18 Unit Housing Development In One Plan

[dshall]

Okay,  my first foray into a multi unit project.  18 houses will be modeled in 18 different plan files.  I would also like to have a site plan file with all 18 houses.  The piece of property is not flat.  I plan on creating symbols of all 18 houses to put in the site plan file.  I am concerned with the size of the site plan file and if it will become cumbersome.

 

I have created a few of the symbols for the houses.  One symbol has 36000 faces and the other one has 78000 faces.  I assume the other 16 house symbols will be of similar sizes.

 

Has anybody done something like this?  Has the plan file become too large?  Is a symbol with 50000 faces a lot of faces?

 

Any thoughts would be appreciated,  thanks a ton for any advice.

[DRAWZILLA]

Did you delete or turn off everything inside the homes before making a symbol of it?

[imodel]

The house symbols should be no problem. The site could get a bit slow as you wait for the terrain to rebuild with edits. You may be able to turn rebuild off at times.

[dshall]

I turned all the obvious things, elec, cabs, framing,

[Jay_on_Cape]

I haven't done anything lately.  In version 10 I did a handful of multi-unit buildings.  To make the symbols I copied the plan and deleted all of the interior.

 

  I'm sure it is much better 6 versions later but back in 2005 +/- I still get the shakes and hot flashes thinking back about that project.

[RodCole]

Very nice project Scott, I am sure it is well deserved.

 

One thing that I might point out is regarding how it would be good to have Xref  "Exterenal Refernce" capabilities in Chief.  It seems like I posted about this quite a while back in the suggestions forum.

 

I have played around with it a bit when TurboCAD Pro Platinum introduced layer control in there Xref feature set.  At the time it was quite buggy do to being new I suppose, so I never got back to checking it out further.  The point is that it would be very powerful to have the ability to import other Chief files within a main file while having the ability to control layer display for each imported file.

 

Sounds easy enough to me, but it is not something that is widely available in CAD applications that I know of.

 

One of the advantages of Xrefs is that since they are linked files rather than embeded, they can be updated to reflect any changes in the referenced model.  It doesn't help anyone now, but a feature like this would be very helpful for situations like yours.

 

Looks like a good time for me to take another look at TC's Xref features to see how well it is working now.  It might be a good way to deal with remodels as well.  Another reason why it would be good to have 3DS export of Chief models inclued layer names.

 

Please keep us posted on how you decide to deal with these issues.

[Designers_Ink]

I would image it will depend strictly on your computer setup.  Before my last upgrade, I would turn stuff on and off to keep my surface count down, but I don't seem to have those issues with my current setup.  After looking at your post, I looked down at the project I was working on and saw my surface count on an exterior view of the house was over 18,000,000.  I usually fill the house with furniture from the 3d warehouse, so that usually gets the surface count up there pretty high on my projects.  Chief handles it well, but only with the higher end computers.

 

I have done several apartment complexes with multiple buildings, parking lots, landscaping, cars, etc.  Chief has always handled it well for me.

 

The attached image is the view I was looking at.