Archive for August, 2005

Axiom adds SpecMonitor CAD Standards software to Toolkit.

Sunday, 14 August 2005

Toolkit owners with active maintenance to receive new application at no charge.

CLEARWATER, FLORIDA, USA — As part of their ongoing effort to continually provide greater and greater value to their customers, Axiom announces that its MicroStation Productivity Toolkit, the most comprehensive package of MicroStation time-saving tools, has been further expanded by the addition of SpecMonitor. The purpose of SpecMonitor is to automate quality control by enforcing drawing standards (rules) as the operator works. SpecMonitor ensures drawings are created standardly, eliminating tedious, costly and time-consuming proofreading and correction after-the-fact. SpecMonitor can, for example, enforce your symbology standards.

MicroStation Productivity Toolkit now includes SpecMonitor, the MicroStation utility that standardizes your MicroStation files as you create them!

MicroStation Today readers may already be familiar with SpecMonitor’s sister application, SpecChecker. SpecChecker is used to perform quality assurance checks and make automatic corrections to batches of files.

SpecMonitor is different — it works in real-time, as the draftsperson works, so that drawings are created properly to begin with. SpecMonitor analyzes each operator drawing action against customer-defined standards (rules) and reports and discourages violations of those rules.

Save time now and later with SpecMonitor.
For example, say a draftsperson is placing text in a design. Company standards require all text to go on level 60. The active level is still set to level 10 (where he was just working). He mistakenly places text on level 10. Without SpecMonitor the error could easily go undetected. Hours, weeks or months later, on the eve of submission to a client, someone (you?) performs tedious last-minute proofreading and manually corrects the misplaced text elements. Or the file is submitted with errors.

Why not use SpecMonitor to get it right to begin with?
With SpecMonitor, the draftsperson would be notified immediately that the text was placed on the wrong level — and with the click of a button, he can automatically move the text to the correct level. But SpecMonitor goes further — with the click of a button the draftsperson can correct the active settings so that subsequent text placement will be correct.

Bean counters will love you.
SpecMonitor is the 20th addition to MicroStation Productivity Toolkit for V7. Your bean counters will love to hear how MicroStation Productivity Toolkit owners reduce costs four different ways using the 20 applications in Toolkit:

  1. Axiom’s Toolkit bundle offers savings of up to 67% compared with individually purchased applications.
  2. In addition to the cost savings, Toolkit owners with active maintenance receive all component application enhancements at no additional charge, promptly shipped to their desk (or instantly downloadable from Axiom’s FTP site). These relentless enhancements provide Toolkit owners with new time-saving features multiple times throughout the year — the current MicroStation Productivity Toolkit now represents over 20 years of research and development!
  3. It is not uncommon for Toolkit owners to report that a single use of one or more Toolkit applications saves enough time and labor on a project to pay for the entire Toolkit. And then, with the original investment repaid, Toolkit owners continue to benefit from the time savings (and increased profits)!
  4. On top of all of the preceding savings, Axiom continues to add new applications to the Toolkit year after year. All Toolkit owners with active maintenance receive newly-added applications at no additional charge.

The Axiom tradition continues with the addition of SpecMonitor to MicroStation Productivity Toolkit!

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Senior Drafter for NASA shares his secret for saving weeks of MicroStation work (and provides Super Bowl pick).

Sunday, 7 August 2005

“My dream since I was eight was to work at the Space Center,” states Terry Jackson, the sun-tanned Senior Drafter for Space Gateway Support in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He started out in drafting about 30 years ago, straight out of high school. He confesses that “it was the only thing I ever wanted to do.” Since the debut of CAD onto the drafting world, Terry has trained himself on four different programs, including MicroStation, and was later appointed shift supervisor and trainer. Now, aside from being the Senior Drafter, he is the head of the CAD Standards Committee.

Leon McGovern (Director of Engineering, left) and Terry Jackson (Senior Drafter and Chuck Norris fan).

MicroStation Today had a chance to get to know Terry better and hear about the exciting projects that he has been a part of, throughout his 20-year CAD journey.

MicroStation Today: What are your daily duties as the Senior Drafter?
Terry:: I design, create and maintain CAD Standards and draft construction drawings. I work with 11 drafters in my particular department, but we have approximately 20 MicroStation seats here.

MST: What have been some of your most memorable projects?
Terry:: Designing the Launch Control Center, the NASA Headquarters building and the power dispatch center for the Air Force.

The Launch Control Center project involved designing a conference room that looks out over the firing room (command center where all the launch engineers sit and ensure the launch is successful). The object was to make an area where dignitaries could come and watch a shuttle launch through glass windows overlooking the firing room.

For the NASA Headquarters building project, we were tasked to design what engineers called “force protection” (due to the events of 9/11). We designed the front of the building and grounds so no vehicle could get close enough to the building with any kind of explosives to do any damage. The offices for the Center’s director and other NASA officials are in that building.
Lastly, we designed a high-tech power dispatch center for the United States Air Force. There, Air Force personnel monitor everything going on in the Air Force station from one room. It has become quite a showcase as far as power dispatch rooms go.

Clouds cast shadows as Space Shuttle Atlantis crawls back inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. To the left of the VAB is the Launch Control Center, which houses the firing rooms that are used to conduct shuttle launches. Photo: NASA

MST: How do Axiom tools help you in your work?
Terry: CellManager has been extremely valuable and it has saved us at least 200 hours in just a couple of months. This tool is great for building and combining cell libraries. It allows you to be able to see any duplicate cells, scale the cells, rename, change weight, change color or change line type. Where it used to take weeks or months to do, it now takes hours or days.

FileFixer has also saved us a lot of time with just a few files that have been fixed. Due to software conflicts, we were losing levels and getting “end-of-file missing” errors. Because of the complexity of the drawings, it would have taken several weeks to redraw the drawings. Because of FileFixer it only took approximately ten minutes to fix the files.

We own Microsoft Office Importer and are still incorporating into our procedures. Microsoft Office Importer will save several hundred hours of production time a year once it is fully implemented.

MST: When was the last time you broke the rules?
Terry: Last week.

MST: What is your favorite TV show?
Terry: “Walker, Texas Ranger”. I love the way [Chuck Norris] fights.

MST: Who’s your Super Bowl pick for this NFL season?
Terry: Indianapolis Colts.

MST: Terry, thank you for your time! We think Chuck kicks some major butt as well. Good luck in your future endeavors!

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Multi-line joints

Sunday, 7 August 2005

This month, we are going to learn about the “Multi-line Joints” tool box.

Joints are simply intersections of multi-lines. Multi-lines are sets of two or more parallel lines treated as a single object, commonly used for drawing walls in floor plans.

At first glance, the Multi-line Joints tools dialog box can be a bit intimidating. Accessed through Tools | Multi-Joints, it provides you with easy ways to make cross joints, tee joints and corner joints from multi-lines.

This is the specimen we are working with, two overlapping multi-lines:

Below are pictures showing you what the seven types of multi-line joints look like:

Closed cross joint

Merged cross joint

Open cross joint

Closed tee joint

Open tee joint

Merged tee joint

Corner joint

Any joints you create using these tools are not permanent, because even after you create the joint, you can manipulate the multi-line as it was before you created the joint. This means that if you are not satisfied with the location of a joint you have created, then you can just select the multi-line you want to reposition and make the joint again. However, if you delete any part of the multi-line using any of the tools that partially delete multilines, then those partial multi-line deletions would be permanent, unlike the joints.

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SpecChecker expert cuts through CAD standards confusion.

Sunday, 7 August 2005

By Eiren Smith, Axiom’s Vice President for Technology
There are a million and one different CAD standards: national standards, client standards, project standards and company standards, ad hoc standards defined by CAD managers. It’s a very big field. When it comes to enforcement of CAD standards, even at a small shop, it’s hard to get things to hold still long enough to figure out where to begin.

With so many CAD standards possibilities, it can be easy to get bogged down with choices

The majority of CAD standards enforcement consists of checking attributes of individual elements. The most common element attributes MicroStation CAD managers want to check and enforce are level, color, weight, style, type, font, text size and cell name.

By laying out the basics simply, I hope to remove confusion and help you define the best CAD standards compliance path for you.

Choose your CAD standards
There are numerous milestones at which users may check their design files for CAD standards compliance. Some users check their own files; some rely on others to check their files for them. Some companies check all submitted design files for standards compliance upon receipt and some companies check all files before those files leave their doors on their way to the client. In addition to these major milestones, many companies also want to check every element as it is created or modified, immediately notifying the user when he violates the current standard.

The first thing you need to do is decide — or find out — what standard or standards you are going to enforce.

Once you know what standards you’ll be enforcing, you’re a third of the way there.

Decide when to check CAD standards
The next step is to decide when you want to check your design files for standards compliance. Do you want users to be notified the moment they create a non-conforming element? If so, you need to use SpecMonitor. Most companies that use SpecMonitor still use SpecChecker for checking entire files (as SpecMonitor only checks for violations as they are committed) or multiple design files all at once. They check partial and full submittals and, sometimes, entire projects at regular intervals, such as every two weeks. On the client end, they often check all submitted files before accepting the submission. They use SpecChecker to do all of this.

SpecChecker main dialog box

As a rule of thumb, it is usually a good idea to at least check your files for standards compliance whenever those files change hands, be it from one department to another in your firm, between you and your client or between you and subcontractors. It is generally agreed that checking your files for standards compliance for the first time near the end of the project is dangerously late.

If you’ve decided how often to check your files for CAD standards compliance, you’re two-thirds of the way there.

Define your rules
By now you should know which standard you want to enforce and have decided when you want to check your design files for compliance with it. Whether you need SpecChecker or SpecMonitor, or both, you need to tell them what exact standards you want to enforce. You do this by defining what we call “rules.” Rules are your CAD standards in a form SpecChecker and SpecMonitor can understand. SpecChecker and SpecMonitor make it very easy for you to get your standards defined in rules. Using the included Rule Wizard tool, which is available from SpecChecker’s main menu or from within the stand-alone rule management tool, RuleManager, which is delivered with both SpecChecker and SpecMonitor, you can easily create rules to enforce your CAD standards. The Rule Wizard will help you create your rules interactively.

Once you’ve defined your rules, you’ve completed the third and final major step and are officially on road to CAD standards compliance.

We understand that CAD users’ needs vary and there is no one right way to help all users enforce all standards in all scenarios — it takes judgement and requires very flexible tools. SpecChecker and SpecMonitor are designed to provide you with the means to make your own choices based on your project demands, personal style and situation.

And to help you further, Axiom has expert trainers and technical support staff on-hand five days a week to help you get started with SpecChecker and SpecMonitor and to provide you with creative solutions to whatever standards enforcement demands you can think up. If you need any more help, give us a call.

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