Sunday, August 14, 2011

Autocad and piping

Just had a look on Youtube at a demo of Autodesk's Plant 3D which I guess is an add-on to Autocad. It looks easy to use and produces things like isometric drawings with bills of materials.
From the short demo, I came away quite impressed. You can see one of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokkAr0Lc2I

It makes my home grown approach to piping look a little crude and backward. If you want a look at how I do this, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZsVUjbRWO4

Having said this, I could imagine how hard it would be to persuade decision makers at my work that this would be a good way to go, probably because my work about 20% piping. Well, I can dream can't I?

Even if I were certain that this was the way to go, there would be a nagging doubt that maybe other products such as Revit MEP might be the clever way.....

So, back to Youtube and what do you know? Here is a demo of Revit MEP,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sf_b_Wes2s

To me, it looked like a lot of button pressing for not much result. So here is a puzzle: Autodesk make and sell both products.....why?

I don't want to be seen as a Revit basher here, because as I understand it, a lot of quite clued up people think that Revit is the way to go for drawings of buildings, so maybe I'm missing something.