Has it dawned on you yet that any drawing you send out will make your styles available to the recipient?
Just dawned on us a little while ago.
We have a LOT of time and money tied up in developing ours and the nifty little drag and drop style feature hit us.
We are really thinking of saving everything back to 2004 format before sending any files out. Maybe even live with DWF and like it.
Yes, that occurred to me. I'm abivalent about it, though. It bugs me a little bit, but I'm not so sure I care too much. I've been going through and setting up a lot of styles, and it's a tedious task, but it isn't particularly difficult. I ran into strange behaviroral quirks and gaps in C3D from time to time - like quirks in the way Point Group layers affect Point visibility, no way to enable linetype generation for Survey Figures, etc. And I ran into some issues that are flat-out bugs, such as problems with Plot Style (we use Named Plot Styles), "$+" works like "$*" in description key format codes, etc. But all in all, I was largely just taking the corny defaults Autodesk put in the software and modifying them. Nothing top-secret.
There's enough in there that's specific to my company that it would still be a lot of work for someone to take them and clean out all our stuff, and change it to their stuff. Basically, regardless of whether they start from one of my drawings or one from Autodesk, they still have a lot of work. They would probably save some time starting from mine, but mostly because they wouldn't have to fix some of the bonehead Autodesk defaults. For example, for some reason Autodesk set all the labels to thousandths of a foot and hundredths of a second in angle, which are precisions that aren't commonly-used; and they configure everything to orient to World, so nothing rotates with the view, etc. I have no idea why they make those the defaults. I'm happy to save someone else the effort of repeating that task.
I
have spent a lot of time on setting up styles, though. For example, I discovered the benefit of making all symbols 1 drawing unit in height. Then in the Point Style, I can key in the exact size of the symbol as it should appear on paper, and it will always come out the same size. I can just say "make this Point symbol 0.25 inches big when it plots on paper", and it is very simple. Unfortunately, our existing blocks are not a uniform 1 du in size. So I started going through our old block library, converting them to all be 1 du in height, so that they all work the same in Point Styles. I've also been renaming them, starting with ZZ characters, so blocks that are part of our symbol library appear at the end of the list in the Block Editor. Someone who got one of my drawings could use the blocks, instead of doing all that cleanup. So they would be able to take free advantage of my labors, and it's taking quite a bit of time to do all this.
But most of this is painful, redundant work. To a large extent, I kind of feel that if I save someone else some of the effort, then that's a GOOD thing. They'll still have a ton of work to get my styles to look the way they want them to look. And if the companies we work with on a regular basis start using C3D in basically the same way as we do because they start with copies of our styles, well then that will just make it easier for us to deal with their files. Unless they dumb them down to DWF or Autocad 2004 format or something like that, of course...
If we get a C3D drawing from an engineer, we can spray points down feature lines and do the construction staking very easily. If we get a DWF or DWG with flattened and exploded linework, we're back in the same old boat as before...
And then of course there's the fact that Autodesk has actually released better styles OOTB with each version. So it's always possible that they'll reach the point where they give out enough free with the software that other companies won't care much that they see all your styles in the drawings they get. They'll just be one more "example" to use when creating their own styles. It's always possible that they'll be more annoyed by how hard it is to change everything to THEIR styles, and purge all of YOURS out of the drawing...
All in all, I see incredible value in receiving drawings that contain all those styles, with all their descriptions. And not because I would be interested in stealing or co-opting the styles - I doubt I would want to use any of them myself (I've already mostly-developed a full set of styles of my own). But if we get a model that is completely self-annotated (by someone who knows how to enter meaningful descriptions), then it should be very easy to figure out what everything is, unlike some of the stuff we see today. It won't matter that the other company has different standards, and never again should I need to find myself trying to figure out what layer "4" is. And since they are (hopefully) creating a full 3D model, we won't have to deal with engineers who "hack" a design together with contours that don't match spot elevations, etc. So I'm willing to eat a little bit of time in exchange for receiving better electronic files, that are easier to understand, easier to use, have less chance of creating error, increase turn-around time and allow us to be more-responsive to our clients, etc.
One of the things that I like less is that, now that Autodesk has piled almost everything into the DWG, we have a copy of our entire symbol library in every drawing. I know that the gigabyte is getting cheap, but isn't that a bit ridiculous?
I've come up with a bunch of styles that seem to work pretty well, though, at least in my first "pilot" project. I basically stopped worrying too much about how layers will look to Land Desktop users for the AEC objects like Points, Alignments, Sufaces, etc. These all come into Land Desktop as dumb, unusable blocks anyway. So I created those styles in such a way that they are easy-to-use for
us, and still produce something that can be plotted in Land Desktop. Land Desktop users will just have to get used to having some aspects of my drawings look like "pretty pictures". They can load all of those items from the XML export, though, so they can always create the Land Desktop equivalent of the C3D points, surfaces, alignments, etc., from the XML. Anything that's created from Survey Figures goes on dedicated layers, so much of the linework is still spread out onto layers for them, although it would probably be easier for me if I just sprayed them all onto a single layer (or a small set of layers)...
I've got my FBK imports working, points are flying in, figures are self-generating, and I am having fun... The models look so good in 3D I'm thinking we might want to try generating a rendered isometric view, just to see what we can manage... I'm looking forward to the day I can finally retire Land Desktop for good. I don't think that day will be very far away.
