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I recently tried designing a safe deck myself and found it quite interesting. I did my design in ZWCAD, but the logic behind the design process should apply to all kinds of CAD software. If you're interested in designing one yourself, feel free to download the sample drawings here . Okay, here's how to design a safe deck. Step 1. Prepare a plan of your house and its surroundings. Then, decide where to locate the deck and the basic shape of it, based on the plan. Step 2. Outline the shape of the safe deck, which will be the base of your design. At this stage, your top consideration should be practicality. For example, if the ground were noticeably uneven, consider designing a multi-level deck. Step 3. Draw the dividing lines on the deck to represent the placement of the wood. And don't forget to add dimensions to your design. For those who also use ZWCAD, you can use the Super Hatch function to texturize the deck with realistic wood images, to make it easier to read. Step 4. Create the layout of the supporting pillars. You should allow for the moving load on the deck, which means the distance between two pillars is usually about 3 to 4 meters. In ZWCAD, you can quickly place the pillars with the Array function - first, select the pillar as the basic object, then set the distances on the X and Y axes. Step 5. Design the elevation, which is mainly to show the height differences of the deck and its railings. Note that the deck should be lower than the house floor to prevent water from flowing back into the house during rainy days. As for the railings, the height is suggested to be 1 meter. Step 6. Insert your title block in the layout space to display the necessary information, such as materials and size. Then, decide the paper size for printing out the layout. In this case, I think A3 is just fine. With the printed layout, now you can contact your local contractors and discuss it with them. That's the whole process of designing a safe deck!

Hello, I've been asked to make facade views from a survey in 3D. I have the house in 3d lines and i would like to extract the front-, left-, right- & back view of the facade. i used to do this by redrawing in an other file, but there has to be an easy way to "extract" that view. 1245337672_3dhouse.dxf

Hi All, I hope i have put this in the right section of the forum. Introduction to my Queries: I am working on a 2D housing layout, which has multiple houses, roads, paths and trees, ect. For the record I use Blocks for the houses and within each block contains details such as House Name, Engineering Details (Rain water Pipe, Soil Vent pipe), Hatch Colour, roof line and entrance indication. The problem: Quite often I will have to mirror and rotate the houses to give variation for the elevations and general design of the layout. Now the problem I have, is when using the mirror cmd. The mirror cmd also mirrors the text which mean I have the choice of 2 things: A- explode the house block and flip the text back. B- make an additional mirrored blocks for each orientation. the problem with solution B is i have to then insert a new block each time, which makes the Job very long winded and lengthy especially if i have say 1000 houses on the scheme. is there a way to have a block which allows you to replace it on the whim? Like a right click change to opposite block. or is there a way to make the text to always keep it orientation? despite being mirrored Thanks in advance Jason