[David Cutler]

Is anyone out there in the Brainery community using 360 cameras for documentation?

[David Cutler]

Great tip @Doug McLean ! All of my custom area measurement tools are setup this way.

On a similar note I have my default “Rectangle” tool set to a yellow color with the “highlight” option set and a yellow border. This provides a great tool for highlighting large blocks of text or an area on a drawing. The tool has the added benefit of providing a “crisp” rectangular highlight compared with the rounded end that the highlighter tool provides.

[David Cutler]

Welcome to the Brainery @sdryan

Don’t be afraid to build some simple custom tools of your own! Doing so isn’t really that hard. You can then add more extensive functionality as your skill levels progress/as you learn and ask the “what if I did” questions.

@Doug McLean , @Vince and @troy-degroot all have great posts about custom takeoff tools. Doug and Vince do amazing things with the data that they extract from Revu and import into Excel (#revunitroskit). My custom tools and workflows aren’t as fancy as theirs, but they get the job done and are more efficient than the completely manual processes that they replaced.

I highly recommend spending some one-on-one time with @troy-degroot also. Be prepared to be blown away by what he can show you!

[David Cutler]

Unfortunately @Doug McLean educating designers about “material efficient” design is probably beyond our reach, but maybe some will find there way here and learn from your description of the issue.

Does your company offer “Lunch and Learns” to design firms? Might be a great way to add value to your clients by educating their designers on “constructible” details.

[David Cutler]

So I listened in to a webcast yesterday called “Civil Chat” as recommended by the folks at Morning Coffee Revu. The format is similar to MCR, but the conversation was definitely not as dynamic as that lead by @mechave and Jason Artley.

I posed a question to the chat (imagine that 😎) about the “quality” of the PDF that the host was working on. In a nutshell he thought it was great – it was his work so rightfully he should. I pressed a bit further asking if layers had been preserved and a few other item. His response blew me away. His “best practice” (my words) is to basically dumb down the PDF so that it is a simple image of his CAD linework. He was very concerned about others plagiarizing his work or a contractor missing something because a layer was turned off.

What does everyone think about his response? Is it unreasonable for a Contractor to expect a “more useful” PDF? Should designers produce PDF’s to protect themselves from liability or so they are most useful for “downstream” use as @Doug McLean as discussed on LinkedIn? Should clients require “useable” PDFs from their designers?

Exchanging emails with Jason Artley after Civil Chat he shared that next weeks topic on MCR is going to be “Project Closeout and Distribution”. I’ve offered a few “seed” topics to him:

1. Locking PDFs and how
   effects the usability down stream
2. Including layers
3. Print quality – how it
   impacts the ability to use features such as dynamic fill
4. Viewports and how they
   impact measurements

I know @Vince has commented in the past about the quality of PDFs that he is receiving. My original post in this thread had my initial thoughts on quality PDFs. What are others seeing? What do you look for in a “quality” PDF?

Rant over, for now… 😎

[David Cutler]

I thought of this discussion today @Jeff.Collins after I joined in a session of “Civil Chat”. As Jason Artley from Morning Coffee Revu put it I got my feathers ruffled over a discussion of how Civil Designers should distribute PDFs. The way I heard it the host was basically saying that ideally, due to liability issues and the potential for people to copy designs, PDFs should be distributed as scanned documents after they are sealed by a PE. This is a polar opposite to what you are suggesting with a full project PDF. I was suggesting that a “quality” PDF would have layers, bookmarks, labeled pages, etc. The response, again, as I heard it, was that basically Civil 3D should be used to prepare what amounts to a crayon sketch for distribution!

So, how does your company prepare documents for distribution?

[David Cutler]

An update!

We have been provided updated drawings for this project. In addition to overlaying pages to identify differences I copy the previous takeoff markups and apply them to the new drawings, modifying them as required to match the new curb lines, sidewalk limits, etc. I started having the same problem again with not being able to adjust points. What I did this time is choose “yes” when I was prompted to remove the “Untitled” viewports when I opened the new file. That seems to have cleared up most (but not all?) of the issues…

[David Cutler]

So, @Doug McLean , does this relate to your LinkedIn post from the other day about considering downstream work flows?

😎

[David Cutler]

Going to have to get the popcorn out and settle in to watch this one @lizlarsen 😎

[David Cutler]

Perhaps the question needs to be “what do I need to break to make this work?” @lizlarsen 😎

[David Cutler]

Looking back through some older threads and saw this one @Doug McLean (have to study history so I know where to get my hyperlinks from for @Vince ). Did you find a way to simplify this process? If not, perhaps some of those who have joined the Brainery since your original post might have some ideas.😎

[David Cutler]

I keep a folder on my desktop labeled “temp delete often” for the one-off use files. You could in theory run with a c:\t directory (t for temp) to get your files downloaded and still keep them in one folder.

[David Cutler]

“802 drawings in 82 folders.” how many structures are they building @Vince ? Sounds like an absolute document management nightmare.

Not knowing your document management strategy/file storage system could you download the 20 files that the names are too long to a local disk with a shorter file path name and then rename them to save them to your dropbox location? I’m sure you have something figured out, but I’m curious to know in case I run into a similar situation in the future…. On the bright side at least its only 20 of the 822, not 802 of them…🤣

[David Cutler]

I understand completely @Vince

You could try it with a small set of drawings – or piece of a larger set of drawings. Might have to flatten the markups so that they stick.

[David Cutler]

I like @Doug McLean ‘s idea about applying your own header/footer @Vince . You might even be able to use “Bates Numbering” to sequentially number them….