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AEC Newsletter archive:
Geoffrey Moore Langdon
CADENCE AEC Tech News # 35 (October 1, 2000)
AEC Tech News 10/1/2000
In This Issue:
Hyperlinks in CADD Drawings
Hyperlinks in CADD Drawings
Hyperlinks to objects entities in CADD drawings are a side benefit of the growing sophistication of drawing files as databases where every entity has more than just properties but also attributes and tags to associate it with other components, parametrics, cost analysis, and so on. They are also a result of the cross-pollination with World Wide Web software as each developer of design software strives to integrate their software better with the Web.
Hyperlinks and graphics are what transformed the internet from email between college students to the World Wide Web essential for business, commerce, education, entertainment, and communications as we know it today. Hyperlinks in CADD drawings will become extremely important -- eventually they will be expected and we will wonder how we got work done without them.
Downthinkers will cringe and say that they definitely do not want to mistakenly click on parts of their drawings and have the thing suddenly connect online, but that is not what I have in mind at all... at least for now. On a much simpler level, hyperlinks will merely go to another view within a drawing calling up different layersets and zoom scales.
In 1998 one of the biggest applause's from the audience during the Designers 3D CAD Shootout was for Charlie White when he was showing off the drawings that his ArrisCAD Team had produced in the previous three hours, when he clicked on a section line and the system immediately jumped to the section view, then he clicked on the eve of the building and it jumped to a detail of that eve. It was a relatively simple function, merely extending a feature that already exists in virtually all CADD programs today - that of saved views with layer sets (actually one of the most important productivity techniques) - and just linking them to an entity in the drawing. However the audience of several hundred architects immediately saw the inherent logic and productivity advantage of arranging your drawings in such a way. Instead of having to decipher cryptic view layer set names or worse yet, having to turn on individual layers one by one by hand, appropriate associated drawings pop up instantly. At the time, something I noted, since I was standing much closer to the other software developers on the stage, several of them were shaking their heads at the audiences reaction whispering to themselves "we can do that."
The developers of Revit, having the benefit of being able to design a CADD program from scratch during the World Wide Web era, have designed hyperlinks to entities in drawings so innately that there is essentially no other way to switch between drawings as they have determined that it is the most logical and intuitive way to go about that.
The just released DataCAD 9 includes hyperlinks associated with GotoViews, enabling the architect or builder to click on notes or detail keys and jump to elevation, sections, schedules, details, and other areas of the plan with just an Alt-click of the mouse.
The new AutoCAD2000i, the "i" as in internet, allows you to add hyperlinks to any entity or object on the screen essentially as an attribute (a feature that has been in the program for 15 years). However, in ACAD2000i you can go even further, and link not only to other layer sets and views, but also to other drawing files, other programs, and even to specific web pages across the internet. They are ambitiously pushing us to the next step, where, yes, at some point, we will indeed be able to click on our drawings and pop up virtually anything.
Facilities managers will be able to click on an office and see whose office that is on an office organizational chart. Interior designers could click on a light fixture in a plan and have a photograph of that particular luminare pop up for view. Contractors would click on a camera icon on a plan and have a web-cam of the current construction progress pop up. Developers and contract bidders could click on various drawing entities and see the various specs, cost, and materials databases in Excel or Word. Architects, when they place symbols dragged and dropped from manufacturers web sites would have a hyperlink to that manufacturer automatically added to the drawing with automatic specs.
The ramification for all of this is huge.
This kind of ease of use is obvious for facilities management, where non-technical people and MBA-types can make use of graphic information - photographs, charts, diagrams, and database information - linked to accurate architectural floorplans. Thus most of facilities management software, such as Aperture, ArrisFM, ArchiBus, and DrawBase, have had such hyperlinks for many years.
You may start to wonder exactly who is going to add all this information to the drawings - just as people doubted the "Web" would work since they thought computer guys simply couldn't add really useful information to their "home pages". As we now know, those tech guys didn't have to recreate all the info, but rather just created interlinks to information that was already out there, and, as web page creation software got so easy that it is now included as part of every word processor and page layout software, the phenomena grew like wildfire. Similarly, get prepared to see many more people than registered architects starting to tinker with and link info to CADD floorplans, elevations, sections, and 3D models.
Just as hyperlinks and graphics simplified the esoteric unix commands of the internet and open the door for all sorts of uses for non-technical people which had been unforeseen, hyperlinks in CADD drawings will pop up everywhere, used by all sorts of people. Firemen will expect to click on a map of their town (on their in-truck GPS panel) zooming in on a house, and pop up a photograph for easy identification, along with information on the location of the nearest hydrant. Shoppers in malls and travelers in airports will become familiar with zooming to details on dynamic floorplans of where they are, which will include photographs and highlight their particular travel path to go, as opposed to how they currently try to decipher huge you-are-here diagrams. Our architectural clients will become more and more used to viewing their own buildings through hyperlinked PDF files and viewing software such as EZ as the software to view and zoom in on large CADD drawings becomes more and more a standard expected feature on ALL Apple and Microsoft based systems.
Links :
ArrisCAD = http://www.arriscad.com
EZ = http://www.ezmeetings.com
Designers 3D CAD Shootout = http://www.architectural.com/shootout.html
Revit = http://www.revit.com
DataCAD = http://www.datacad.com
AutoCAD2000i = http://www.autodesk.com
About Geoffrey Moore Langdon, AIA
Prof. Langdon is a registered architect and is the principal of Architectural CADD Consultants, a firm that specializes in helping architectural firms with computing and CADD. He has taught Design, Solar Energy, and Architectural CADD at a number of colleges in the Boston area. He is the author of Architectural CADD: A Resource Guide to Design and Production Software Appropriate for Architects, a guest speaker at many AIA events, and the founder and organizer of the Designers 3D CAD Shootout competition. contact him at aectechnews@architecturalcadd.com, or through his website: http://www.architecturalcadd.com
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