Conceptual and detail design software

[LouiseSJPP]

I'm at blank sheet stage.  I need to conceptualise a design, I need to be able to present the concepts, I need to subsequently detail the design and then create planning drawings, detail drawings and BOM from the design.

 

First question: Can one bit of software do all these jobs, or is it best to split the tasks?

 

Second question: which software?

 

This is all generic, it will apply to any project.  In my case, a few specifics:

 

I've looked at SketchUp and it appears to be less than robust.  What worries me is that with so many assumed constraints, while it is quick to sketch, it easily makes incorrect assumptions and gives me faces where I want solids.  When it goes bad, there seems to be little over-riding control.

 

I'm currently looking at FreeCAD, which has a far more robust methodology of constraint.  It still leaves some things in the lap of the gods, however, leaving me feeling that half way through designing a roof I'm going to find I cannot place an origin and set planes at the strange angles I need.  It is also tricky finding out how to drive it: like many open-source projects, it runs ahead of its documentation leaving users scratching around YouTube tutorials looking for answers.

 

I'm a little unwilling to go the whole hog with AUTOCAD, its horrendously expensive.

 

I'm nervous of the 'house-designer' type offerings, believing that with their pre-defined structures, again, I'll come unstuck designing something like a roof.

 

Trouble is, it's really hard seeing how software works in advance, and the learning curve to get into any of them to find out is steep.  I'm OK once I've go into the ethos of a particular package, but I suffer terribly from frustration before then.

 

Can anyone offer an advice?

 

Louise

[Jeremy Harris]

It depends how "hands on" you want to get, and also how much detail you need to provide for your local planning and building control people (not sure how it works in France!).  I found that for planning very little detail was needed, just plan and elevation drawings plus a site and location map.  The planners weren't interested at all in the internal layout, they just wanted to see how big it was, and how it fitted into the surrounding landscape.  Any very simple 2D drawing package would have done the job, but as I already had AutoCad I used that. 

 

Our planning permission submission and drawings can be seen in this blog entry, that may help:  http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/09/part-fifteen-the-site-is-finally-ready/

 

This blog entry covers everything I submitted to get building control approval, I'm not sure if there is a similar process where you are or not:  http://www.mayfly.eu/2013/09/part-fifteen-the-site-is-finally-ready/

 

We opted to take as much risk out of the build as possible, so chose a frame supplier that also offered an integrated insulated foundation system.  The cost of this was modest compared with the alternatives and it meant that all the detailed structural design was done by the frame supplier, as a part of the package.  All told I think this was the best route for us, as it still allowed us to do all the basic design of the spaces we wanted etc, what they did was engineer this into a package that could be erected very quickly and have the performance we wanted.

 

If going down this sort of route then all you really need in terms of software is a fairly simple 2D drawing package (something like Draftsight, which is free, would do very well) plus a spreadsheet to keep track of costs, do some basic calculations of performance, etc.  I produced a very simple heat loss model that runs on Excel or Libre Office Calc and will allow the areas of the house, doors, windows etc to be entered, together with their U values, the anticipated ventilation rate and MVHR efficiency and give a prediction of heat loss.  It's simple, and nowhere near as comprehensive as PHPP, for example, but it's useful for doing "what if" iterations, to what the effect of changing any component has on the overall heat loss.  You can download it from the front page of our blog, the direct download link is here: http://www.mayfly.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Fabric-and-ventilation-heat-loss-calculator-Master.xls

 

Edited December 24, 2017 by JSHarris

[Russell griffiths]

I am a computer numpty, but have just used an app called architouch on my I pad, it was very easy to use and allowed me to rough out what I wanted, I then took this to our architect who drew it up correctly ready for a re submission. 

I believe doing this saved me probably a good £1000 in fees. 

I paid for a 1 month subscription for £17, but would be happy to pay for it again if I need to do any tweaking. 

[LouiseSJPP]

I'm hoping to get all the way to detail design, although I'm not sure yet if I can manage it.  As a former professional engineer, it should be within reach, it's just the problems of crossing disciplines.

 

If I can't find a promising 3D package, I'd conceptualise in 2D drafting, I have no problem doing this, but I'd miss out on easy communication with others who cannot read 2D.  It may sound silly, but I want pretty pictures both to ease through planning and to bring the locals on board.  It's an area with deep, deep roots, and I don't want to rub against the grain.  Presenting an obviously traditional design but with an easily-understood ecological pedigree is my aim.  

 

So, I'd like my cake and eat it please....  An easy-to-learn inexpensive software package that does everything!

[Jeremy Harris]

I found that 99.99% of the professionals only wanted 2D drawings, and also that there was a general distrust of nicely rendered 3D drawings.  To overcome the problem of some people not being able to visualise thing from 2D, I made scale models, one large one covering the entire site, that showed our proposed house in the landscape setting:

 

 

And also a sequence of different, larger scale, models that I made for my wife, who struggled to visualise spaces from a set of 2 D drawings:

 

 

I found that the first model, the one showing the house in the landscape, was exceptionally useful, as the neighbours, Parish Council and all the other people who were involved in commenting on whether our planning application should be approved, found it much easier to understand what we were planning to do from this model.  If you have to deal with any local bureaucracy then I'm convinced that a scale model is more likely to be believed than any 3D rendered graphic.

[Stones]

I used SketchUp to create a scaled floorplan, and some 3d images of the exterior and how it sat in the landscape, to show the concept / what we were proposing, to our planning officer.

 

I then paid someone I found on one of the freelancing websites to draft that floorplan into a full set of plans / elevations. Cost me £150 IIRC.

 

Details in my blog

 

 

[LouiseSJPP]

5 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I found that 99.99% of the professionals only wanted 2D drawings, and also that there was a general distrust of nicely rendered 3D drawings.  To overcome the problem of some people not being able to visualise thing from 2D, I made scale models, one large one covering the entire site, that showed our proposed house in the landscape setting:

.......

I found that the first model, the one showing the house in the landscape, was exceptionally useful, as the neighbours, Parish Council and all the other people who were involved in commenting on whether our planning application should be approved, found it much easier to understand what we were planning to do from this model.  If you have to deal with any local bureaucracy then I'm convinced that a scale model is more likely to be believed than any 3D rendered graphic.

 

This is an interesting perspective, which hadn't occurred to me.  Must have a bit of a re-think here!

[Jeremy Harris]

25 minutes ago, LouiseSJPP said:

 

This is an interesting perspective, which hadn't occurred to me.  Must have a bit of a re-think here!

 

I found that model making was extremely useful, and after a bit of practice, very quick an easy from 2D drawings. 

 

The technique I used for the big model of the whole site, was to use the data from our topographic survey (usefully provided as a .dxf file) and use that to make a plaster base, with cut to length cocktail sticks as the spot heights, layers of 5mm thick foamboard as the contour lines and then plaster filler to create the landscape.  The local model shop supplied textured grass, gravel etc, intended for use with model railways, and painting a coat of PVA glue over the surfaces, then sprinkling the texture powder over it was easy.  The house and other buildings were made using either modelling liteply (easily cut to scale by spray mounting 2D drawings and then cutting it out with a craft knife), or for the larger models I used a mix of 5mm foamboard, with a skin of 2mm liteply, that was very close in scale thickness to our 480mm thick walls.

 

I can talk you through making these models if you like, but they weren't hard to make.  After around the fourth of fifth iteration of the detailed house model, to show my wife what the interior would look like,  at 1/50th scale, so I could use 1/50 scale plastic railway model figures to show how people would look in the house, I'd got the process of printing off the pieces and making  a new version of the model in around 30 minutes.

Edited December 24, 2017 by JSHarris

[Stones]

An alternative we've used before, to make sure our interior plans would work, was to use Lego (handy having kids with a plentiful supply) to form the footprint, partitions and scale furniture. Easy to move things around and get a feel for what it's like. 

 

If you don't fancy building a model, drawing out the floorplan on a sheet of  A1 paper / smaller sheets taped together, and using cut outs of furniture to the same scale still lets you play with the space and move things around.

[MikeSharp01]

6 hours ago, LouiseSJPP said:

 

I'm a little unwilling to go the whole hog with AUTOCAD, its horrendously expensive.

Autocad won't do all you are asking anyway, not that you need it realy, the answer is probably Revitt - even more expensive and harder to learn.

[Onoff]

Draftsight is a 2D AutoCAD clone:

 

 

[pdf27]

7 hours ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Autocad won't do all you are asking anyway, not that you need it realy, the answer is probably Revitt - even more expensive and harder to learn.

Problem is any 2D CAD package is only doing what you can do by hand pretty easily once you learn to do technical drawing - 3D CAD packages are way more expensive. I’ve used Catia v5 and NX at work: both are hugely capable - you could model individual wires in a whole house model - but that power comes at a huge price (5 figure license costs).

[TerryE]

I used a 3D visualisation package called Smarty3D to do all of the visualisation and make sure that the house design worked in 3D. We have a warm loft with a couple of rooms in the loft, and some of the tolerances needed juggling to make sure that we had enough BReg clearances and corridor widths, etc.  So I found having a 3D visualisation package very useful.  We then used a local architect technician to prepare the AutoCAD 2D drawings for our planning submission using the Smarty3D outputs as a starting point.  Our timberframe company then did their own AutoCAD 2D plans and elevations, and we did further tweaks to work some issues in the detailed frame design and again I put these back into Smarty3D to check the 3 D issues and as a sanity check. 

 

This process worked well for us, and everything fits in the house as-built as I envisaged it .  I am sure that you could use something like Sketchup just as well.

[IanR]

I see little use in "3D" for the detail design, accept maybe where there are non-standard details/junctions that would benefit from teasing out the issues before it comes together on site. A 2D drafting package should therefore be fine for producing the Building Control drawings and all plans and layouts that the onsite trades will use. An Architectural package will have workstreams optimised for producing such drawings so should save time. Their capabilities are all rather similar so take your pick.

 

For the concept design phase I found a huge benefit in using a 3D application, to get proportions, scale, flow and material selection all the best it could be. I can't see it matters whether that's a virtual 3D CAD model or a physical 3D model, as long as it's a medium that's relatively quick to change and trial different options. The important bit is that is fleshes out any awkward junctions and make you think about how the structure will come together.

 

I used the CAD and visualisation packages I was already familiar with for doing this as the "best" CAD package is the one you already know. However if I didn't have that existing knowledge I'd have used SketchUp. It's free, quick, and very flexible for applying materials and textures for reasonable quality renderings. 

[LouiseSJPP]

Given the replies so far, I've picked up on a 2D package, again the open source one, LibreCAD, an AutoCAD clone.  I'll start the laying out in this, perhaps using FreeCAD 3D to rough out a few shapes to see how they look at an early stage, then going to physical models when the design is shaping up.  

 

Thank you all for your advice

 

Louise

[Guest Alphonsox]

I did our 3D designs using Sketchup. The main problem with this package I that it is superficially easy to use. I had problems until I sat down and went through a set of architecture/building based tutorials, at which point everything started to make a lot more sense. I’m not sure what you mean by “less than robust” and “assumed constraints”. It is a widely used package and very flexible.

 

[Onoff]

1 hour ago, LouiseSJPP said:

Given the replies so far, I've picked up on a 2D package, again the open source one, LibreCAD, an AutoCAD clone.  I'll start the laying out in this, perhaps using FreeCAD 3D to rough out a few shapes to see how they look at an early stage, then going to physical models when the design is shaping up.  

 

Thank you all for your advice

 

Louise

 

Is LibreCAD as close a clone to AutoCAD as Draftsight is?

 

Coming from AutoCAD I was using Draftsight in literally seconds.

[LouiseSJPP]

23 minutes ago, Onoff said:

 

Is LibreCAD as close a clone to AutoCAD as Draftsight is?

 

Coming from AutoCAD I was using Draftsight in literally seconds.

 

It was years ago since I last saw AutoCAD, but the command line approach looks very familiar:

 

[Jeremy Harris]

AutoCad is a bit like Marmite, you either love it or loathe it......................

 

I had Solidworks for a time, and even though it's really powerful, I found it extremely difficult to use, due entirely to me having around 30 odd years worth of AutoCad experience.  Others i've spoken to have said that getting to grips with Solidworks is a LOT easier than getting to grips with AutoCad, and they are probably right, it depends very much on your past experience I think.

[LouiseSJPP]

1 hour ago, Alphonsox said:

I did our 3D designs using Sketchup. The main problem with this package I that it is superficially easy to use. I had problems until I sat down and went through a set of architecture/building based tutorials, at which point everything started to make a lot more sense. I’m not sure what you mean by “less than robust” and “assumed constraints”. It is a widely used package and very flexible.

 

 

I did a practice piece a while ago, a pergola design.  The sloping wall at the back was a huge problem to create.  It was done in segments, but each time I tried to add the third and final segment, I'd get part of it going hollow, becoming a series of faces rather than a solid.  There seemed to be no way to control it.  The feeling I got throughout was lack of control, not enough tools, too much simply hoping it would do what I wanted.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 26, 2017 by LouiseSJPP

[Onoff]

LibreCAD looks much, much more basic compared to Draftsight.

 

Tbh even using Draftsight I find myself wanting to do 3D and it's very limited. You can for example EXTRUDE but then can't SUBTRACT solids etc. If you import a drawing created in Draftsight into AutoCAD the latter throws a hissy fit. 

 

Can't remember if it's Solid Edge or Works I want to look at as it can generate interactive PDFs.

[Nickfromwales]

On 24/12/2017 at 18:27, LouiseSJPP said:

So, I'd like my cake and eat it please....  An easy-to-learn inexpensive software package that does everything!

Me too. I'm off the tools with a duff arm, post op, so need to change from installer to designer / installation supervisor pretty much overnight   

Ill be watching and listening, and then comes the learning.

Plus, I also like cake. ?

[Guest Alphonsox]

1 hour ago, LouiseSJPP said:

 

I did a practice piece a while ago, a pergola design.  The sloping wall at the back was a huge problem to create.  It was done in segments, but each time I tried to add the third and final segment, I'd get part of it going hollow, becoming a series of faces rather than a solid.  There seemed to be no way to control it.  The feeling I got throughout was lack of control, not enough tools, too much simply hoping it would do what I wanted.

 

 

 

 

 

Try grouping things - Sketchup works best if you assemble larger blocks from smaller elements. In this example I would group the base, the top, and the ladder sections as separate elements then assemble.

[LouiseSJPP]

I was doing so badly with the different CAD packages, I began to wonder if it was me the problem.  In desperation, I looked around for yet another package, last ditch attempt.  I came across another open source package, QCAD.  I downloaded it and opened it, and began drawing.  No need for tutorials, everything was laid out ready to use.  The manual is well put together, and easy to dip into for detail.  

 

Maybe it''s just that this package suits my workflow, but I found QCAD to be a refreshing chnage after all the recent frustrations.

 

It's not free, the trial version runs for 15 minutes at a time, but the price is low, 33 euro here.

 

Whether I'll use FreeCAD or physical models to add to the 2D I'm not sure yet, but for now, the log jam is released and I can begin a creative process

 

Louise

 

 

 

[PeterW]

QCAD is very nice and the only reason to go pro edition is to get some of the plug in tools. It’s currently running on my Linux desktop and I find it really easy to use too.