Generic Forms - Walls, Wall Assemblies and DG Walls

There are people using DG Walls currently, and I will offer these benefits to using them now (and knowing there are more coming).

• DG Annotation
  • Create a wall annotation tag and a rule to automatically place Wall tags on plans
• Automatic Family/Part Assignment
  • This prevents users from not changing the Family/Part and placing walls with the wrong Part.
• Changing from a single leaf wall to a compound wall (or vice versa) 
• Easy create a DG Catalog of "standard" walls that already have all of the data entered that is typically shown in a partition schedule.  
• DG data is easy to harvest from I-Models using Item Sets for analysis of the model, isolation of elements, model checking, etc.

I am not sure if I completely understand your requests for functionality, but I would recommend a workflow where you start out placing a "generic" wall through the DG based Wall Tool.  Then as you develop the project you can 'modify' that wall and exchange it for a more specific wall or compound wall with the data attached that matches the project (or corporate) partition schedule. 

 I have made the conversion of walls from Family/Part based to DG walls for 2 different companies now, and can attest to it is not nearly as much work as it may seem before you start.  If you are comfortable working with the .xml's directly it is even easier. 

 -Travis

ONE:

My issue is I have over 2000 parts and need to go into Each and every one and no create a NEW DG wall.

I do see the beneift from a Tag - but since my part name is the "SpecNo-Desc"  it is just a pain and I will lose so much time just creating walls for tags.  And I still asume the tag is for each individual part in a wall and not must the wall assembly.

I've never seen a wall or partition schedule.  Talked with several friends this evening with projects from 25 mil down and that is new to all of us.  I woul dliek to see an example of someone's schedule as this may be something I can use.

Since our firm has no draftsmen and all are architects or engineers.  The time to recreate DG Walls from Parts could be made simlier with a utility to bring all parts into DGwalls.

TWO:

In most packages I use I can manipulate an elment from within one singluar dialog.  With parts I must open 5 dialogs to make changes to or correct one PART.  Yes there are shortcuts by opening the spreadsheet - scrolling backand forth as they still don't fit on a 27" wide screen monitor., scroll up an down copy al other part then open the five dialogs to make the changes.

This is less user frinding than we had in architectural products 20 years ago when WYSIWIG was considered an important need.  I can even remember at least two of the Bentley brothers saying this was why Microstation was so much better than Autocad.  We have gone backwards from userfriendliness to geekness.

Emilberger,
I originally too had many parts for walls.
However, when I transitioned to datagroup walls the number was significantly reduced.
With datagroup walls, the part is only used for the graphical display of the wall.
For instance, I originally had a part for 2 1/2", 3 5/8", 6", and 8" 1 hour stud walls with 1 layer
of gyp board on each side. I also had a part for  2 1/2", 3 5/8", 6", and 8" 1 hour stud walls with 1 layer
of gyp board on one side and 2 layers of gyp bd on the other side. In addition to these parts,
I also had another 8 parts for the same walls except with batt insulation.
All 16 of these walls had a 1 hour centerline embedded.
However, now I only have a part for 1 hour gyp walls with centerlines embedded; 1 with sound batts
and the other without sound batts. So I have 2 parts to cover all 16 instances.
The thickness of the wall is detemined by the datagroup definition.

For you reference, I have attached a pdf of our Type A walls. (1 Layer gyp on each side of metal stud)
The main tag number would consist of a letter and two numbers.
i.e. A31
Also part of my tag consists of two subscripts.
One of the subscripts determines if the wall is either a smoke barrier wall
or a smoke partition wall.
The other subscript would determine if the wall also is lead lined.
With this approach the one Type A legend covers every instance of a single metal stud
with a single layer gyp board on each side.

We have a partition legend sheet that consists of type A thru N that covers all our interior paritition needs.
All but 3 of the legends are single datagroup walls. We do have three wall legends for our plumbing chase walls.
These utilize compound walls.

Note that the legends are for interior paritions only.
Our exterior walls are not tagged but described usually in wall sections.

HTH
Tom

Tom:

Thanks for expanding on how your firm uses DG Walls.  I think this is a perfect example of how use of DG allows for the consolidation of Families/Parts.  Doors & Windows are other examples of how DG reporting eliminates the need to maintain a large numbers of Parts.  In the past we would need a separate part for each type of door or window (still delivered for legacy purposes), but really you only need one Part for a door or window (other than the parts used for materials within PAZs).  That one part would be used to dictate only the symbology of the door or window and all reporting would be done through DG Explorer.  This same logic is now being applied to the walls, and the function of wall parts within DG Walls is primarily for symbology purposes with the meta-data generated through DG placement carrying the additional information.  

Emilberger:  

I hope Tom's post addresses some of your concerns related to your first question.  I will add that you can create a DG Annotation Tag for walls that pulls any piece of data from the wall and does not have to be just the Part Name.  Tom's comments should also hopefully encourage you that moving to DG Walls is actually a big step in increasing the BIMness of Bentley Architecture walls and simplifying the Family/Part maintenance of walls.  I agree it must be hard to move away from a collection of families/parts that have been built over years, but consolidating parts by removing meta-data from their names and moving that meta-data to the DG structure is a big step in increasing the Building Intelligence of our Bentley models while reducing the complexity of the datasets.  

Let me know if you have more questions related to best practices related to DG Walls.

-Travis