Sheet coordinates for multiple drawings
In BlenderBim, when multiple drawings are assigned to a sheet, they all appear over the top of each by default. While you can manually arrange them using Inkscape, any updates to the drawings necessitate re-generating the sheet, resulting in the loss of layout changes. This can lead to a fragmented workflow.
Wanting to streamline this process, I've been wondering if there's a solution I might be overlooking. Is there a method to regenerate the sheet while preserving the positions of the layouts?
Ideally, I envision a feature where the sheet coordinates of each drawing get stored, enabling seamless regeneration without disrupting layout arrangements.
However, I'm unsure if such functionality exists within BlenderBim or if there's an alternative approach that could achieve similar results. Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
There is some discussion of this here.
Basically the XY placement of the drawing isn't stored in the IFC yet, I'm using a custom patch to do this temporarily, but haven't committed it because it isn't a very elegant solution.
Though even with the default BlenderBIM, you should be able to regenerate a drawing without losing its placement in the layout, regenerating the sheet should pick up the changed drawing.
Thanks for the insights and link to the other discussion.
When you say "you should be able to regenerate a drawing without losing its placement" do you mean there currently is a way to do this, or that this feature should be added to BlenderBIM? If the latter, couldn't BlenderBIM have a Pset that stores the coordinates rather than hardcoding a default position?
@tim yes the way it works at the moment is that you create SVG fragments for all your 'drawings' (plans, elevations etc..), and these are referenced along with a drawing box and CSS into 'layouts' SVG files.
The 'layout' file doesn't change unless you edit in inkscape, so when you change or regenerate a 'drawing', the layout just includes the new drawing automatically at whatever position it had before.
The system is incomplete, as this position is only stored in the SVG layout and not in the IFC. This needs to be fixed (a minor problem is that you can't attach psets to IfcDocumentReference so we need to find the least ugly workaround, ideas needed here).
Do you guys have this problem as well?
https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/issues/3959
I often have to replace the drawing on a sheet because of this issue.
@theoryshaw I've noticed that too
I’ve experienced this as well
@brunopostle , do you think a json file would be the right approach to store the missing information?
For my workflow, after generating sheets, I only use Inkscape out of necessity to do the following things:
So from my perspective storing the x,y sheet coordinates for drawings and drawing titles would mean that I theoretically wouldn't need Inkscape.
What information is missing to streamline your workflow?
@tim I think that ultimately we should want to be able to recreate the drawing set from a bare IFC (albeit with default/missing style elements). So your idea of having the x,y coordinates available in the drawing list for each layout seems reasonable. These coordinates, and maybe rotation, should be stored in the IFC, somehow.
All this drawing stuff was put together just enough to get it to work. I'm not sure if @Moult considers that it just needs some glitches fixing, or if it needs some redesign after user feedback.