acad2004 adt

I just wanna know what people think about acad2004, especially the
architectural desktop component.

Does anyone out there find the adt extension useful? All the AIA standards,
design centres, wall styles blah blah blah....... Just seems awefully
difficult to use.

They do seem logical and quite clever, but just wanna know if people do
make use of its "intelligence"?

I'd like feedback from architects, engineers and everyone else.

regards
Henry
Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering
University of Bath
http://staff.bath.ac.uk/abshhkc
http://www.3thirteen.co.uk

 

hello,

I do have an older version of Architectural Desktop (Release 2, AutoCAD 2k).
While the AD stuff seems to be nice, I hardly ever use it. I use mainly
plain AutoCAD to make my drawings. But 90% of my drawings are 2D-drawings
anyway.

Regards
Roman

 

I am the maker of an AutoCAD tool for architectural dimensioning,
floor space calculation etc. (http://www.archtools.de, English version
comming soon). Most of the 1,000+ users of my application have ADT,
but they don't find the ADT tools for dimensioning very helpful for
their daily work.

Tom Berger

 

I have a slightly older version ADT 3.3. I use the walls, doors,
windows, design center all of the time. I think it is a great tool
once you get used to it. I use it for floor plans only at this time.
I still draw my elevations and sections the old fashion way. By
lines.

Ron

 

ADT2004 has advanced quite a lot from previous versions & can be a good
thing or a bad thing depending on how you want to use it.
Previous versions felt very much like an addon to AutoCAD, in that they
added their own set of four menus at the end of the AutoCAD standard menus -
This made it easy (too easy) for users who were used to plain AutoCAD to use
it in exactly the same way as they had used AutoCAD, without making much use
of the additional menus.
In ADT2004 however, the menus are now integrated within the main menus of
the program - making it appear a more coherent product, but at the same time
loosing some of its similarity to basic AutoCAD.
It also adds in Viz Render - a cut down version of 3D Studio Viz, that you
can use for your base renderings (I don't do my 3D work in AutoCAD really,
so haven't used it much, but it seems like it would fulfil most rendering
needs for most architcts)
Because I knew AutoCAD very well before starting with ADT, I tend not to
utilise it to its fullest, mainly using just the blocks etc within the
design centre.
There are a lot of benefits to it though, although I can't help feeling that
it is a product that is not quite there somehow. Eg. If you are really
wanting to create a building, should you need to know about layers at all?
or should you need to be able to draw a line? - the line alwsys represents
something, so shouldn't you be drawing it as what it is rather than as a
line?
Revit goes a lot further than AutoCAD in this respect (although ADT2004 has
gained a few more Revit like features)

I don;t have a problem with things like the layer standards. It makes it a
lot easier for managing layers & AutoCAD will also display the layers as a
description as well as the name. Furthermore, many items automatically come
in on the correct layer (walls, revision clouds etc) so you don't need to
worry about the names as much as you might imagine.
At the end of the day, you can always add you own layer names as you would
have in AutoCAD.

Whether or not ADT works for you depends a lot on your way of working (& how
willing you are to adapt your way of working to try & fit in with the way
the program wants you to work)
It is fairly easy to implement (to whatever extent you want) on very small
jobs where there is a simgle person working on it, but in many ways although
it is faster to draw walls etc in these scenarios, the true benefits of
standardisation are negligable, compared to larger jobs where layers etc
need to be managed somehow.

Matthew

 

After a year's use, I found it to be useful for myself, a one man drafting
show, but I hate the thought of ever having to teach it to someone.
I think that it's beauty lies in the fact that the day to day chores of
trimming, filletting, etc are greatly reduced. Drawing a plan, then being
able to turn it and get a basic elevation helps as well,,,
A better approach to this would be to have a program which works in 2d with
ease of inserting doors, windows etc, but contains 3d information attached
to the 2d elements, either thru db or lisp, to external text files. When
you are ready, items can be temporarily extruded/drawn to give you a
building block for your 3d or elevation views.

sw

 

could you tell what are my posibilities to work with auto cad 2002 trial
version.How can i use it