Education_001 – Introduction to CAD

Introduction to CAD
CAD stands for Computer Aided Drafting or Computer Aided Design. It means using the computer to draw.

CAD is using the computer software to generate 2D drawings or 3D virtual buildings that you can walk around.
[ms-protect-content id=”34491,34492,34493, 34494, 34495, 34496, 344927″]
What Are Originals
When you move from manual methods of creating drawings and models to computer production methods you have to get used to the fact that the originals are no longer the printed drawings. The printed drawings are copies of the information on the computer and if you change one line in the computer file your printed drawing is no longer current.
When you get used to this it becomes easier to deal with the issues that this raises. The rule is that the computer file is the original, the printed drawings are a copy. Don’t update the printed drawings manually and issue them. If you do this then your computer drawings are no longer current and you can lose track of which drawings are the latest.
You need to have a strategy that makes it clear which copy of the file is current and which drawing can be marked-up. When the whole drawing has been corrected you can reprint the drawing and use the new drawing to replace the old one in the stick set.
Storing and Organising Files
Vectorworks is for producing drawings. You must have a system at the moment for storing and organising your current projects. For example, many companies have a large folder that they put sketches, sketch plans and tracing paper originals into. They store these folders in a cabinet of some sort.
When you move to computer based drawings you still need to have a way of storing and organising your files. You may still store your printed drawings in a folder but now the original drawings will be stored on the computer and just as you had a logic and an order to the way you stored your tracing paper drawings so you need a logic and an order for storing your computer files.
You should have a strategy for storing not just the computer drawings. The strategy should also cover all the computer documents that you will be creating including contracts, accounts and specifications. When developing your strategy here are some things you should consider:
Storage

• Never have more than one place to store files on your computer system. If you duplicate the files on different computers you will get into the situation where you don’t know which file is the current one. So, stop this at the beginning by having only one place to store files.

All Documents Together

• Put all the documents that relate to a project in the same folder, so that you can go to a Job Folder and find what you are looking for whether it is a drawing, letter or specification.
• Divide these documents into folders so that you can easily find a letter or a specification.

Folder Naming

• Consider a naming strategy that will allow you to see the Project Folder quickly. Many people can remember the Project Name, and they can remember roughly where the job is (chronologically in a list of jobs).
• You can search down the list of Project Names looking for the project, but when the list gets long, a project number can help.

File Naming

• When you are looking for the latest drawings inside the job folder it’s handy to have the project name as part of the file name and then the date that the file was last worked on:
  Bloggs_001230.vwx (writing the date backwards helps to sort the file into the correct chronological order)
• You can also add the type of drawings. Big projects may be made out of several files. For example: Bloggs_Plans_001220.mcd
  Bloggs_Window_001220.mcd Bloggs_Details_001220.mcd
• For large projects you might have a strategy where you start each day with a copy of the most recent file and change the date to that day’s date. This will allow you to go back to several old versions of the drawings if it’s the type of project that will have a lot of changes. You don’t have to keep every days work, just the ones that you think are important, like the last drawing each week.
• Now that you have a strategy for storing and organising the drawings and files on your computer you also have a strategy for finding the drawings that you want.

Real World Sizes
In practice the area that you can draw seems unlimited because you set up the piece of paper that you want to print on and then tell Vectorworks what scale you want to use. Drawing in Vectorworks is like drawing on a piece of paper. The grey border is the edge of the printable area (the area that the printer can print on, not the complete size of the paper).
When you are drawing in Vectorworks ignore the fact that the layer is set to a specific scale. The thing to remember is this: draw the objects to the correct real world sizes regardless of the scale of the layer that you are working on. For example, if you are drawing a concrete block, then ignore the scale of the layer and draw the concrete block its full size, the size it is in the real world.
[/ms-protect-content]
Next Page: New Ways of Drawing