Showing posts with label cabinets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cabinets. Show all posts

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Archidigm.com update

Have you been back to Archidigm.com lately.  I have often linked to his site with it's great teaching tips and spoke about his ready made content and system.  Odin has given fantastic support to the ADT/ACA community both with his teaching and downloadable content.  If you are in the US you may be able to avail his services but for those around the world he has a wealth of in depth information on the web site.

Did I mention that he released his Development Guide, last written for ADT2005 for free download.  Although we have moved on 7 versions since then, many of the base concepts have not changed a great deal and you will find great tips here.

Odin continues to release updates on his excellant content, the latest being an update to his previously released Fences kit for ACA2010/11.  If you are looking to do interior renders or illustrations then his Kitchen & Bathroom Kits could bring great productivty gains with the ready made componants for cabinets, fixtures and fittings ready to drop in and assemble and they are also designed to be used to produce the Construction Documents so you are not double handling, reducing errors. 

He has also released a Furniture Kit, TV's, Garage doors, Fridges, Streets and there are some package deals going where you can save by bulk buying.  Purchasing of a kit also gives you 1 years access to the OSMOSIS learning web site which contains even more indepth information on all sort of things ACA.
A large portion of my knowledge of ACA that has lead to productivity gains has come about from scouring the Archidigm web site so get on over and dig in.

Cheers.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Archidigm.com

I have been a fan of Odin Cary's ARCHIdigm.com web site for most of the years I have used ADT and his site is a wealth of information. 

I have often mentioned and linked to his site for various tips and techniques. Whereas some information is by the book and dealing with straight forward tasks, Odin looks beyond to the 'how to' often faced in the real office.  ADT OOTB has basic cabinets made from wall styles but Odin took them alot further to something that can be used to produce even finished construction drawings with little manual drawing.  He showed how to create a downpipe, latticework, various fencing styles from railings.  He taught me the how to create a Layer Key style and overrides, stair displays and the list goes on.  I always appreciated his slant for looking to press the tools beyond their intention.

But after sharing about the roof object with Odin, he let me see inside this storehouse and I found out I was only window shopping.  There is some really great information that would have saved me SO MUCH TIME (and time = $ right!) in the OSMOSIS section.  I had assumed because the gear is in imperial that I would not be able to use it however that's not the case.  And the prices are so low that it's well worth buying something to get access to OSMOSIS.

Just being able to pull the gear apart and learn how he has done things is a big learning curve but if you just want to get on with the job then his kits are a great offer.  Just a drag and drop for construction drawing and render ready cabinets, appliances, fence styles, Door and window styles and even furniture packaged to suit Autocad Architecture.  Sometimes it's just developing more styles that you find Out Of The Box but there are also clever ideas using ACA tools for some thing completely different.

So do yourself a favour and get over to Archidigm.com and you WILL find many items of interest.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Cabinetry

For cabinets I owe much to Archidigm and Odin's great tutorials. But we make cabinets differently and don't generally have a splashback but a number of rows of tiles above. Whilst you can have a variable height you only have one option and you can't have a different height to your cabinet and tile height. (well you could if you cab height was the wall base height and the tile height was the top of wall but you would have to manually grab each side and pull them up to get the tile height extension. Actually I just tried that and it might work okay for some).

Therefore I use a separate simple wall style with hatch pattern to indicate tiling (more on this later). So check out Odin's well laid out tutorial and then view the following wall component list for a full Aussie cabinet spec. Unlike Odin's cabinets which uses the wall style as a placeholder, I went further and created a whole cabinet that will plan, elevate and section complete without further attention. It really isn't much more effort.

Many model the bench top separately with slabs but using body modifiers you can add breakfast overhangs etc without much fuss (ok a little). Probably the trickiest part is creating the endcaps for cabinet ends. I tremble at trying to explain how to create the endcap but I did mine using the edit-in-place and trial and error. It was easy to get lost but I prevailed and won!

I have created different styles for a wall oven stack, pantry cabinets overheads. This way you can quickly lay down the whole kitchen when sketching and be ready for CD's. They are also ready for rendering. I should probably be using the Tool Palletes but I really just cut & paste a whole kitchen from another similar job and alter as required.

Here is one bathroom cabinet shown without doors. It's designed to take a reef (semi-recessed) basin. You can see it's much as they would build it. Encaps assigned to the style so this can be created by drawing JUST ONE LINE! Length is of course completely adjustable.

Thsi cabinet has adjustable height but the midshelf is set.

For the doors you could add a componant for that too but I have used door styles to model the cabinet doors, both single and double, glazed & profiled using the typical rules we use for a normal door object. If you add a door componant in the wall style itself, you could leave it on until you are ready to add more detail to your cabinets for either rendering or detail drawings.


Even handles can be added and are great if you are wanting to do renderings for clients. If you are able to use your model for CD's and for a little more work do some renderings then all the better.

It's probably better anyway to have your doors separate as it gives you more flexibility.

I have tried to anchor the doors to the cabinet using aecobjectanchorattach but that will cut the cabinet so I will have to investigate that further. I seem to remember Odin mentioning that on his article.

As I suggested, you could add a tiling componant and make it's Bottom Elevation 0 Base Height and it's Top Elevation 0 Wall Top. Once you 'draw' the cabinet, just go into iso view and stretch each side up and your tiles will appear. For now I am content to have the tiling as a separate wall style. It is also better to have them separate if you want to take quantities.

On the endcaps, I have done this one with a little overhang to the top. For finishing up against a wall on the side, it may be better to have no overhang as the standard endcap. To add overhang, you can create a ME to the size requried and add it as a BodMod. In the endcap illustrated above I have the side panels coming forward to the front face of the door. Some build them with the doors overlapping the side. It's just choice and could be covered with different endcap styles that you could have available to select from or edit on the fly.

HTH's

If you have an interesting use for a wall then please post a pic and an explanation.