[Vince]

You could create a template grid to overlay the room with. Place a second markup with some kind on the centre point then align the centre points. Then you can markup all of the full tiles required.

[Vince]

I’m thinking of new ways of measuring things all of the time Dave but finding time to set them up is proving a problem.

My foundations setup is structural instead of civil but is proving a massive time saver.

I’m now concentrating on my workflow for measuring Brickwork and Scaffolding before I start in any new projects!

[Vince]

Hi Dave. I’ve started looking at using these but haven’t found the time to build anything yet so, will definitely be interested to see what others are doing!

[Vince]

That’s definitely something to be aware of! Thanks for the heads up, Troy.

[Vince]

My initial thoughts on this go along the lines of: –

Say you are working with 2.400×1.200m sheets with the grain running longwise and you are completing panelling with the grain running vertically.
Firstly, I would take the length of each markup and divide it by 1.20 then round it up to the next whole number (a).
Second, take the height and divide it by 2.40 then round this down to the previous whole number (b).
a x b gives the number of whole sheets.
Then with the remainder of the height, add 100mm to allow for cuts and then round this figure up to quarter sheet sizes i.e. 0.60m (c), 1.20m (d) and 1.80m (e).
Multiply all of these by b to get the number of pieces required.

When you have all the different panels measured and calculated as above go through the following steps.

Then take the number of d pieces and divide by 2 then round up to the next whole number. Add this to the number of whole sheets.

Pair up pieces c and e to work out the next lot of whole sheets.
Then, if there is a remainder of e pieces then add that figure to the number of whole sheets.
However, if there is remainder for the type c pieces instead then, take this number and divide by 4 then round up to the next whole number to add to the number of whole sheets.

Hope that rambling makes sense! 😆

[Vince]

Hi Troy.
I know what you mean about which side of the line to offset to – I typically markup from left to right on the screen so my markup for a stone head to a window is offset to the opposite side to that of the stone cill. However, I have copied a couple of tools and they have the wrong offset so I need to go back and reverse those.

With regards dealing with different scales, if you are jumping from a 1:50 drawing to a 1:100 then you just need to half the line thickness.

I try to keep the tools using ‘standard’ widths so I can quickly go into the toolboxes and adjust all the line widths if I am going to be working on a large number of drawings.

[Vince]

Both great ideas David.
I’ve actually already got a couple of template toolchests – one for the storey heights of buildings and the other for internal wall opening sizes as below.

The latter will need filling out at the start of each project as the ‘standard’ opening sizes change on every project e.g. a standard width for a window always used to be 1200mm but now they are drawn as 1200mm, 1210mm, 1248mm and 1250mm – it’s very frustrating from a measuring point of view but even worse for the guys on site as they are not working to full or half brick sizes a lot of the time. Populating the toolbox to cover all the different sizes used might just become a bit too messy.

The other trick that I have found is to use the polyline sketch to scale tool to make a 3-sided shape. If you use this, then you don’t have to worry about which layer is at the front when you do your cutout.

[Vince]

Thanks David! Maybe on the next tender I’ll do one housetype on Revu and the same again on my spreadsheet.

[Vince]

Unfortunately not Dave. I’m not sure what happened but I’m really not sure how much time I would have had to put into looking at this anyway – I haven’t got enough time for the Revu workflows that I’ve already started.

[Vince]

Looks great Chad! Are you running more than one project / dashboard at a time?

[Vince]

I’ve looked Rob but unfortunately there are just too many adjustments to make – it some cases I will have to individually adjust literally every sheet. Our drawings here in the UK are just shockingly bad!

[Vince]

Thanks Isaac – I will definitely take a look!

[Vince]

Hi Isaac. I use QT Tab Bar with explorer, but this doesn’t offer the same renaming feature that you’ve described.

My big issue with doing this is that the naming of files here is sometimes that bad that I fear I have to rename almost everything each time there is an issue of drawings. And unfortunately certain companies have a tendency to issue a full new set instead of just the revised drawings – this can be up to 800 drawings at a time.

I have sort of come up with a fix using Power Query to take all of the filenames from selected folders and then create a drawing register which is hyperlinked. This still isn’t perfect though.

[Vince]

Thanks Doug. I’ve had a go at changing a few of the settings but unfortunately, I am still left with the original filename which includes the outdated revision number.

I’ll have a play around with some more drawings which use a better naming convention to see if I get better results.

[Vince]

I have that all working now using the filename without the prefix. What is throwing me is the useless naming convention on the set of drawings that I have been trying this with – the revision details are in the middle of the file name e.g. “150 – Garages-D2-Single SGB.pdf”.

The “D2” is the revision number!

So, my issue now is that when I slip in the latest revision which is “D5” the drawing title remains as the original set which can be rather confusing if you are expecting to see “D5” somewhere.

The naming conventions here in the UK have a long long way to go before this becomes the simple process that it should be.