Monday, June 12, 2023

Drawing a Roof Structure Using Autocad Solids

Yes, completely mad.  I have drawn a rammed earth house roof from whoa to go in 11 x 15 minute videos. I did not design this building.

These were rendered in Autodesk Showcase, as I had problems bringing it into Twinmotion.

Well, no difficulty, but my way of doing materials did not quite fit with Twinmotion.

It came into Twinmotion quite nicely, just my materials were not playing nicely.

Not the fault of Twinmotion, which is a very good program. I have used it with Revit on several jobs and it works well.





You can see video 1 of 11 at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vEf8vWkF9U

I have gone on about this idea in previous posts.  The nice thing about using Autocad this way is that you have complete control over what is modelled. 

This job had timber windows and it just so happened that I had made a lisp routine to draw a window in 3D solids some time ago.  This was a bit of a time saver, but even so I still took 2 and 1/2 hours for the videos and around another 2.5 hours for off camera stuff, so around 5 hours all up.

I have an idea that if I had a timber window family organised,it would have taken less time in Revit. Designing one that had wall thickness as a parameter might have been tricky.

Possibly a private hell I should put myself through?






Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Using ChatGPT as an Autocad help

 Interested in such things, I logged on when I had a problem recently.

I had a 3D model and in wireframe mode all the solids showed up.  Switching to Conceptual mode and one of them disappeared.

I checked all the usual things, still no good.

So I asked ChatGPT.  I got a very good answer, but unfortunately none of it's suggestions worked.

I was impressed though.

My solution involved hiding a 2d block that I had in the drawing, and all was good!

Apparently you can ask it to write scripts, macros and autolisp, so that might be fun to try out.