The local model shop supplied textured grass, gravel etc, intended for use with model railways, and painting a coat of PVA glue over the surfaces, then sprinkling the texture powder over it was easy. dxf file) and use that to make a plaster base, with cut to length cocktail sticks as the spot heights, layers of 5mm thick foamboard as the contour lines and then plaster filler to create the landscape. The technique I used for the big model of the whole site, was to use the data from our topographic survey (usefully provided as a. I found that model making was extremely useful, and after a bit of practice, very quick an easy from 2D drawings. This is an interesting perspective, which hadn't occurred to me. You can download it from the front page of our blog, the direct download link is here: It's simple, and nowhere near as comprehensive as PHPP, for example, but it's useful for doing "what if" iterations, to what the effect of changing any component has on the overall heat loss. I produced a very simple heat loss model that runs on Excel or Libre Office Calc and will allow the areas of the house, doors, windows etc to be entered, together with their U values, the anticipated ventilation rate and MVHR efficiency and give a prediction of heat loss. If going down this sort of route then all you really need in terms of software is a fairly simple 2D drawing package (something like Draftsight, which is free, would do very well) plus a spreadsheet to keep track of costs, do some basic calculations of performance, etc. All told I think this was the best route for us, as it still allowed us to do all the basic design of the spaces we wanted etc, what they did was engineer this into a package that could be erected very quickly and have the performance we wanted. The cost of this was modest compared with the alternatives and it meant that all the detailed structural design was done by the frame supplier, as a part of the package. We opted to take as much risk out of the build as possible, so chose a frame supplier that also offered an integrated insulated foundation system. This blog entry covers everything I submitted to get building control approval, I'm not sure if there is a similar process where you are or not: Our planning permission submission and drawings can be seen in this blog entry, that may help: Any very simple 2D drawing package would have done the job, but as I already had AutoCad I used that. The planners weren't interested at all in the internal layout, they just wanted to see how big it was, and how it fitted into the surrounding landscape. I found that for planning very little detail was needed, just plan and elevation drawings plus a site and location map. It depends how "hands on" you want to get, and also how much detail you need to provide for your local planning and building control people (not sure how it works in France!). I'm OK once I've go into the ethos of a particular package, but I suffer terribly from frustration before then. Trouble is, it's really hard seeing how software works in advance, and the learning curve to get into any of them to find out is steep. I'm nervous of the 'house-designer' type offerings, believing that with their pre-defined structures, again, I'll come unstuck designing something like a roof. I'm a little unwilling to go the whole hog with AUTOCAD, its horrendously expensive. It is also tricky finding out how to drive it: like many open-source projects, it runs ahead of its documentation leaving users scratching around YouTube tutorials looking for answers. It still leaves some things in the lap of the gods, however, leaving me feeling that half way through designing a roof I'm going to find I cannot place an origin and set planes at the strange angles I need. I'm currently looking at FreeCAD, which has a far more robust methodology of constraint. When it goes bad, there seems to be little over-riding control. What worries me is that with so many assumed constraints, while it is quick to sketch, it easily makes incorrect assumptions and gives me faces where I want solids. I've looked at SketchUp and it appears to be less than robust. This is all generic, it will apply to any project. I need to conceptualise a design, I need to be able to present the concepts, I need to subsequently detail the design and then create planning drawings, detail drawings and BOM from the design.įirst question: Can one bit of software do all these jobs, or is it best to split the tasks?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |