It's a matter of what you know, not the manual act of drafting. I've seen interns take more than a week to resolve a bathroom. An experienced architect can draw an accurate floor plan in just an hour.
These are questions that you need answered, questions that no CAD software can answer. Having to make the marks yourself will force to you ask a lot of questions. Yet it stands today as the most significant architectural icon of the entire continent, despite remaining a miserable place for opera. It was 700% over budget, because it required computer calculations even to design, during the 60's, and was re-worked three entire times before being completed, something like 10 years off schedule. There are countless details even in simple residential construction that can cost you *serious* dollars if you instruct a contractor to build something one way and in process it's discovered that some adjustments will be necessary. A floor plan is just a fraction of the total picture! Just because you put lines on a page doesn't mean it can be built. The real advantage is working collaboratively (file reference sharing) and making modifications once everything already exists.īut the better reason for not drawing with some software package is that they don't design. Even as a professional, drawing with CAD is about the same speed as by hand. Unless you're a professional, you can't possibly draw contract document quality drawings with software at the same speed that you could with a pen and a good parallel bar. There's two reasons not to use software to represent your designs.
So, my (probably biased) vote goes to ViewBuild.ĭisclaimer: I'm an intern architect currently taking my architectural registration exams. We used OpenGL, and made things really fast. We had a whole group of people wandering around editing the same building. It has a few geek-cool features as well, though I don't know what made it into the final package. It's more like a drawing package where you're more concerned about how it looks than if two sections are lined up at 60 degrees and are 6.225 feet long. The difference is that it isn't focused on accuracy. It's a lot faster than traditional CAD packages. Some of the stuff people have been building in it is just incredible. The main focus of ViewBuild is getting a design up as quickly as possible, and be walking around it and editing it as fast as your machine can push it. Since this is Slashdot, many of you may be keen to know that it uses Python as a scripting language. Since it's very plug-in friendly (everything down to the "Quit" menu option is a plugin - though they're packaged away), I'm sure the guys are working on it.
That said, ViewBuild is an ass-kicking piece of software for whipping up designs fast. Well first thing I should say is that I used to work for ViewBuild.
You'd be surprised at the amount of "space" in a house that is consumed by walls. The reason why center to center is so important, BTW, can best be illustrated by measuring each room in a house and then comparing those figures to exterior dimensions.
Since two walls are involved in each measurement, add two half-thicknesses to your measurements. The dimensions you provide the software should be from center of wall to center of wall. Typical framing material = nominal 2x4 studs (actually 1 3/4"x3 1/2" finished) It is most likely that the software is using that figure for nominal wall thickness. But, if you want to compensate, add 4.5" to each measurement you make that is from wall to wall. If you've done any architectural drafting, this should make total sense. In other words, the software was taking your dimensions and assuming that they were from center of wall to center of wall. Sounds like you were getting centerline dimensions for the walls. But when I did that, I found I was coming up a few inches short, even though I knew certain things would fit.