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	Real Architect 3.0 REVIEW

The opinions and views of these reviews are that of the writer/reviewer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Professional AutoCAD Users Group, PAUG, and or its members.

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Real Architect 3.0 Review - By David V. Sherrill

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Introduction: Real Architect v. 3.0 is an architectural plug-in for all AutoCAD LT version. I chose to test it on AutoCAD LT 97 since it is the newest in the line of LT products would give me the most complete set of tools to test Real Architect. I decided to review Real Architect since the sole licensed resellers, North American CAD Company, claimed that Real Architect allowed AutoCAD LT to "design commercial and residential buildings with R14 productivity for a fraction of the cost" of AutoCAD and a 3^rd party architectural program. I found this hard to believe since AutoCAD LT 97 lists for $495.00 and Real Architect sells for the extremely low price of $149.00. In fact, you can purchase AutoCAD LT 97 and Real Architect 3.0 for $509.00 from North American CAD Company's website at http://www.nacad.com.

North American CAD Company's list of features for Real Architect v. 3.0 include:

Produce full set of 2D/3D working drawings

Increase productivity with "on the fly" layer management

You define structural grid routines

Use intuitive frame wizards for walls, doors and windows

Place dimension-driven 2D/3D "self-cleaning" walls

Stack and move floors

Create plan and elevation roofs with rafters

"Click and place" 2D/3D blocks, including cabinets, appliances and site symbols

View massing studies

Add "real" architectural annotations with dialog interface

Breeze through our online tutorials

And much more

After receiving Real Architect the first thing I looked at was the manual/tutorial book (83 pages of tutorial and 91 pages of manual) which was well written and contained many excellent examples and illustrations. It took me an entire hour to read the manual and tutorial. After reading through the manual, I installed Real Architect according to the instructions. Everything went extremely well and within a few minutes I was up and running. The only problem with the install which I discovered a while later is that the file "2layer.scr" was installed in the "real\template" directory and it should have been installed in the programs root directory, "real".

The first two things found that I did not like about Real Architecture also pointed me to its best feature, which is how customizable Real Architect is. I have found that this customizability is it's most powerful feature and really fits in with the whole idea behind AutoCAD. My first dislike is that Real Architecture is intended for inexperienced cad person on a stand-alone system so the menu calls all blocks by path. This caused a problem for me since I like to store all blocks, symbols and files on a server. My second dislike is that all the blocks with attributes, dimension settings and text annotations were set up for 1/4"=1'-0" only scaling (which is the most common architectural scale). This caused a problem for me since I do primarily commercial buildings where 1/8"=1'-0" is common. Therefore, the first thing I began to look at was how this program worked. I discovered that the program is written in diesel strings contained in the menu file. And to my surprise, the menu files were not protected as th are in most AutoCAD 3^rd party programs. Since, the menus were not protected, which is a definite plus, that means anyone with a little knowledge of diesel can modify Real Architect to fit the way you work. I was also able to modify Real Architect to run under R14. Although it real wasn’t worth the 8 hours I spent getting the program calls to variables in the Windows 95 system registry to work it was a fun challenge. I submitted the menus I created for R14 to Real Architects programmer so you might be able to get R14 functionality in a later release.

After discovery how easy to program was to modify, I decided to modify Real Architect to work the way I like. First, I decided to make Real Architect network friendly. I opened the menu file and did a search and replace to remove references to directory paths (took about five minutes). Then I moved the block files to a directory on my server and specified the directories in the AutoCAD support path. Next I did a search and replace of all instances of block insertions for blocks that contained text and/or attributes and added a string that would insert blocks insertion scale based on the dimscale variable. I also, scaled down all the related Real Architecture blocks (this modification took a few hours) by a factor of 1/48th. I also had to modify the dimension style in the Real Architect drawing template file. When I was done I had Real Architect running across a network and had it set up to run at any drawing scale.

Since Real Architect is a menu based program the easiest way to explain its features are by each of it's three menus, Master, 3D Model and Utility.

Master Menu: The Master Menu (see Figure 1) contains the core functions to produce 2D working architectural drawings.

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Figure 1

The first item on the Master Menu pull-down is the Plan Menu (see Figure 2) which contains settings for level (which floor your working on), wall width, and level isolate (which turns off all layers except the layers associated to the level your working on. The Plan Menu also contains links to the Plan Windows and Plan Door insertion menus, which insert various parametrically sized styles of doors and windows. In addition, the Plan Menu also provides links to the other high quality 2D blocks for Bath Fixtures, Appliances, Electrical Symbols, Furniture, Trees and User Blocks (a nice thoughtful addition) and the other base menus for creating elevations and section views.

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Figure 2

The second item on the Master Menu pull-down is the Elevation Menu (see Figure 3). The Elevation Menu contains settings for wall height, header height, roof pitch and eave overhang. It also, contains links to elevation window, door and elevation fixture insertion menus, which insert parametrically sized blocks of each of the related items. In addition to the insertion menus, the Elevation Menu has routines for creating roof elevations, horizontal walls, wall hatching and ridge offsetting.

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Figure 3

The third and forth items on the Master Menu pull-down are respectively the Section Menu and Stair Menu. The Section Menu has all the necessary tools for creating sectional views including blocks for various sized timber sections. The Stair Menu contains routines for creating stairs in plan and elevation views. Although the stair routines work they are limited compared to the stair utilities found in higher priced architectural packages.

The fifth and sixth items on the Master Menu are the menus for inserting elevation cabinets and poche (see Figure 4). Poche is a fancy term for wall fills.

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Figure 4

The seventh item on the Master Menu is the Annotation Menu. The Annotation Menu contains many useful routines and utilities for architectural drafting including routines for manually inserting window and door tags, section tags, stair arrows, break lines, curved leaders (architects just love those curved leaders), and routines for calculating and inserting text for room areas. I would like to point out here that under the Utility Menu, there is a setting for labeling mode which depending on the mode set will allow for insertion of window and door tags at time of window and door creation. The Annotation Menu, also, contains links for text editing (ddedit) and tag editing (ddatte).

The rest of the Master Menu contains routines for zooming, panning, snap settings and layer control and at the bottom of the Master Menu is User Block which has routines for creating and inserting user defined blocks. I have found that it is much easier to create blocks and edit the Real Architect menus so that they are added to the area of the program that they relate to.

3D Model Menu: The 3D Model Menu (see Figure 5) contains the core functions to take 2D production drawings and convert them into a 3d model of your project. The 3D Model Menu contains routines for changing the floor level setting, extruding walls. It also, contains 3d block insertion menus for doors, windows, cabinets and appliances, and a utility for creating 3d counter tops. Finally, the 3D Model Menu has routines for setting views and UCS.

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Figure 5

Utility Menu: The Utility Menu (see Figure 6) contains all the functions to manipulate and polish your architectural drawing including routines for cleaning up wall intersections, rotating, moving, mirroring and changing elevations of door and windows. It also contains routines for creating structural grids and framing, inserting trees and borders, setting labeling mode, an overlay routine, drawing parking spaces, and more. Two of these items, labeling mode and overlay, require a little more explanation which follows.

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Figure 6

The labeling mode setting changes the way in which Real Architect handles labeling of doors and windows at time of insertion. There are four modes that can be set by the user. They are standard architectural text labeling with dialog interface, text labeling with automatic width, tag style with dialog interface, and no labels. If you select no you can insert labels manual by using the Annotation Menu.

The overlay routine runs a script routine for setting layer colors and linetypes. This is required since Real Architect creates layers only when you create an item that belongs on a particular layer. When Real Architect creates layers it does not assign color or linetype so AutoCAD uses the defaults of white and continuous respectively. This method has two advantages. First, by not setting the color and linetype the routine runs faster. Second, by putting all the color and linetype settings in a script file they are easily changed to colors and linetypes by the used by the user.

Conclusion: Real Architect is an amazing program for three reasons. The first is that it is a capable architectural plug-in for AutoCAD LT. Which I might remind you was designed on purpose by AutoDesk to not be capable of adding 3^rd party plug-ins. Second, is that it is available for only $149 dollars. And finally, because it is so user customizable, which higher priced competitors don’t allow because they protect all their code. In fact I have stopped using Eagle Points Advanced Architect Pro and switched to Real Architect since I can modify it to work the way I want to. My only complaints are that Real Architect could use a larger symbol library especially in the electrical area, the install program needs a network installation routine, insertions based on dimscale or another variable instead of the default 1" = 1’-0", and AutoCAD R14 compatibility. The R14 compatibility is needed so those firms running a mix of R14 and LT would be able to use Real Architect through out the firm. Overall, I highly recommend Real Architect to anyone wanting to significantly increase their productivity creating architectural 2d production drawings while saving a bunch of money.

The opinions and views of these reviews are that of the writer/reviewer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Professional AutoCAD Users Group, PAUG, and or its members.

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Revised: June 23, 2000.