Just realized manual drafting on vellum is way faster than CAD for quick layout sketches

I spent 3 hours wrestling with layers and constraints in AutoCAD for a simple floor plan revision last Tuesday, then my coworker whipped out a pencil and did the same thing in 20 minutes on vellum. Has anyone else found themselves going back to old-school methods for certain jobs just to save time?

3 comments

3 Comments

david_walker975d ago

You're not wrong about speed for quick sketches, but CAD has saved me way more time on revisions. Last week I had to change the ceiling height on a whole set of drawings, and the parametric constraints made it a five minute job instead of an hour of erasing and redrawing. Plus when you need to email three different versions of the same plan to a client, having the layers and blocks ready to go beats scanning vellum any day. Manual drafting is faster for one-off rough layouts, but for anything that needs to change or be shared, I'll take the three hour setup over the headache later.

mason.drew5d ago

Wait, but what happens when the software crashes or the file gets corrupted and you lose that parametric setup entirely? I've seen way too many drafters spend three hours building constraints only to have AutoCAD eat their file and they're back to square one with nothing to show for it. At least with manual drafting, if you make a mistake you just grab an eraser and fix it, you don't have to worry about some corrupted block throwing off your entire ceiling height because the reference point shifted. And yeah, emailing three versions is nice until the client can't open your file anyway or the PDF looks different on their screen than what you printed. Sometimes the headache is just baked into the digital process no matter how careful you are.

parker_webb5d ago

Man I feel you on this one. I've had AutoCAD eat two hours of parametric work before and it honestly makes you feel sick, like all that time just gone with nothing to show. The manual drafter might be slower overall but at least when they mess up, they only lose the time it takes to erase, not the whole file.