Division8 - Curtainwall Blog

Spent this week training 4 more people on V6. The 27 or so training videos we have put together have made the training process much better and more professional. It also documents our process really well as well as providing an easy way to go back and review specific items if you can’t remember something.
So we are very close to completing our implementation. Really just a few items left to go. We need to complete dialing in our data access from other branches, finish our detail implementation for shop drawings and a couple of open items on packaging and pricing for miscellaneous items.
We are now using V6 on all upcoming projects. The Samaritan project, LAX, Neuroscience, Equinix and Kaiser Redwood City are our first projects for V6. Should have some results to post in the next month or so…

So the remote desktop software works great for V6. I can’t say the same for Autocad. You can’t run Autocad from a server so you can’t use the remote desktop software for it. Since most of our implementation involves automating Autocad with the data from V6, that is causing a problem.
We have a custom Microsoft Access program that uses the data from V6 to drive most of our downstream processes. Reporting, extrusion optimizations, Autocad Cleanup, fabrication drawings, etc… The program works fine in the Fremont office where we also have the SQL server, but the latency in the other offices when working over the network was a real issue. We spent the week testing different data access methods and found some interesting things. If you try to copy data from SQL over the network to a linked table, the performance is horrible. If you copy the same data to an unlinked table, it is much better. The best performance came from using stored procedures or pass-through queries to fill a non-linked tab …

Started training the LA branch last week. We’ve recorded over 20 videos covering all the basic subjects and are using these for our training. This way people can go back and review things that weren’t clear or they can’t remember. I’ll try to post these in the near future.

The latest version of V6 has a much better implementation of their detail module. They are now using the open design alliance dll’s and the imports and exports are excellent! You have the choice of storing the details in the database or as a file on the server. We reviewed this yesterday in our weekly V6 meeting and it was very impressive. I still think we will use a hybrid method for our company. Export the generic details from V6, then roll through them programatically, see what assemblies were used to create the detail, search a database to see which of our standard details represents those assembly combinations then replace the generic detail with ours. I think this will result in less clean up for the draftsman.

Had an issue with the VRML to IFC converter. The VRML output is in inches and we were converting to IFC in inches also. This worked fine when you import it into Revit, but was not scaling correctly when you import into Navis. We changed the units to Metric and both imports work fine. Not sure why, but it works.

Finished the VRML to IFC converter. We can now export VRML files out of V6 and then convert them to IFC for direct import into Revit and Tekla. This was requested on one of our projects where they were looking for a way to import our work into Tekla. The DXF files out of V6 would work, but they wanted to be able to cut a section and see our actual extrusions and the DXF export does not have that sort of definition when it comes out of V6.