Explore the detailed process of implementing gridline dimensions and cleaning up working dimensions in architectural drafting. This article provides a practical guide to effectively dimension wall changes, align dimensions precisely and ensure your drafts are easy to read and build from.
Key Insights
- The article offers valuable tips for implementing gridline dimensions - a process where dimensions are drawn from gridline to gridline. This can be done either by drawing them across or by copying existing dimensions from another level.
- Readers are advised to clean up their working dimensions and ensure they are properly dimensioning changes in the wall. The tutorial demonstrates this process by dimensioning from the face of the wall to the gridline, and then extending this across all locations.
- Ensuring legibility and ease of reading in your drafts is highlighted as crucial. This is achieved by removing overlapping dimension lines and tick marks, and resolving graphic conflicts. The article also emphasizes dimensioning at an appropriate zoom level for accuracy.
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I've gone ahead and jumped over to A202 and, just right off the bat, I can see this one is not in as good a shape as level one was, and I think that's just because of where we ended up at the end of BIM 302, but that's okay because we're here to fix that. We're going to do the same thing that we did on level one, but I'm going to zip through this a little bit quicker and give you the opportunity to do more work on your own. So the two things that we want to do are we want to have gridline dimensions, which just means dimension from gridline to gridline to gridline, and so what you could do is you can go in and you can do what I did here and just draw them across, or you could jump into level one and say I've already got them.
So you can grab, say, these two here like I've done. I've selected those. I can copy them to the clipboard and I can go to level two, and I'll delete these real quick, and then I can paste and I can align them to the current view, and now you can see I've got the dimensions added in the same exact location, and that's something we can do for both of these here, for both the top and the side of the gridline.
We want to add those dimensions, and then another thing that we're going to want to do here is kind of clean up some of our working dimensions that we had before, making sure that we're dimensioning all of these changes in the wall. So what I'll do is I'll start with a dimension on the face of wall here to the gridline, and then I'll start taking this just all the way across. This is a dimension that we're going to want at all of these locations here, and you can see I'm kind of just walking myself down the line, picking the points, and I just want you to also notice my zoom level. It's not like I'm trying to work at a microscopic level here, hitting these points. I am working at a level where I can see exactly where I'm hitting these points along the wall, and that's very intentional because I don't want to be in a situation where I'm trying to dimension something from outer space that really needs to be done from a much closer level.
So I'll go ahead and drop that dimension string in, and like I mentioned in the previous video, there's a lot of cleanup here, so it really is helpful if I go through and just grab these two-foot dimensions and pull them off because they do overlap with the dimension line and the tick marks. If I turn the thin lines back on or off—however you want to look at that—we can go ahead and see where those graphic conflicts are occurring and go in and clean up our dimensions so they are legible and easy to read, which means easier to build, right? So that's how we'll do this side. I think down here you can kind of see what we'll do is we'll dimension a gridline, which we've got one of them here, which is nice. I can move that down so it aligns with our other dimension string, and then we'll have a dimension for our curtain wall.
So I can just edit the witness lines and pick this one up, and we'll do the overall and then the number of panels—equal panels here and here. We have a similar situation on this side, but we'll actually want to dimension these different lines because you can't really see where they are there. This is also something you want to make sure that if it's located on level one, we don't necessarily need to locate it on level two, correct? We don't show the same information redundantly from level one to level two.
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The next thing we'll want to do is take this strategy that we used here, apply the gridline and overall dimensions, and then also dimension these different windows just like we did at this point down below. I'm just doing the dimension exercise here so you guys have it on video, but I don't think it's necessary for it to be part of the class, just because it is a relatively tedious effort and the students should be able to do this on their own at this point.
