Different dimensions on identical plans

[Keith_K]

Those to whom I submitted my original office block design have decided that rather than departmental managers having their own office they are to be sited in with the hoi polloi and only those staff on the Strategic Management Team and their PAs are to have their own little private domains while everyone else will share large open plan areas.

 

I, personally, detest vast open plan areas, but heigh ho!, the client always knows best especially when they discuss things with you in "corporate speak" which goes straight over my head.

 

So, doing some blue sky thinking outside the box   and considering best practice   which is supposedly better for their human resources   I have been demolishing walls and destroying furniture and doing some wall rearranging to see whether I can come up with something that will fit the client's wishes.

 

Because I will be having two floor plans, one showing dimensions etc. and the other showing the furniture and equipment layouts without the clutter of the dimensions, l have been working simultaneously on both using a split screen.  But something has happened which I can't seem to solve.  Even after staring at the plans for ages I can't seem to spot what is causing the  problem with some of the internal dimensions.  While most of them match (as they should) there are five which don't and I am hoping that someone on here will be able to spot what I seem to be missing. 

 

 

 

 

[DavidJPotter]

If the two floors have different dimensions, then they are not "identical" by the usual deffinition of that word. If these are in fact two floors of the same plan you can compare them using the "Reference Floors Tool" floor to floor.

 

If you mean that you have two copies of the same plan (theyare obviously not "identical" are they) the you fix one or the other to match the other after you decide which dimensions are "correct" and make them agree.

 

With dimension strings, I would also make sure that they are measuring from the exact-same dimension points in each floor or instance as part of the check over, zoomed out they can easily look the "same" and actually be measuring from different physical dimension points in the plan.

 

DJP

[solver]

Make a copy of the correct plan. Add a second floor. Copy the wrong plan in as your new second floor. Align walls. Delete lower floor.

[Keith_K]

Without going into semantics...

 

1.  I am working on two copies of the same basic plan using a split screen.

2.  There is a difference of 1 millimetre in the dimensions between the exterior walls which I put down to the rounding up/down of the dimensions done by the software    

2.  The dimensions between interior walls on each used to be exactly the same on both copies.

3.  Due to requests from a client the interior walls have been demolished and new interior walls are being drawn.  The exterior walls have not been touched.

4.  As soon as I complete one operation on one plan I immediately go and do exactly the same on the other.

5.  However certain dimensions on a particular part of the plan/s don't match.  Some are out by only a few millimetres while others are out by a few hundred millimetres.

6.  I am unable to work out as to why this is happening as, given the difference of only 1 millimetre dimensions between the exterior walls on both the plans, any error in the dimensions between whatever I do between said exterior walls should result in only a 1 millimetre difference somewhere on only one of the interior dimensions.

7  If the errors were progressive from one side to the other it would indicate to me that the dimension between the exterior walls was vastly different from one plan to the other.  But it isn't.  It is the same and the differences are random, not progressive.

 

And I don't know why.  Hence my posting.

 

The only thing I can think of trying is to go to each plan and zoom in as far as possible to the dimension pointer on each  dimension and check that it is actually measuring exactly from the one wall surface to the other.  Despite asking several times for this to be looked at there is still no way to tell the software that I would like the dimensions measured from one side of a room to the other and to be done within that room without going through to the side of the room next door resulting in my having to click on the dimension and drag it back which, if I am working at my usual zoom distance, isn't an exact science.  But even so I can't see this inexact science making an error of a couple of hundred millimetres.

[Kbird1]

Dimensions measure to the Main layer usually , think we discussed this before Keith ? so if you draw some walls right to left and others left to right, or some up to down or down to up , the main layer(s) will/can be reversed , so with 100mm walls you could be out 200mm if both walls are reversed and it is measuring to the far side of each not measuring "inside the room" to wall surfaces.<br /><br />Make sure your dimension defaults on each plan are set the same too ie to wall surfaces..<br /><br />M.

[Keith_K]

Thanks Mick.  I will fiddle with that, maybe changing colours of the main layers so that, for the purposes of carrying on drawing, I can seeing where the layers might possibly be reversed and in future I will try and remember to draw walls in one direction only.

 

Do the <br /><br />  things in your post have any significance?

[Kbird1]

hi Keith .... no the <br /><br /> are HTML (Rich Text?) tags which the new forum adds to my posts sometimes but I haven't figured out why ?

 

CA always has suggested drawing in a clockwise direction to get the exterior layer to the outside , with interior walls it is more diffircult to see with drywall on both sides and a lot of the time makes no difference.

 

I did have one other thought ...how did you get the 2nd copy of the plan ?  do a save as>rename   or copy and paste (C&P)  into a new template plan ?  if you did a C&P it is possible the Copy has picked up new "defaults" from the new Template's Defaults too eg you Plan Defaults for how dimensions are handled. 

 

M.

[Keith_K]

I did a "save as" to get the second copy so I had one named Office Plan and the other Office Layout Plan (in which I was placing workstations and stuff).  I have now managed to get them the same.  It took about a day of fiddling and it seemed that a method I eventually used of working from the inside of the plans to the outside rather than outside to inside was they key.