File Management With Multiple Details

Rhino
1

I am looking for a general approach for the following problem.

I have ship plans. Generally there is one plan per deck. Those plans have a lot of different layers for different types of detail (e.g., Decks, Bulkheads Doors, Ladders, Machinery). They also include a lot of research information, such as measurements and notes.

I need to be able to output these in different formats. For illustration, lets say book and printed plan. For a book, I need to include callouts, the plans need to be in smaller scale. The text needs to be larger and I have to match the plan font to the book font. The plans need to be split to fit on a book spread.

A compartment name, for example, needs to be different text from a printed plan. The font frequently needs to be different and the text needs to be positioned and line broken differently, so I cannot just use Rhino’s automatic scaling. E.g. when a plan has to be split across book spreads, the text has to be either in one spread or another.

In some plans I want to include measurements. In others I do not want measurements.

Next level of complexity:

From a base set of plans, I want to be able to depict the different ships of the same class and have different parts I can include that are specific for each ship.

At present I have been doing this using layers and separate sets of layouts. The number of layers is getting staggering and it is hard to manage what goes into a specific plan.

I was wondering if anyone has come up with a good approach to dealing with this issue?

2

Okay this sounds like a lot of issues…so you don’t just want different layers on/off but different text/dimension styles, line styles and actually modified dimension locations sometimes? And keep track of parts? And there’s probably more stuff you’d want to do… It actually does sound like something I did back in the 00’s where I had an elaborate layout with tweaks for print vs screen.

The most elaborate stuff I do these days as far as managing product data and various sorts of documentation involves InDesign, Rhino, and a database all glued together with a bunch of scripts.

3

Yes, it’s a lot of different issues rolled up into one. I was just wondering what approaches people have taken who have encountered similar issues. There’s not going to be a silver bullet.

4

I mean all the swapping styles/visibility and even identifying annotations that need to be moved out of the way of a page split sounds eminently scriptable, but how that actually translates into a workflow that actually helps save time requires looking at the whole process.

5

I was wondering if blocks might be used and reference from common files, for example.

6

Sure, in general, that’s what blocks are for, but note that trying to use blocks as any sort of ‘assembly management’ thing is doomed. Ask me how I know.