Dynamic door - certain issues

[rhudb]

Hello everyone,

I've been an AutoCAD user for roughly a decade and I'm constantly attempting to introduce good practices to my workflow. I'm an owner of a small architectural office and lately we've been experiencing heavy work loads which makes me want to level up our workflow. To give you a little background - up until last year most of our work has been mainly within the scope of Schematic Design, Preliminary Design and Design Development. Over the past, say 18 months, we've been taking on more and more projects which are in the Construction Drawings stage. In the next half a year we'll be trying to migrate some of our work to Revit, so that it's easier for us to handle the CD stage, however, we're very new to BIM, so I guess we'll need to keep working in CAD until becoming fully confident that we could produce clean and neat drawings as per our standards.

To keep it short, over the past decade we've collected all types of blocks. I made a small selection of such that we're using on a daily basis. They're not very consistent so I'm trying to re-make these and elaborate on their functionality. Starting small - I'm attempting to create a few different door blocks.

Single Swing Door (SSD)
Double Swing Door (DSD)
Single Swing Glass Door (SSGD)
Double Swing Glass Door (DSGD)

I've had some hiccups with the flip and rotate functionality but somehow found my work around it. There's currently four things that I'm struggling with:

01) When I click on the width stretch grip I'd like for the dynamic input to display the total width of the door + jambs. Currently it only displays the door leaf. So if I have a door with a leaf of 96cm and 2cm jamb on each side I'd like to be able to input/see 100 units. I'm guessing this should be done with chain actions and 2 different linear parameters - one for the leaf and one for the total width.

02) I've set up 3 visibilities for each of the blocks. Door, DoorWithSchedule, Schedule. In the DoorWithSchedule there's a door tag, width and depth. I set up for the width to obtain the length of the doors width through an attribute and a field. When I do test block or simply play around with the block in an actual file the width parameter never updates. Attsync, Battman, regen - just doesn't work. I haven't manually changed the attribute's parameters as I am aware this might disconnect the attribute from its field.

03) The width, depth and door tag are set up annotative attributes. Currently it only looks OK in 1:50 scale which is fine, but I'd also love to make it work for 1:100 and perhaps 1:25. Should this be done all manually with annoreset and then changing the position of the actual attributes in each separate scale or am I missing something?

04) We have clients from Europe, USA, Australia and Asia which means we need to be very flexible with units, layouts, etc. We've a few separate layout setups that cover the needs of almost all of our clients (A1, A2, A3, A4 for Europe, Australia and Asia and Arch C, Arch D, Arch E and ANSI C for USA). So far so good. I'd love to be able to repurpose the blocks I'm currently creating in other units. I'm now creating them in centimeters and I'm suspecting I'd still be able to use them in mm (UK and Australia) as well as meters (Austria, Switzerland, Germany), although the annotative attributes might go wild. However, my main concern is that when I import them in imperial (ft and inch) they annotative attributes will definitely break.

Please let me know your thoughts. Apologies if my post is boring - first time posting a thread related to AutoCAD.

Thanks in advance!

[dbroad]

I had to explode the inserted group of blocks to gain access to the individual blocks.  It was a bit confusing at first to see the renamed actions. I'm used to seeing there action types in their names.  Your main problem was that you haven't added the parameter that the attribute is reporting to the stretch action called width.

You should look into using AutoCAD Architecture rather than creating all your own content.  It does take a significant investment in time but being able to tag objects instead of relying on visibility states within the blocks themselves is far superior. There is also a built in separation between modeling, viewing (annotating and dimensioning), and organizing sheets that helps a lot.  It also semi-automates sscheduling and creating elevations, plans and sections.

I admit that it is a bear to learn but isn't any worse IMO than learning Revit. There is a wealth of imperial and SI content.

[rhudb]

Exploding an inserted block shouldn't be a problem, right? That happens when you copy/paste in place (Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl / Ctrl + V). Not sure whether that has anything to do with the actual blocks, though.


Thanks for the hint to use AutoCAD Architecture - I might look into that.


Could you please quickly reply on how to fix my main problem? Also, just to confirm you're responding to 02) from my points, correct?

Thanks in advance!

[dbroad]

01) AFAIK you can't create a pair of parameters that can affect one another. That causes a circular reference so you need to decide which to control and display the other.

02)-already answered.

03)-Use annotative tags. Don't include the tags inside the model block. For example, the circle won't change size annotatively. Neither will the line.  You might control the width and height attributes better by using BL and TL justications. AutoCAD architecture has the ability to tag mview blocks and other AEC objects.

04)-You need different libraries. Each block will be stuck with its own units. That's why you should consider AutoCAD Architecture. Using a single library along with setting up blockunits can somewhat work.  I use some details that are mm based and set them up to automatically scale when added to imperial drawings.  The scales of the blocks will be affected and won't look natural especially when you want to use blocks that have multiple scales.

[timothy_crouse]

FYI there are a few doors posted in the "Showcase Your Dynamic Block" Thread.  that you could get some insight from.

01. You could add some parameters and constraints and link the properties into a field.  Those types of blocks can be finicky, sometimes you have to change a visstate or touch control to get the field to update.  Basically you would place the dimension parameter in the block and adjust it's width with a stretch function and the value would change.

02 - does changing the visstate initiate the update?  If visstate will not trigger the update add a stretch command or scale command you could toggle to try and get the refresh to trigger.

03 - Seems it is an attribute you could tweek the size of the attribute to come up with a visual appearance that works.  It would be a bit off scale at the other vp scales though, that's a tough one.  Visual Appearance vs scale takes some tweaking.  Ofcpurse you could go full layout annotation, but that is a whole other camp 🙂

How many door widths are there?  Maybe it would be better to have a block with many predefined states that you explode once you have the view set.

Best Regards

-Tim C.