Description
Key Learnings
- Get inspired to get working now
- Learn how to deal with what you’re given to work with
- Learn how to manage time: better time is of the essence
- Understand that starting over will only be an option with less time to do it
Speaker
- william abramsSpeaker Emeritus; Mentoring; AutoDesk University 2007 - 2019 - AutoDESK Make Anything I have over 35 years of Architectural drafting experience. ask me about anything!
WILLIAM ABRAMS: OK, thank you for coming. It's 2:15. Let's get started. My name is William Abrams. The class it's called Practical Solutions for Impractical Drawings . It's a life I live every day. I'm sure some of you do also. What I tend to do here is I run my classes a little bit differently than the AU-- since we're kind of at the end of AU. We have absorbed so much information-- thought process and such. What I like to do with my own presentations, I like to go through my slides very quickly. And you see I speak very quickly. So we can get to the end, which is drafting, drawing, working with these problem drawings, and such.
So with that in order, well, actually, sorry. Takes a little getting used to this. This is why I want to express why we want to come to AU. We want to tell our bosses what we learned here. It's hard to express what we learn from all the thought process, the procedures and such. And that's why I want to base my class on real-world scenarios, the life I live every day.
Give you a good example. They told me I was in 3206. So I was down the hall. I set up my computer. I had everything ready to go. I had my buttons ready. And then they came in. And one of the guys that came through said, that's not our class. I went to the woman at the front and I said, well, what's wrong? And she said, oh, you're really scheduled in this room. I thought, OK. So I ran down the hall. We got another engineering here. He hooked me up. And we're ready to go.
And that's why I like to work with these real-world solutions. These are the learning objectives. Again, we can read all this. I can sit here and tell you each one by one. This is what you're going to tell your boss what you learned at AU. You learned how to work with these drawings, how to process information, and such.
How do we get involved? We got to get inspired. How do we get inspired every day? I do it every day in my job. I go in early. I put my music on. Sometimes I want no distractions. I put my earphones on. That's how we get our processes done, by taking it upon ourselves, getting our peace. Or sometimes people like the blaring music. I worked at one place. Every night I was there until 9:00. 6 o'clock everybody would leave. I toss in all the CDs, crank up the system. And the few people that were left, we'd just crank away at our drawings. And that's basically what we want to do.
This is a good example. I'm glad everybody laughs. Because before I left for AU, two days before, my boss came to me and said, oh, we got this big project due and blah, blah, blah. And this is what my desk resembled when I left. When I get back, I tell you, I am very detailed, organized person. It never looks like this. Only when I'm working will I look like that.
And, again, it's my process. This is how I work. I throw things out. Print, print, print, red line, print, print, print, red line. I go through my thought process. And that's why I put this up here. It's really important.
How do we deal with drawings? First thing I get all the time-- I'm a CAD manager where I work. As everybody says, well, I'll pass the work out. Or the project managers or architects will pass the work out. The first thing they say is, I didn't do this. I don't know why it's done this way. It's not my idea. And I tell everybody, when you touch a drawing, it's yours to develop. You have to own it basically.
Again, write me a real-world world solution. Before I left for AU, one of the architects-- he just started-- he came out from New York high-profile architect worked on these high-profile, high-rise buildings in New York. We had simple little two-story buildings in Florida-- not very huge and ornate and such. And he came to me and he said, well, I can't seem to figure out why it was drawn this way. I don't know either. I didn't draw it. I'm the same process that everybody else has.
So I told them, well, this is the time you take to readjust your drawings your way. It's your drawing now. And he said, well, where do I start? And I looked at it. I said, I'd start drawing all this stuff over. It's all wrong. The dimensions aren't right. People fudge things. He has time, effort, and energy. That's what I tell people that it takes to maintain your drawings is time, effort, and energy. And you have to remember that's what you're here for is to put your time in. Put your effort in. Your energy goes with that. And your drawings get done.
How do we manage our time better? Like I said before, we put our time, effort, and energy in. Everybody can read this. And that's what in my time. Generally, what I do is I like to have the focus on me and the presentation, not flipping through your phone or looking at their presentation on a pad or such. All of this is posted online. It'll be posted at the end of the class. And that's where you download your information to remind you how to process the information while you're working with these difficult drawings.
One of the things that I stress is to set a goal each day of how much work you want to do. I overestimate. I'm a bad estimator. I'll tell everybody here, when they come to me and they say, estimate a job. Poo, the needle goes over to the right. And then they don't ask me for estimating anymore time. But I will say just like my boss said, me going off to AU, he said, I need this done before you leave. So, again, everybody faces that challenge. And you work in a manner that gets him what he needs.
We all know that when you start over in a drawing and are drafting, you get to a point where you're drawing and drawing and drawing and you're trying to manage the information-- all this information that you got in from various disciplines-- whether it's civil, mechanical, architectural-- all these different types of drawings and disciplines that you're trying to meld together that you need to know, how do I do this? I can fix this now. But I only have until tomorrow to complete everything. And then I've asked my boss this. Is that unrealistic? Do you have a genie for me? Who's going to help me for this?
And I think everybody here that signed up for this class-- and I threw this out to Autodesk in an instance because I feel like our industry is in a need of people like myself and everyone in here-- that you're faced to do the work.
I used to work with a company. I had 68 people underneath me. I could tell every one of you what to do and how to do it on a project. And all I had to do was deal with the 12 managers on top of me that pushed the work out for the firm.
Now it's not so easy. It's me and about 25 other people pushing out the work on a daily manner. That's why I say I work with all of the employees. They're all my friends. I have to have help. I can't do it alone. It's no longer that time where you have that huge organization with a wealth of people underneath it. I find that our industry is changing where we're doing a lot of the work ourselves. I don't mind it. I like working. Keeps me busy. Keeps the time going.
The types of difficult drawings that we all work with, we all know. I hate civil engineering drawings. Is there any civil engineers in here? OK. That's OK. I'm honest. I tell you, you deal with these 3D points. It draws my drawings wacky. I have a really nice site plan. We go and throw in an outline of some kind of a hidden line or boundary or something, and all of a sudden I get these SHX files and all these 3D points. And, again, what I try and do is I try to work with those elements to simplify them before I put them into my drawing.
Engineering drawings-- I worked for an engineer and architect. Half of the office was just like this. Architects on one side. Engineering's on the other side. It's a very fine line between the two. And you don't cross the two. They worked well together on the projects. We got things done. But there was definitely a separation between architects and engineers.
So I just wanted to bring this up that we have-- while each discipline may have unique drawing standards, they do not integrate seamlessly with each other. That's why I'm on this Revit band to ramp up for the collaboration. Again, all these years we work separately in our own disciplines where it's architects, engineers, and whoever. But now there's a big push for the collaborative effort. And, again, a lot of the collaborative effort for me is help. I need help in all these drawings and drafting and procedures that I'm working with.
Civil engineer drawings-- again, they're simple and tough to begin with. This is a good example. We started with this building here. It was nice and simple. I was all happy gung-ho. Everything worked well. And then the owner came and said we're going to toss the building upstairs. I said, god. Now we've got the civil engineer involved. Now he's worried about how my existing drawing is melting with my new drawing and how all the drawings are going to melt together and such.
So, again, it's working with the older drawings and the new drawing, melting them together with some of the engineering. Also, same is for electrical engineering. This is a unit. We have all these different units and our plans and our buildings. And this is how the engineer describes his work. Sometimes their tech size is one size. And then their bubbles or another size. Again, that's the way they work. That's fine. I accept it. I move with it. And I also help them set their drawings up.
Sometimes they're not so quick and easy to turn a background layer to zero or a background layer to a gray instead of a hard, black line. So you help them along the way. We used to take a lot of time in the beginning setting up consultants' drawings. And along the way, I think we've got too busy to help them, because our workload has gotten expanded.
All right. And lastly, my favorite-- of course, I'm in the architectural field-- is the architectural drawings. This is a site in California. It's called the Tustin site. It's an ALF. and it's got a bunch of different [INAUDIBLE] basically that they flip and flop around to create these drawings. And how I managed this is working with the civil engineer, the electrical engineer, and all the disciplines in order to create my drawings. Everybody knows this. It's nothing earth shattering and such.
The thing that I want to stress in my class is to simplify. Because everybody works with all of these drawings that are very detailed and very complicated. And the one thing that I keep pushing back on the industry is start being more simplistic. You can get all involved in the details and that's what the details are are for all the important information. But really, our drawings really need to be simpler. And we have to do the work. How do we fix the difficult drawings? What do we need to do? And we're almost getting to the point of the class that I really like-- drafting and drawing.
How do we fix the drawings? What do we have to do? We have to purge, audit, recover, -pu, burst some symbols because some architects don't know how to work with some of these symbols with the dynamic blocks. And I make their life easy. They will work with these symbols to a certain point. And then they'll throw their hands up and say, I need this done. And then I come in. I say, how do you want this done? And then they'll give me some unrealistic response of how they want to see this information. And I say, oh, burst it. It gets them through their little day, and it moves on.
I hate exploded blocks. I will say that. Because exploded blocks are made for one reason. And if they're made in a proficient manner, then there's really no need to burst them. Sometimes working with other people's drawings-- and a lot of this class is based upon those other people's drawings-- is why we would want to use the burst command in general.
Some of the things that I've done is W block an entire drawing out. I recreate drawings on the fly all the time just because it gets us to a point where we can use them. And that's a lot of this class, I say, is practical drawings. How do we get to the point where we can actually use them? It's great to open them up and look at them and see how they've done things before. But when the boss says, I've got two days to put this stuff together, that's how I need to know how to use this information-- how to make it easy for myself.
One of the things that I said before-- let me go back to here-- is about purging drawings, because that's one thing-- that I'm the little 'ol purge bird at work. Purge, purge, purge, purge, purge all day long-- every drawing I purge, every drawing I touch. People will call me and say, oh, my drawing crashed. When's the last time you purged it? I get no response. Well, that means you haven't purged it today, yesterday, or the day before. You're bringing this information in, trying to manage it on a daily basis.
Anytime I bring something in, I purge, purge, purge, purge, purge. And, again, one thing that I like about purging is that it brings our file sizes down. Let's start with drawings, and I'll show you one. I'll bring one up in a minute. It's a 20 meg file. There's two of them in there. And I've got these files down to a manageable 2 megs. Again, email the files-- zip files, whatever, it's manageable. I don't have to use Dropbox. I don't have to use blah, blah, blah. I just send it.
So, again, I want to tell everybody to keep their drawings manageable with, again, managing them to keep their files smaller. This happens to me all the time. I've got a brand new computer at work. I got one last week before I went to AU. Yeah. It crashed. It happens to me all the time. One thing that I've said to our IT manager-- RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM, RAM. I can't get enough of it. I am opening and closing AutoCAD every day. Outlook's open every day. Photoshop's open from time to time.
There's a myriad of information that I'm touching on every day. I reboot my workstation every day. It's brand new. I just got it. You would think, hey, I could last eight hours. No, I can't last four hours. Again, you'll see how my class runs. That's why I do this.
Where are we with our computers? Where, again, 10 years ago there was about a $7,000 or $8,000 range that I was working with computers and operating systems. Now we're right around the $2,500 range. I'm like, how did this all happen? We went from way over here to way over here. And now we're talking Revit and these environments that really need to be way over here again.
So it's really bringing the IT department along with your managers, your bosses-- making them aware of how long this stuff takes to generate, to come up, to process. And that all will help us receive better computers and such.
All right, working in AutoCAD-- this is really where I wanted to get. Because some of this is just a hands-on-- on let's see if I can get my mouse going. [INAUDIBLE] Of course, the IT person came in. And now this doesn't work. John, I should not have let him touch my computer. You ever say that? I said that before I left.