Architecture in SW?

Just curious....Has/does anyone use SWx for doing any architectural work?
The reason I ask is I just want to know how nuts a friend of mine is. He &
his wife own a building (jewelry store) and he just finished renovating it
before Christmas. He basically built the whole thing using Solidworks
including intricate display cases, created full floor plans and drawings
that were submitted and approved by the town, and used photoworks to create
renderings that were placed in the newspaper and mail flyers...The work he
did was incredible and you could practically do a walk through of the damn
thing....Like I said, I hadn't know anyone who did this using SWx before,
esp. at this level of detail. Another interesting thing is he said he was
able to get approval from the town (which is in a very strict historic
district) quickly because they were able to see the finished product via
photoworks....Anyone heard of anyone doing this before, or is he just nuts?

Here's some links of it...Like I said - just interesting....

http://www.geocities.com/sunrisr_2000/before.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/sunrisr_2000/photowrks.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/sunrisr_2000/after.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/sunrisr_2000/inside.JPG

Scott

 

I've actually done this for some "home" projects I've done around the
house. I'm currently designing my next house in SW. It works pretty
well. You just have to think in terms of walls and roof being blocks
of material rather than things like studs, insulation, etc. You
basically model a wall as a solid block of 5 1/2" (if using a 2x6)that
represents the studs and insulation between.

The company I work for also builds architectural type products and we
doo it all with SW. Check out our website. www.rockofages.com

 

My wife was having a hard time visualising the architects plans for our new
house so I modelled it up in Solidworks. It's nice whipping the roof off and
slicing a section through to get a good feel for things. I also put the
important furniture in to get an ideal of the space around things.

I think the drawings could be exported to Acad and used as start for
architectural drawings.

 

Can't get to http://www.geocities.com/sunrisr_2000/photowrks.JPG.
It says "page not found".

One of my friends says it would be hard to do architecture in SW, and i'd
like to show him what some people can do.

TIA
JM

 

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HTH

 

I do a bit of architectural visualisation work as an extra money earner -
all the modelling is done in Solidworks, as using polygon modelling in Maya
or even worse AutoCAD drives me nuts. This is exported to Maya for
rendering - it's pretty quick and keeps the naming structure of the
components, so it's dead easy to turn on and off parts in Maya and obviously
Maya is way better sorted for doing animations and rendering, though being
able to export an exploding assembly sequence would be handy sometimes.
E-drawings are a great bonus - clients tend to get very excited the first
time they see their designs in 3D!
You can even import STL files of things like cars / trucks / furniture from
..3ds downloads on the web in to the assembly for an added dimension to the
E-drawing.