Good morning everyone,
I thank in advance anyone who will try to help me solve my problem.
In the company where I work, we are trying to optimize the transition from quote to production, which currently move on different tracks. To date, estimates are made with Revit; executive drawings are made with AutoCAD; products are designed on Solidworks and the unfolding sheet metal are exported as dwg. Dealing with the vast majority of standard products, some lisps have been created that work in this way: a lisp extracts the dimensions as data from an Excel file; on Excel the data are extracted and inserted in the lisp that created the dxf of each unfolding sheet metal, based on the length dimension that is the only variable value. Part of these steps is done manually and part by macro/lisp. Unfortunately the speed of creation of drawings for production is too low and there are too many errors (not due to the lisp) in the execution of the procedure and they are found only on the finished product. We thought of three possible solutions, but we don't know if they are really feasible:
- Solution 1:
o creation of all parametric components on Inventor;
o export the components as Revit families;
o creation of nested parametric families in Revit of all the components assembled in the final object;
o quotation is done in Revit;
o export of each family individually with modified dimension to Inventor for the creation of unfolding sheet metals;
o creation of a macro to automate the last step.
- Solution 2:
o creation of all parametric components on Advance Steel;
o export the components as Revit families;
o creation of nested parametric families in Revit of all components assembled in the final object;
o quotation is done in Revit
o export of each family individually with modified dimension to Advance Steel for the creation of the unfolding sheet metals;
o creation of a macro to automate the last step.
- Solution 3:
o creation of the dynamic block on AutoCAD of the development of each component;
o creation of a dynamic block, composed of nested dynamic blocks of all the developments, which should be editable only in length;
o executive drawings would be made using the dynamic blocks;
o creation of a lisp to automate dxf export of the unfolding sheet metals of nested dynamic blocks;
o creation of a lisp that would allow the previous step to be done in series.
Thanks for your suggestions.
