I’m seeing a pop up here that says attendees still on hold a chiclet start broadcast now or we it appears to me that everyone is okay that it is started good deal all right well I’m ready to go here so thank you

Ashley and thank you all for joining me on today’s webcast I’m usually very thorough and not into the whole brevity thing but since we are on limited time today I will keep the PowerPoint to a minimum that way we can see more of the software so my assumption is that you

Are all here today because you have found out you now have access to AutoCAD architecture included with your AutoCAD licenses therefore I wanted to start off by pointing out some of the basics of AutoCAD so I can contrast that in the next slide with differences between AutoCAD versus AutoCAD architecture so

AutoCAD or plain old vanilla AutoCAD as we refer to it in the industry has been around for a long long time and is an absolute giant in the world of 2d drafting so with that we traditionally use it for you use it to draw things like lines arcs polylines and even hatch

Patterns to represent what we need to draw you can even take this one step further and group certain elements together as blocks for more sophisticated use another nice feature of AutoCAD is it allows you the ability to organize your drawings by layers that way you can now tell what items are

Actually supposed to be and control things like their visibility and line weights we can then create a layout with a title block at our drawings to that sheet at a desired scale and print our sheets after reviewing a typical workflow of plain old vanilla AutoCAD let’s take a minute to introduce AutoCAD architecture

Essentially it is an autocad-based product with tools that allow architects and building designers to model their buildings in 3d and includes a massive set of tools dedicated to creating a set of architectural drawings previously it was commonly referred to as a vertical of which autocad architecture is one of

Several verticals or as we call them now tool sets there is one for MEP plant design and a few others for different types of engineering disciplines I am not 100% on this but I always assumed they were called verticals because most of them are three-dimensional and allow

You to build models vertically in the Z direction or at least conceptually because you are adding a higher level of functionality to regular AutoCAD now AutoCAD architecture is model-based what does that mean well it means when I want to draw a wall I place an actual wall

Not just a bunch of lines and hatch patterns to represent a wall but I actually model a wall and AutoCAD architecture will display it is if I had actually drawn a wall on my plan with all the associated components I need to show such as brick hatching stud layer

Gypsum wallboard and so on it is a parametric modeler meaning that I can manipulate its physical properties with certain parameters if I take the wall I placed find the height parameter in the properties box I can actually drive the geometry by changing the value in the properties palette as far as

Intelligence goes you can create things like door and windows schedules based on actual components placed in the model then of course you have an entire slew of modeled objects and details dedicated to architectural design and construction documents so there was a lot going on with that last

Slide and I will show most of that again once we get into the software but now that you have a basic understanding of the differences between AutoCAD and AutoCAD architecture I wanted to talk about a common point of confusion so we are talking about two separate products here if you already have AutoCAD

Installed you will need to install AutoCAD architecture it is not just an add-on it is a totally separate download and install furthermore you can absolutely have both products installed at the same time in case you just need to do some Lyons arcs and circles by all means use regular AutoCAD if you are

Doing building the building design for sure use AutoCAD architecture if you are looking for AutoCAD architecture you can find your download at manage autodesk.com so hopefully this looks familiar to everyone but this is where you can download your software I clicked on the products and services tab then

The down arrow next to AutoCAD architecture then you can select the version you would like to download notice again the URL managed Autodesk comm and I included that for your reference again at the top of the slide alright so I know we are short on time today scheduled only for 30 minutes or

So so thank you for your patience on the PowerPoint now I say we take a look at some of the software here all right so this is autocad architecture one of the first things you’re going to notice here is that up at the top and of course I’ve got America’s favorite plumbing

Consultant as always to help us out you notice instead of just AutoCAD it now says autocad architecture so you see we’re working at a totally different product or it’s going to look different than you’re used to seen one thing to keep in mind about autocad architecture is it’s very much product based with

Unless you’re using sheet sets with vanilla autocad you’re used to having a bunch of separate DWG files with autocad architecture it’s really more of a conglomeration of a bunch of separate files that it groups together for you and that’s managed partly by this project browser here today we’re going

To be working with this research lab you can add in rendering and some basic project information and things like that so the floorplan view that we’re looking at here looks just like a normal regular floorplan but when I select one of these elements this wall for example you it

Selects it as an object not just a bunch of separate lines hatch patterns and if I was going to select the door arcs and things like that these are actually object elements and right now we’re looking at a slice of our building through the first floor if I look at it

In 3d you can see we’re actually looking at working with a 3d model here so I’m going to go back to my top view here go back to plan and let’s talk a little bit about some of the modeling elements that we can work with so let’s say I just

Delete this wall here and maybe I want to add in another wall well this is my tool palette right here and it’s got all sorts of things that we can work with these are right out of the box and I’m going to show you some of the great things that comes with it

One of them is a whole set of walls that we can use if I would like to model a wall I can find the one I want in this case we’ll do stud with chip on either side can drag this into my model click

Where I need it to go add it in here and draw it in a little more you can see it’ll automatically connect if I’ve been zoomed in a little better it would have connected for me so if i zoom in here you can see all the layers and it’s

Actually a real modeled element let’s take a look at our element properties here you can see the style here listed you can see the width the base height and some of these parameters are modifiable maybe I really wanted this to be it nine foot six instead of 10 feet I

Can modify that 9 feet 6 hit enter and that will adjust it for me let’s say I want to add in a door zoom out a little bit so we can kind of see what we’re doing here if I go over to the doors tab on my tool palettes let’s take a

Standard single hinge door here select the wall where I want to place it and notice before I even place that I can decide the orientation here click and it’s placed notice on the placement here before I even add it into a wall I’ve got it defined so it’s relative to the

Grid it’s got an offset and I have an automatic six inch offset which allows me to get it six inches from the end of the wall as you see as I’ve placed here let’s go ahead and take a look at this door that we placed so notice this it

Actually not only placed the modelled element of the door but it cut out an opening in the wall if I were to move this door inside this wall notice it’ll infill move or the cut is located let’s take a couple seconds to look at the properties here so we can modify the

Height and width parameters if we like we’ve also got some standard sizes that come as part of this door so we could choose the sizes that we want this will allow us to not select or not size something that can’t be manufactured let’s take a look at the window tool now

This is pretty similar so let’s say I want to place a window in here now with this I have the ability to type in the offset that I want maybe I want this to be 11 feet right here I can type that in and it will place it as such so let’s

Take a look at this in 3d and see what I’ve done here all right so here’s our wall that we’ve created with our door and the window here now here’s another thing that’s kind of nice I didn’t show this when I placed it but I could set

The head or sill height vertically if I’d like so maybe if I wanted the head height to be a little higher I could bump that up alright so we’ll go back to our top of you here in our floor plan yeah one other thing that I want to show

With the door even after you’ve placed one you can use the flip toggle to get the swing going the other way and you’ll see that with a lot of other components as well let’s take a look cat the stair tool so for this I’m just

Going to show this kind of off to the side here let’s say for this we’ll use the built-in stair tool and I’m going to do a multi landing stair here so I’ll just draw a few risers put in my landing and then finish the stair out here and

You can see it draws it in really nicely in plan but if I look at it in 3d you can see we’ve got a very nice modeled stair element let’s say you’d like to add some railings to that well we can go ahead and do that by clicking the

Railing tool selecting our stairs and it’s automatically going to add one in there let’s say I want to place another one in railing maybe I’ll do three foot offset to put one on the inside select my stair again and there we go so the railing is associated with the

Stair one nice thing here is if I were to host this maybe offset a little bit notice it it’s just kind of floating there because it doesn’t it’s kind of inside the stair so if I undo that get it back to maybe a three foot offset

It’ll go back to where we had it so the that’s I was just showing you how everything is nice and associated here all right um let me make sure I didn’t forget anything here so let’s do one more example with our walls and maybe we’ll add a roof to the project here so

If I go to the walls tool again I’ll just grab one of these and if you draw your building clockwise the brick should be on the correct side here and then of course you can just kind of you could use the trim or fill it tools to get these to clean up or

Just drag the end grips as I did so let’s say we want to put a roof on here you can find the roof tool right click on it and apply it to the walls that you’ve got created here so I’ll select my walls and enter we will not erase the

Geometry and there we go we’ve got a nice hipped roof let’s check that out in 3d real quick looks pretty good go back to my plan view so let’s say you want to gable and rather than a hipped roof you could drag your grip over to the edge

Here and now you’ve got a gable end over here so the roof looks great right now but we kind of need to clean up our wall here that’s no problem we can select the wall right click on it roof floor line modify roof line and then choose Auto

Project down here select the roof and hit enter and it’ll clean that up for us alright let’s see if I forgot anything else here all right so I think I’m going to go ahead and delete some of this extra stuff that I popped in here let’s say yeah I will do them

Plan view here then I’ll talk a little bit more about how the project goes together all right so we’ll take what we’ve got here maybe save that and exit my construct here all right so a project navigator this is kind of how we work with some of the important project

Settings and it’s kind of like our how we work with everything in the project settings and for example on the project tab up here we can set our levels and things like that up so if I open up maybe my ISO view here this will give us

A good idea of what’s going on so this building project that we have and in 3d this is going to look something like this it’s going to take a second here to generate now on my project I could add in another level here so if I go ahead and do that

I’ll right-click in here add a level above name it accordingly and maybe this is 5th floor we’ll call it five for the ID that should be four and I will save these alright so we made some changes that’s okay so let’s take a look now so some things got rearranged here but

That’s okay we can fix all that if we go to the views over here let’s look at our exterior ISO so we need to make a new construct here for the new floor that we added so what I can do is copy my fourth floor and apply it to my fifth floor

Looks like I messed up my numbering but that’s okay we can work around that so I’ll rename this and we’ll just call it oh five fifth floor rhe path everything most of this is just done automatically for us if I go back to my ISO view check the properties we

Can turn that on everything’s on here everything should be showing and it’ll give it a minute and should generate here looks good okay so that’s how you would add another level you would just kind of duplicate the floor plate from the one below and repass everything all right so let’s say

Let’s take a look at our views tab and maybe we want to do another floor plan we’ve got our constructs here for each level then maybe we need to show a different type of floor plan we can add that by creating a new view right click on here say new view drawing general

Next turn on all the floors next make sure they’re on finish and we’ll open up our new view here let’s take a look at what’s going on here all right so we’re looking at our new floor plan that we’ve created one thing I like to show is if

We zoom in here we’ve got different levels of detail if we’re doing a construction document set will want a probably medium level of detail if we’re doing a presentation view you can switch it to that and we’ve got a nice poche here so you’ve got all sorts of

Different ways you can look at your project let’s go ahead and take a look at maybe adding a little door schedule here I think we’ve got some time for that so let’s find our tool palette so if you right click on your tool palettes you can find all sorts of there

And things that you have here you can add in things like revision clouds key notes text dimensions call-outs and sections which we’ll get to a minute in a minute tags but we’ve got scheduling too so this will kind of give you an idea of the intelligence built in so let’s say I

Click on door schedule select the part of the model I want hit enter and draw that in and let’s zoom in on here and we’ve scheduled every door in this in this plan so all of the doors are populated of course we’ll have to go in and add some user-defined fields as well

But it’s a very nice capability of the software let’s go ahead and see what else so if we had time we can do a window schedule wall schedule and so on and so forth but let’s see what happens if we want to cut a section through our model now we

Can do this by going to the call-outs up here and maybe choosing this section mark click once up top once below hit enter now define how far I want to show my section we’ll draw it in our current drawing here and I can click to place it wherever I want now it’s actually

Cutting a live section of my model here and if i zoom in you can take a nice look at this and let’s go ahead and do this so now that we’ve got that section if we go to the sheets tab we can actually create a sheet for this so let’s say I

Right-click on the architectural tab you know what I better save this first otherwise I’m not going to be able to get that sections will save our construct right click new sheet so maybe this is sheet number a three hundred sections say okay and you’ll see that it

Populates our title block here I’ll show you this in a second so sections sheet number whatever information we’ve had now this is the best part here if I go and find that section that I created all I have to do is just drag it drop it on

To my sheet and I’m now placed it on here and the view title has populated with the view name detail number and view scale so you can see that this is a pretty superior way to put together a set of drawings and I think one thing I

Left out here is I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the things in the tool palettes that make this pretty awesome for putting a set together if you look at the detailing tab you’ve got some basics concrete we’ve got all sorts of detail items built in some of the

Stuff is modeling some of this is just detail items for example maybe you need to maybe you’ve got a section detail and you want to add in some plywood I would do this probably in a live view but just for purposes I can show you what that’s

Going to look like maybe you’ve got a roof drain detail that you’re working on you could place this in your model of course you would play places in a models view and work with it from there I probably should do that maybe if we go

Back to one of our new views here we could do that so I would just place any of these in my section one other thing I want to point out is everything gets placed on a layer automatically for you so AutoCAD architecture recognizes that this is a detail so it places that on

That detail these walls these all your walls and doors and things like that these will all get placed on I probably go to the constructs for that these will all go to the correct layer so you don’t you don’t have to worry about that anymore that all gets taken care of for

You so it knows that this is on the wall layer the door same thing door layer back to the tool palettes here all sorts of things that we can load in let’s take one more look at this there’s something called the content browser there’s so many components that come with the

Software out of the box let’s say I’m looking for some casework I could do a quick search in here and it’ll load all the components available and a lot of these are three-dimensional so if I want to actually model these I can just place them in my drawing or add them to my

Tool palettes so it comes back with a whole list of all these three-dimensional items I could place in my model so since we’re pretty much running short on time here I think I pretty much covered everything that I really wanted to show today and I think we can open it up for some

Questions and answers and I’m pretty sure if you had any questions I think Rick was already going through and answering them but feel free to keep them coming if you need to it’s so far there’s only been a couple of questions I’ve answered both of them but just in

Case other people don’t see them because I think some some of the questions were done privately one of the questions was having you used siemens factory cad in factory flow and are they compatible with autocad architecture I myself have not done it I don’t believe dan has

Either out he may tell you otherwise but I did look on the factory cad website and according to their website is compatible without a cat of architecture they didn’t tell versions what versions of factory cadw operations of autocad architecture are compatible they just said it was compatible question that

Just came in was does autocad create their own layer list or do you have to create it I’ll answer that one since off the top of my head there’s a layer control I tell you why maybe Dan can go there for us real quick go under manage

Their Dave or dam I’m sorry that’s right all right take a look on your manage tab and you’ll see the style manager and under documentation objects I believe it is you’ll see ok look under a multi-purpose object since it’s one or the other yeah see where it says layer key styles

So this is the layers that come out of the box which are said if you aware of what objects go to what it’s basically a pointer system that was set up by some architectural association that governs this and it’s supposed to be a standard so it’s basically taking if it’s this type

Object this is the layer it goes on you can modify this to your own standards if you don’t like it and you can create your own layer keys completely if you need to so that’s the way it’s handling the layers can you show how to print out the door schedule basically it’s just

I’ll let you answer that day and if you want to yeah so um right I should be able to just place that view on the sheet and print it out so this is just a view did I have a let’s see here yeah let’s go to that sheet

I could explain basically what you do is just like you did with that section cut you can take a view of a particular schedule and place it on a sheet once it’s on the sheet you would print it just like any other crime you could actually create the view to be the

Entire drawing of a bunch of schedules that are all on one drawing because the schedules do not have to be on the same drawing as the view or you could just create a view area of that schedule and then you can drag it just like you’d

Like the section cut and the view area is defined just like a view and AutoCAD can case work be modified yes it can it’s just AutoCAD 3d blocks that have been put on steroids so you cannot have modify the 3d blocks themselves and change it that way you could also create

Your own and everything is a little more complex than just a normal AutoCAD blocks because there’s some set up in the style that has to be done but that’s something that would be covered in training maybe not specifically for case work but it’s the same concept for

Anything custom it my coworker and I are on shared drawings can I use the vanilla while he uses vertical yes you can as long as they’re not the exact same DWG file is still AutoCAD so there’ll be a lock file on it on a DWG file that is

Opened but you can open up a regular AutoCAD architecture drawing in AutoCAD they would need the object in a blurs installed on their computer in order to see the AutoCAD architecture objects and they wouldn’t be able to modify any of the AutoCAD architecture objects they

Would just be able to draw 2d items and things like that they could erase the AutoCAD architecture objects but they couldn’t modify it in other words they couldn’t change a door hide or windowsill hide or something like that or the way the window looks can you

Import the schedule to an excel sheet as well yes you can they are just regular tables and AutoCAD that have been populated so you could export those to excel the same way you would an autocad tape and so far that’s the last question not one more how does AutoCAD architecture differ

From Revit and I’m gonna turn that over to Dan here so basically it’s just two different products there’s a lot of crossover you know they’re both modelers they both associate information together one is just autocad-based the other one is Revit based and that’s really it you

Know there’s a lot of it is external forces a lot of companies prefer or require Revit deliverable some require an AutoCAD or nonspecific deliverable just things like that I could elaborate on that a little more I would say some things could be more powerful in Revit as far as ease of

Getting three-dimensional views and lender inks and things like that and updating the drawings but they both pretty much at the core at the very core to do the same thing it’s putting together a solid set of construction documents is the difference about file size you know it takes that one or me

Yeah I really so like this one this one right here we haven’t really done a lot of sheets on this dataset yet and it’s still getting kind of large I mean last time I looked at the folder it was definitely like 15 or 20 Meg’s already

But it’s probably all in still gonna be a little less than a Revit file once full CDs are done but it might and might be kind of comparable but basically yeah each individual file is smaller let’s put it that way each individual file you’re working on it’s going to be like you know

A couple hundred K at the very most it’s so basically the way I’ve always looked at it as a Revit file being one file is gonna be pretty good in size each drawing in the AutoCAD architectural individual you’ll be much smaller but when you look at the project as a whole

That’s gonna be relatively about the same size as the Revit model so you’re not really gonna be gaining anything in file size it’s just a group of drawings that are all making the project together being handled by the project manager and in Revit it’s just a single model and

That’s what makes the difference between how they work also advice some thuggish function out while some things will be more instant and Revit because she makes the change in the model it changes everywhere here you may have to set up an additional command to make it update

Section so if you change the model that section won’t update automatically you have to hit a command that says update sections and then it updates because it’s AutoCAD not a single file Revit is a single model file database a CA R infinity that’s what we just said thank

You for your input how can you work as a team again it would just be working on individual drawings you know if you can divide it up into several different constructs like in this particular one each floor is a different construct if when when you get into different views

One person could be working on the construct while somebody else is working on the view because it’s using xrefs so if he makes a change in the construct you just get a message saying update that view so it’d be just into each person working on an individual drawing no two people

Working on the same drawing what’s the name of the model that’s the name of the drawing files so it can change and be whatever you want to make it per drawing you would think of the project name as being what your Revit if you’re comparing it to Revit the Revit file

Project name would be equivalent to the project file name on this end in each drawing being individual parts of that drawing so individual views and individual sheets things like that within our in comparison the to the tool palettes have a library and can it be modified the tool palettes are working

Off of the content browser so it’s pulling information from the content browser you can add information additional information from the content browser to tool palettes you can also create your own tool palettes and manage them for an entire company through the content browser so in other words you

Could have one person who is the parent of all the tool palettes and create a bunch of custom tool palettes that you need in your in your company you save those in a Content browser location on your network and everybody else read sass so if you make a change as the

Parent to the tool palette everybody in the company will get that change now they’ll have to refresh their tool palette there’s a button that would show up on their tool palette says refresh but once they hit refresh everyone in the company but there would be three people or two hundred people would get

The same change so it’s a lot easier to manage your tool palettes because you’re doing it through the content browser itself that was the last question so far we’ll give everybody if about a minute or so here to see if there any more looks like that’s about the last

Question we’re gonna guess so Dan I’ll let you close it out with Ashley yeah I think that was all I had so thanks a lot Rick for taking the questions and I guess Ashley if you want to take it from here okay well yeah thanks guys this will

Conclude our broadcast if you think of additional questions later you can just simply reply to that confirmation or reminder email your receive from GoToWebinar and we can get those today and/or Rick or whoever to get your questions answered once again if you could take a few moments to fill out the

Survey it will just pop up as we close down today and thanks for attending and have a great day everybody

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