Composing Drawings Blog Series - Introduction

Drawing Composition, in general, is all about creating and composing drawings from your design. In MicroStation, drawing composition can be achieved efficiently and easily using Dynamic Views. Dynamic Views is a general term that encompasses several related technologies which share a common goal of making model analysis and documentation more interactive and intuitive. These technologies range from use of seeds, models, and detailing symbol styles to saved views and references. Dynamic views allow creation of live, intelligent views of a design that update automatically as the design evolves, thus making the task of composing drawings simpler and faster.

Broadly speaking, there are following stages in the drawing composition workflow:

1. Setting up project standards – Create drawing seeds, drawing boundaries, detailing symbol styles etc.
2. Design composition – Reference all your project designs into one design composition model, also called as Master model. This is usually at a full scale (1:1).
3. View composition and sheet composition – In view composition, you compose desired views (section, plan, elevation etc.) and link callouts with placeholder fields to these views. In the sheet composition stage, you will reference these views in a sheet model at a printable scale. In graphical terms, this workflow resembles something like this:
   This is the stage where you can use the Create Drawing dialog to automate the drawing and sheet model creation and place the views in them.
4. Scheduling and reporting – Add numbering and index to the sheets and place the index sheet as a table or generate a report.
5. Delivery (Printing, publishing and export).

In this blog series, we will primarily focus on stages 1, 3, and 4 and learn to achieve them using dynamic views.

In the first blog series, we will take an example project from the Building domain and demonstrate how to use the drawing seeds for a plan callout, automate dynamic views to generate sheet models and place plan views in them. We will also learn about indexing sheets and generating reports from the sheet index.

In the second blog series, we will take a Civil project example and create a drawing boundary seed. The drawing boundaries can then be used while placing multiple named boundaries in one go. We will also learn about fields and use them in the sheets.