Setting Up Drawings and Layouts

by Simon Brown

We‘ve had quite a few people recently who have submitted project for scrutiny where the plans are slow to load due to the level of detail presented on the layouts. A lot of detail as per below is typical which isn’t really needed suck as the site contours etc.

It is simply a case of isolating this layer which will help the loading of the DXF files and also for panning and zooming about. Once isolated, remove this layer or at the very least simplify it so suit your needs.

Another interesting one that has appeared recently is where the floorplan was 350Km from the origin point. This makes for some very interesting behaviour as the X and Y vertices rounding errors are compounded the further you get from the origin point and again it restricts the ability of the user to pan and zoom as efficiently as they should be able to.

We will be introducing a series of warning messages and a tool kit to enable the user to rectify these issues such as plans moving on re issue ect which should make the process of change of layouts less painful.

A few rules to follow before importation into MEPworx:

1. On the DWG, select zoom extents – if the drawing disappears, unfreeze all layers and delete the ones you don’t want. Any that are affecting the drawing reveal, if deleted will enable the plans to be viewed, preferably occupying most of the screen
2. As above make sure the origin is not an unreasonable distance from the building layouts preferably utilising the common position on a building point for all floors and make that the origin of the layout
3. Remove superfluous information not required, as depicted above
4. Make sure all levels share the same position with respect to the origin
5. Take measurements to ascertain the drawing units used when setting up the file in MEPworx ie measure a door….if it says 850 dwg units common sense tells you it is millimetres, if it is 0.85 it is metres.

But of course if you’d read the getting started guide and videos we provide in the help section you would know all this….