Workflow 3: Documentation Generation
Documentation Generation turns your panels and site into the drawings that leave the office: a dimensioned shop drawing for every panel, the panel book, the site sheets, and the files your engineer and other trades need.
Overview
Every sheet is drawn from the data stored in the panel or site drawing, and every panel's title block carries the details from Project Details. Printing to a PDF device is the PDF export; there is no separate step.
Key Steps
- Draw the Panel Sheet — each panel's shop drawing shows:
- The panel with its dimensions, its mark and gridline marks
- Openings, recesses, reveals and face materials, each with its size note
- The weld connection labels, the Weld Connections Req. table and the Embed Placement Key
- Pick and brace points
- The title block, with the panel's volume and weight from its 3D solid and the concrete weight you entered, and the centre-of-gravity mark, for your engineer to verify
Auto Scale fits the panel and its dimensions to the sheet. A sheet still too crowded at the minimum text size is drawn as it is, with a note recommending 11 × 17 paper.
- Print a Panel — Print Setup plots the drawing as displayed; Print All Layers turns every layer on first. The Print → Panel presets give one trade's sheet: All Layers, Edge Form, Ledgers / Top Plate, Weld Connections, Reveal, or Pick / Brace Points.
- Print the Panel Book — Batch Utilities runs one operation across many panels: print the panel book, print revision histories, or update drawings.
- Print the Site — Print Select Layouts presets the site's print layers and plots. CV Sheets (typed command CV-SITE-SHEETS, in a site drawing) adds four 24 × 36 sheets: the site plan, the pick plan with a slab-edge safety note, and the elevations.
- Keep the Revision Record — Revision History views and prints each drawing's revisions, and Revert / Restore step a panel back and forward through its saved revisions.
- Send Data to Your Engineer — every panel save writes that panel's data file into the project folder and refreshes the project file, so the lift-engineering firm can be sent the project file with the panel book, with nothing re-entered by hand. In ConstructiVision Web, an engineering file can be exported for the firm and its reply imported back, and the SE Verification Record carries lift-point and brace-point coordinates, slab-dowel specs, centre of gravity, panel weight and squaring diagonals, without the parametric model, so an outside engineer can check the design independently. The engineering import reports how many panels each reply applied to.
- Move to ConstructiVision Web — export a panel, a site or the construction layout to ConstructiVision Web, where a project can be issued as a Panel Book PDF, exported to DXF, or saved as a project file.
Documentation Types
- Panel Shop Drawings (DWG) — one dimensioned sheet per panel
- PDF Sets — any print sent to a PDF device
- Panel Books — the whole project's panel sheets, printed with Batch Utilities, or issued as a PDF from ConstructiVision Web
- Site Sheets — the site plan, pick plan and elevations
- Discipline Sheets — one trade's layers per sheet: edge form, ledgers and top plates, weld connections, reveals, pick and brace points
- Revision Histories — printed per drawing
- 3D Models — the panel's 3D solid and the stood-up site, for review and presentation
What Gets Created
- A shop drawing for every panel
- The panel book
- Site sheets and discipline sheets
- PDF distribution sets
- Revision histories
- Data files for your engineer and for ConstructiVision Web
Automation Benefits
- Consistency — All documentation maintains consistent standards, symbols, and annotation from the project setup
- Speed — Documentation generation that would take weeks of manual drafting happens in hours
- Accuracy — dimensions, quantities and embed names come from the panel's own data, so nothing is retyped from one sheet to the next
- Traceability — every sheet is drawn from the data stored in its drawing, and each drawing keeps its revision history
- Updates — when design changes are made, redrawing the panel brings its sheet up to date; Batch Utilities can update many drawings at once
Quality Checks, in Groups
These checks find problems and show them to you. They do not replace review by your engineer, and they certify nothing.
- On the panel
- Build-phase views show the panel one build stage at a time, so each stage can be checked on its own
- The Materials List says when a panel has been set up but not drawn, flags an embed missing from the project's catalog as "(not in catalog)", and names any item it cannot count yet rather than guessing a quantity
- A sheet too crowded to read at the minimum text size says so, and recommends 11 × 17 paper
- Revision History records what changed, and Revert / Restore step through saved revisions
- On the site
- Interference Check tests the stood-up panels for clashes and lists each with its cause, left on their own layer
- QA Findings reopens that list later and centres the drawing on each finding in turn
- Autosite names every panel it did not place, and why
- The construction layout warns when a casting bed lies inside the brace line of a panel set before it
- Crane and pick planning (planning aids, reviewed by the lift engineer)
- Plan Picks keeps every crane station wholly on the poured slab or wholly beyond the wall clearance, never across the slab edge, shows the picks it flags in red, and refuses a site with no drawn slab
- Crane Capacity Check compares every panel with the chosen crane's load chart from one crane position and reports the ones it refuses
- Draw Crane, Crane Pick and Crane Capacity Check put the crane where you place it and do not test the slab edge: check every station yourself
- On the project
- The Tracker marks each phase Done, Now or To do and names the next step
- Projects tells you when a project folder is a copy of another one
- The tutorial checkers grade lessons 1 to 12 against the expected result
- In ConstructiVision Web
- Each panel is compared with every panel in the corpus while you draw it
- Brace clash detection
- The engineering import reports how many panels a reply applied to, so a short reply is noticed
- The SE Verification Record, for an independent check by a structural engineer
Integration with Other Workflows
Documentation Generation draws on the project details from Project Setup and the panels from Design & Detailing. The Materials List takes its quantities from the same drawn panels, and the site sheets and pick plan carry into construction planning for the lift engineer to review.
Ready for Quantities? Once documentation is complete, proceed to Materials & Quantities to produce the take-off for your estimate.