We are a fairly large EPCM company doing work mainly in the mining and minerals processing industry. Up till now we have been using either AutoCAD standard or Inventor to do our plant and piping designs. Typically we will use AutoCAD and related packages for infrastructure and civil design work and IV for structural, mechanical and piping work. Our IV content centre for piping have been developed in-house and it covers all of our requirements.
That said, we do have problems with performance on IV when plant design get beyond a certain size and complexity - generally this means anything bigger than 40m x 40m and about 4 to 6 levels with mechanical and piping distributed through the model. We generate iso's as a rule using the IV isometric views on a customised sheet layout including specials, installation details, elevations, pipe supports, BOM, etc. Overall piping and plant GA's then show more installation details.
Because of the performance issues with IV we are now investigating the possibility of implementing Plant 3D for our larger plant work but frankly reading through the posts here I am starting to doubt the sanity of doing this. My concerns are as follows:
1. Customised piping, fitting and valve libraries - we are using pure metric systems and comply to ISO standards. Therefore we have to ensure that our library comprises our standard equipment being used and available. Using imperial equipment and "fuzzing" the drawing sheet and BOM is not what we want to do. How difficult is it to set up new standard libraries from scratch in P3D?
2. Again metricised drawing sheets and titleblocks - any issues around that?
3. Actual real support from Autodesk and the resellers - when will they understand that you get somebody from an engineering and piping design background to give this support, not some hyper active IT teenager?
4. Generating ISO's - is this fully customisable or are we stuck with the way Autodesk and the USA sees things?
5. Can we use mechanical equipment modelled in IV directly or do we have to convert everything to AutoCAD format first?
I have searched for some books on P3D but have only found one from a company in the Netherlands, anything else available? It seems like there is a distinct lack of material available out there unlike the other Autodesk packages - is this because of lack of support from the users or just that the installed base is too small?
I would like some input from my fellow forum users on this as I am sure these questions have been asked and hopefully answered already.
Regards
Kobus
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