a recent post on Jason Kunkel's blog (link) about users purging the entire model made me think about sharing a piece of our template setup.Families can only be purged if there's not a single instance of that family anywhere in the model. So the solution is pretty simple... create a legend view and place an instance of every text type, line type, tag,...

For presentation purposes, I like to show exterior elevations aligned with the floor plan. It makes it easy to understand the drawings. Once placed on the sheet, it's easy enough to align the South elevation with the floor plan, because it has the same orientation. The East and West elevation can be rotated on the sheet by changing the Rotation on...

Today, I spent some time developing a family for our Life Safety drawings, showing exit separation, based on the diagonal of the area served. This family refers to the Florida Building Code (2010), so if you download it for your own use, be sure to update the code references/calculations as needed. Code References: 1015.2.1 Two exits or exit access...

I recently received an equipment schedule for a commercial kitchen in one of our projects, which appeared to have been created in CAD. Since it’s a pretty wide schedule, the item number column on the left had been duplicated halfway the schedule and to the right, making it easier to read across a row. I had never seen this before and it sparked my...

Some time ago, I helped out on a project that had a lot of slab depressions that seemed to keep on changing all the time. The problem was in their setup; the sketch of the main slab had to be edited to create a void, after which a new slab with a negative offset was modeled inside that void. Lastly, a slab edge had to be added matching the depth of...

This post isn't really template related, but I wanted to share it anyways. Some time ago I had to dimension several complex curvy corridors and it became quite an ugly cluster of dimensions with center points often landing far outside the building. In an effort to simplify this for the framer in the field, and to keep our drawings neat, I came up with...