These templates are awesome! I've checked them out before and learnt so much. I borrowed a lot of ideas from you when I setup my own template, even though I'm coming from an autocad electrical standpoint. Thanks for all your work!
Thanks for sharing this! That was one of my main goals, that is making the standards adaptable to any given field. It's nice to hear someone achieved that. I would recommend looking into the Electrical Toolset if you're using AutoCAD Full . Apologies if that's a no-brainer but I only recently discovered that many toolsets are now included. At the very least there might be some good dynamic blocks/symbols/etc...
Yes, we use the Electrical toolset already. It's pretty useful for our line of work. It includes a lot of tools for managing projects, automatic bill of materials generation, report generation, etc. And of course, a large library of blocks. It's a bit buggy though! For instance it doesn't support dynamic blocks properly. Officially they say to avoid using them. You can use them if you're careful but because of the anonymous names some of the tools like the report generator often don't pick them up correctly! It's one of those things where you learn ways to work around the bugs! 🙃
It's a little frustrating that we have to figure out so many work arounds when we pay so much for this stuff. I think that's one key reason why AutoCAD LT is seeing more and more use: no use paying all that extra money for things that don't function 100%. Basic = reliable and no surprises. I was about to place AutoLISP onto the backburner (I was gravitating towards C#, a whole other programmer language) until they included AutoLISP in AutoCAD LT. Now we have a much lower-cost alternative to implement automation. I still use AutoCAD full because I need the Visual LISP editor (not included with AutoCAD LT) until I finish a project I'm working on.@@PMSteve
@@randomCADstuff yo...SCREW the greedy CAD-monsters, kids!!! instead, try...ActCAD. An ACAD-clone similar to many others, but this one from India. And those Indian-CAD-dudes aren't Fools. They, like me, prefer their "$$$-maker" work for US, and not the CAD-monsters. up-to-you 🙂
You talk about "reactors" quite a bit and I'd like to understand a bit more about them. I don't think you've done a video on that specific subject and I couldn't really find any videos at all that cover it? I've got some blocks that represent an electrical terminal and they each have a unique number which is stored in a attribute called TERM. The problem is that the number is supposed to be shown in 2 places. I know that you shouldn't duplicate the same attribute because it causes problems. Therefore I created another attribute called TERM_COPY and I have a lisp routine that I can run which iterates though all of the blocks in the drawing and copies TERM to TERM_copy if those attributes exist. I wonder if this could be done better with a reactor? Or maybe there's a much easier way altogether?
AfraLISP.net has 3 tutorials on reactors. Here's the link to the first: www.afralisp.net/visual-lisp/tutorials/reactors-part-1.php You'd need to read all three tutorials as they built into one another. The third tutorial gets into "object" reactors. That would be your ticket, but it gets pretty involved. If you're familiar with programming you might have heard of something called "events". Reactors are very similar. I suspect that Revit uses "event driven programming" to make their tags work as they do. The craziest LISP code I ever wrote would actually create symbols (variable names) at runtime (something C# can't even do). The variable name would contain an object's ID handle. And I'd use that to attach the reactor to each object (I actually can't remember exactly how I did it). My concern was that it would populate the drawing with too many reactors and maybe slow things down. I drew 200 beams with tags (this was basically just a beam tag) and no slow down. I think I recall that if you didn't have the callback function loaded, an error would appear any time you tried to edit one of the beams. Although it seems to be working it needed a lot more testing. Reactors can be a little risky (not as risky if you're around to manage them but with this template I won't be). It was something I was doing off to the side hence I never went any further with it. The end result was better than Revit tags because the tag was just MText (Revit tags are very un-editable; you can't even rotate them). All that said, my recommendation would be to stick with your database sweep. Unless your drawing is super large, a database sweep shouldn't take that long. Depending what I am doing, I will create a custom "REGEN" command that regens, but also runs some sort of sweep at the same time.
These templates are awesome! I've checked them out before and learnt so much. I borrowed a lot of ideas from you when I setup my own template, even though I'm coming from an autocad electrical standpoint.
Thanks for all your work!
Thanks for sharing this! That was one of my main goals, that is making the standards adaptable to any given field. It's nice to hear someone achieved that.
I would recommend looking into the Electrical Toolset if you're using AutoCAD Full . Apologies if that's a no-brainer but I only recently discovered that many toolsets are now included. At the very least there might be some good dynamic blocks/symbols/etc...
Yes, we use the Electrical toolset already. It's pretty useful for our line of work. It includes a lot of tools for managing projects, automatic bill of materials generation, report generation, etc. And of course, a large library of blocks.
It's a bit buggy though! For instance it doesn't support dynamic blocks properly. Officially they say to avoid using them. You can use them if you're careful but because of the anonymous names some of the tools like the report generator often don't pick them up correctly!
It's one of those things where you learn ways to work around the bugs! 🙃
It's a little frustrating that we have to figure out so many work arounds when we pay so much for this stuff. I think that's one key reason why AutoCAD LT is seeing more and more use: no use paying all that extra money for things that don't function 100%. Basic = reliable and no surprises. I was about to place AutoLISP onto the backburner (I was gravitating towards C#, a whole other programmer language) until they included AutoLISP in AutoCAD LT. Now we have a much lower-cost alternative to implement automation. I still use AutoCAD full because I need the Visual LISP editor (not included with AutoCAD LT) until I finish a project I'm working on.@@PMSteve
@@randomCADstuff yo...SCREW the greedy CAD-monsters, kids!!! instead, try...ActCAD. An ACAD-clone similar to many others, but this one from India. And those Indian-CAD-dudes aren't Fools. They, like me, prefer their "$$$-maker" work for US, and not the CAD-monsters. up-to-you 🙂
And... For those interested I've uploaded the updated version.
Excellent Planwork!!
You talk about "reactors" quite a bit and I'd like to understand a bit more about them. I don't think you've done a video on that specific subject and I couldn't really find any videos at all that cover it?
I've got some blocks that represent an electrical terminal and they each have a unique number which is stored in a attribute called TERM. The problem is that the number is supposed to be shown in 2 places. I know that you shouldn't duplicate the same attribute because it causes problems. Therefore I created another attribute called TERM_COPY and I have a lisp routine that I can run which iterates though all of the blocks in the drawing and copies TERM to TERM_copy if those attributes exist.
I wonder if this could be done better with a reactor? Or maybe there's a much easier way altogether?
AfraLISP.net has 3 tutorials on reactors. Here's the link to the first: www.afralisp.net/visual-lisp/tutorials/reactors-part-1.php
You'd need to read all three tutorials as they built into one another. The third tutorial gets into "object" reactors. That would be your ticket, but it gets pretty involved. If you're familiar with programming you might have heard of something called "events". Reactors are very similar. I suspect that Revit uses "event driven programming" to make their tags work as they do.
The craziest LISP code I ever wrote would actually create symbols (variable names) at runtime (something C# can't even do). The variable name would contain an object's ID handle. And I'd use that to attach the reactor to each object (I actually can't remember exactly how I did it). My concern was that it would populate the drawing with too many reactors and maybe slow things down. I drew 200 beams with tags (this was basically just a beam tag) and no slow down. I think I recall that if you didn't have the callback function loaded, an error would appear any time you tried to edit one of the beams.
Although it seems to be working it needed a lot more testing. Reactors can be a little risky (not as risky if you're around to manage them but with this template I won't be). It was something I was doing off to the side hence I never went any further with it. The end result was better than Revit tags because the tag was just MText (Revit tags are very un-editable; you can't even rotate them).
All that said, my recommendation would be to stick with your database sweep. Unless your drawing is super large, a database sweep shouldn't take that long. Depending what I am doing, I will create a custom "REGEN" command that regens, but also runs some sort of sweep at the same time.
Thanks. I'll check out the Afralisp tutorials. 👍
💪 "Promo SM"