Anybody know of a good block manager

[buildman]

Need a tool here;

 

I'm beginning to come up with quite a few blocks now, do any of you know of a good block manager? I've done the Google search but so far not finding anything I like, it would be nice if some of you could point me to something that want cost an arm and leg.

 

Thanks

[Jack_O'neill]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "block manager" but here's something you could try. I have several hundred of the most commonly used blocks from my biggest client arranged in an assortment of tool pallets. In my case, they are all standard details for curtain wall products. I have them sorted by product line and system depth. I also have pallets for common surrounding condtions like CMU and brick walls, concrete floor slabs, etc. Makes it quite easy to find what I'm looking for.

 

If you put some thought into how you organize them, tool pallets are a good way to do that. Again, in my case, I try to construct the blocks with regard to the insertion points so when I drop in a wall or floor or whatever, I rarely have to move or change it much. Every architect thinks he knows a better way, so once in a while I have to choose one close to what I want and modify it, but it still saves a lot of time.

[BlackBox]

I'm with Jack, on the Tool Palette idea... the only downside is Autodesk does not provide a simple means by which to make updates to the TP available on others' computers. But doing the work on your own PC is cake.

 

The only other 'block manager' would be Design Center, perhaps? I dunno, I don't use it.

[nestly]

Design Center is a fabulous Block manager if you store your blocks within a "master" drawing. It's automatically updated for all users, and the block preview is equal to your screen resolution.

[Jack_O'neill]

Design Center is a fabulous Block manager if you store your blocks within a "master" drawing. It's automatically updated for all users, and the block preview is equal to your screen resolution.

 

It works very well, but I have way too many blocks to do that way. For instance, I have one directory, that is just one system for this customer, and it has over 700 standard details. It's one of the smaller ones, too.

[BlackBox]

^^ Overachiever.

[buildman]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "block manager" but here's something you could try. I have several hundred of the most commonly used blocks from my biggest client arranged in an assortment of tool pallets. In my case' date=' they are all standard details for curtain wall products. I have them sorted by product line and system depth. I also have pallets for common surrounding condtions like CMU and brick walls, concrete floor slabs, etc. Makes it quite easy to find what I'm looking for.

 

If you put some thought into how you organize them, tool pallets are a good way to do that. Again, in my case, I try to construct the blocks with regard to the insertion points so when I drop in a wall or floor or whatever, I rarely have to move or change it much. Every architect thinks he knows a better way, so once in a while I have to choose one close to what I want and modify it, but it still saves a lot of time.[/quote']

 

 

That's what I wanted to hear, there has to be a way to organize thousands of blocks, I knew there had to be methods such as you've outlined because when I did a search on this site I didn't come up with much.

 

Here's a couple of links to block managers that seem to be at the top of the heap doing a Google search. There's more of these things out there but I'm not going to load up a lot of links to products that I know nothing about. I'm surprised there's not more of this stuff. In my past life I was a software developer doing database applications, when I see stuff like this it just screams for a database application with quick view, drag and drop, the whole nine yards.

 

I'm still hoping to hear if anyone has had experience with any of these block managers, also I would love to hear what methods others are using to organize their blocks.

 

http://www.cadfx.com/blockman/

 

http://www.cad-solution.com/blmanager.html

 

Thanks

[nestly]

@ Jack

Size/number of blocks is not deterrent for DC. In fact, I'd argue that it's really shines when managing large quantities.

I have just over 650 in the main block library I use daily. DC has an Autocomplete feature of sorts where all you have to do is start typing the block name and it jumps you right to those blocks that match the criteria without ever changing drawings, palettes or tabs.

 

I group lesser used blocks into different "master' drawings, but that's roughly equivelent to changing tool palette tabs if I need to retrieve something from a different library. Additionally, I can search for blocks from DC, can Tool Palettes do that?

 

The only thing I prefer about Toolpalettes is the ability to asign certain properties.

[Jack_O'neill]

@ Jack

Size/number of blocks is not deterrent for DC. In fact, I'd argue that it's really shines when managing large quantities.

I have just over 650 in the main block library I use daily. DC has an Autocomplete feature of sorts where all you have to do is start typing the block name and it jumps you right to those blocks that match the criteria without ever changing drawings, palettes or tabs.

 

I group lesser used blocks into different "master' drawings, but that's roughly equivelent to changing tool palette tabs if I need to retrieve something from a different library. Additionally, I can search for blocks from DC, can Tool Palettes do that?

 

The only thing I prefer about Toolpalettes is the ability to asign certain properties.

 

Ok, maybe I misunderstood. When you said "master drawing" I saw one drawing with 700 blocks in it. With these blocks, the file size would be enormous. Not that the software can't handle it, it's my machine I'm worried about. It's getting a bit long in the tooth, and one drawing in the 50000kb range might tax it's abilities.

[Jack_O'neill]

^^ Overachiever.

 

Oh I didn't draw them. Well, not all of them, just some. Had to go buy two 16GB flash drives to hold them all when they gave them to me though. There are literally tens of thousands of them. I worked for them as an employee for 5 years, and have been an outsourcer for them for 3 more and there are products in there I've never drawn or even seen. Got that stuff all zipped and stored out of the way on an external drive.

[buildman]

Oh I didn't draw them. Well' date=' not all of them, just some. Had to go buy two 16GB flash drives to hold them all when they gave them to me though. There are literally tens of thousands of them. I worked for them as an employee for 5 years, and have been an outsourcer for them for 3 more and there are products in there I've never drawn or even seen. Got that stuff all zipped and stored out of the way on an external drive.[/quote']

 

Hey Jack;

 

I've gotten into DC and I have to tell you a person would be hard pressed to find a better program to handle the blocks.

 

Seeing as you are the person that knows where all the blocks are in the world can you point to the X where some some of them are buried. I love blocks and I don't think you can have to many, I need some good decorative brick hatch patterns.

 

Thanks

 

James

[nestly]

Ok' date=' maybe I misunderstood. When you said "master drawing" I saw one drawing with 700 blocks in it. With these blocks, the file size would be enormous. Not that the software can't handle it, it's my machine I'm worried about. It's getting a bit long in the tooth, and one drawing in the 50000kb range might tax it's abilities.[/quote']

 

No, I think you understood correctly the first time. My main block library is 650 + blocks in one drawing. It contains multiple views of all my commonly used welded fittings, threaded fittings, valves, hangers, rollers, fasteners, beams, etc. used for process piping design. The file is ~15MB. My 3D blocks for equipment are divided up by category because otherwise the file size would be huge. Basically, 95 percent of all my blocks get inserted from just one source drawing, and the rest come from 4 other more specific source drawings.

[Jack_O'neill]

Hey Jack;

 

I've gotten into DC and I have to tell you a person would be hard pressed to find a better program to handle the blocks.

 

Seeing as you are the person that knows where all the blocks are in the world can you point to the X where some some of them are buried. I love blocks and I don't think you can have to many, I need some good decorative brick hatch patterns.

 

Thanks

 

James

 

Most of what I have are standard details from various curtainwall manufacturers. They have all the components of a system, then I put in the surrounding conditions like this:

 

Once all that's done, I have a vba routine that goes through and harvests the information out of the part bubbles, dumps it in a database, gives it a numerical number and puts that number in the part bubble. It then sees which ones were used on that page and puts a parts list in the upper right hand corner. You can see here that some of them have numbers, some just say "list". The ones that say list came in with the block I inserted, the ones that have numbers were swiped out of another drawing. The vba doesn't care whats there, it reassigns it every time I run it. At any rate, the surrounding conditions are recreated from the architectural drawings. When I'm done, I send the whole mess in to the engineer, who will do his calcs and decide what sort of perimeter fasteners, steel reinforcement, etc gets put in. Some of the guys I work with will do that themselves, others mark it up and send it back to me to do.

 

--edit--numerical number? thats genius at work right there...I meant "numerical sequence"

[Jack_O'neill]

No, I think you understood correctly the first time. My main block library is 650 + blocks in one drawing. It contains multiple views of all my commonly used welded fittings, threaded fittings, valves, hangers, rollers, fasteners, beams, etc. used for process piping design. The file is ~15MB. My 3D blocks for equipment are divided up by category because otherwise the file size would be huge. Basically, 95 percent of all my blocks get inserted from just one source drawing, and the rest come from 4 other more specific source drawings.

 

Ok, I gotcha now...too much going on at once today to think clearly. When you said "master drawing" I registered "template" for some strange reason. I may try that on the next manufacturer I pick up. Got a customer that wants a system from a company I've never even heard of before. May set it up and give it a try in DC if I get the go on that one. They've only got a hundred or so details, so it wouldn't take long to do and give it a test drive.

[nestly]

If you need to automate the process of importing blocks, Charles Allen Butler (CAB) has a lisp called Block Import Lisp (BI.lsp) that will import all the .dwgs in a folder into a single drawing at user defined spacing.

[Lutze]

We use tool palettes in our office to maintain consistency. They are an incredible tool and are getting better every new release. If you create all of the blocks based on 1:1 scale and put all of the lines on layer '0' then the blocks will insert into your drawing from the tool palettes to scale and on the current layer. You can also set properties for blocks. For example, all of my duct work is inserted in the duct layer automatically without me having to manually change layers and insert the block.

[buildman]

How about free?

http://web2.iadfw.net/terrycad/AutoLISP-Code.htm

Blk_Lib.lsp

Blk_Lib.dcl

Blk_Lib.doc

 

OR

 

http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=32058.0

 

I am having a ball with this stuff, as soon as I get this house plan finished I'm going to get into the programming part of Autocad, I had no idea how much programming you guy were doing. Thanks for pointing me to all this wonderful stuff.

 

James

[buildman]

Hi Jack;

 

That's some very complex stuff you're doing there, I'll bet some of it gets to be quite a challenge, thanks for sharing what you do, I love seeing this stuff, you're way over my head in Autocad but I'm having fun with my little project and I appreciate all the help I'm getting.

 

James

[tzframpton]

Design Center is the best bet, and quite frankly since Buildman is using LT, there's not really another option at all.

 

I use DC a lot. It works wonders compared to not having anything at all, and can be set up to be very efficient, although I can see that it's not the most intuitive subsequent program for AutoCAD, that's for sure.

[Tyke]

Hi Jack;

That's some very complex stuff you're doing there, I'll bet some of it gets to be quite a challenge, thanks for sharing what you do, I love seeing this stuff, you're way over my head in Autocad but I'm having fun with my little project and I appreciate all the help I'm getting.

James

 

Just to reinforce what Tannar said, James you are using LT and that means all of the LISP and VBA (not forgetting .NET) cannot be used by you, you need a full version of AutoCAD or learn the somewhat restricted DIESEL language.

 

We use our own palettes a lot and they are excellent, for our purposes!