Good point. Watching this space. Have you read his book? I have it but I am not needing to study it to that extent (ATM) myself.
There’s no magic! Remember printed quality is entirely different from working on a screen where you are zoomed in to a level that is unrealistic in the field.
My biggest set in the past year was 129 sheets. The pdf is 93 mb.
Come to basecamp next year!
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Certainly, paper is different than screen, and you never need to examine anything at 400%. I see that my latest output (6 pages, 36x48, 18MB) does indeed have a lot more DPI than needed. But still, I’m struggling with this. But I will keep tinkering.
How about Basecamp in NYC? 
Actually, that’s not a bad idea if Trimble wants to be taken more seriously as an Autodesk competitor for big projects…
Oh, yeah! I could take a commuter line train to that.
Short term basecamp is in a year. Even if they go NYC (which would be very pricey), that would be 2024.
All the biggest Autodesk conferences aren’t in NYC, there in Vegas baby!
As for cabinets, are you saying the contractor is not getting shops done? That’s really odd. Back when I was doing large PW projects we always got cabinet shops with field verification.
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Would be very affordable for me! Yes, often no shops. Ikea cabinets being an inevitable example. But anything purchased to module.
Might see you there Nick, maybe you’ll have some updates for the construction details by then ;).
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I completely agree with Nick on the realistic zoom part. I know a number of designers who are deterred from using raster viewports because they think it’s pixelated, if you’ve got your drawings to the right scale, which you always should, it is basically never pixelated, or enough to really notice anything, raster looks awesome with basically no pixelation that one can detect from my point of view. I used to think this was a problem but only once I realized that nobody is going to read a set of plan labels at any time at over 100% zoom. The plan should be completely readable from 100% standard size, therefore raster works great. It’s an unrealistic mindset I used to have, but not big deal now, now I can use fog etc.
The biggest thing I’ve learned this year is that since I paint textures onto my models where the textures are from different sources on the web and therefor me in most of my projects, texture size is the biggest contributor by far to large file sizes. If you model fairly cleanly but use textures from different sources, there is a really good chance you have a lot of textures that are over 1080 resolution and they are making a MASSIVE differeence on your sketchup file size. In my case, most of my single family homes at roughly 3000 sq ft were about 80 mb in size. I thought that was good. I than saw one of sonders sketchup house models at a simliar sq ft and the file size was like 12 mb, I was totally blown away. After investigating why I quickly learned I had a ton of textures that were way too big in resolution, uncessarrily big. I use the sketchup material resizer plugin made by sketchup now and my average house models are around the 20mb mark. That is significant for me working efficiently in sketchup and especially layout rendering.
Construction crews are now using iPads to read pdfs… so they can zoom in to see the drawings warts and all. But probably not a big concern. More of a concern is the software allows them to “scale” dimensions off the drawing instead of relying on given dimensions–or requesting information. Often drawings simply may not have the dimension they are looking for, and it may not be accurate in the drawing, because it is dependent on products or conditions in field, requiring it to be worked out (or someone missed putting the dimension on the plans!).
I’ve typically used Hybrid output. It does create large pdf files, but in general LayOut makes way larger pdf files than any other program I use. I’ve never considered how the scale of the drawing affects the appearance (size of pixelation). hmmm
It is common among CAD/BIM applications to create large PDF files, possibly due to a third party conversion library they use. I have noticed that the “save optimized” or equivalent function in a PDF editor application can often shave away up to 90% of the file size of PDF exports from LayOut, Archicad or AutoCad with no apparent effect on the quality.
I don’t think it does. Of course, a texture shown at a large scale might start displaying its pixels. The overall pixel density of LayOut output is determined by the Output Quality setting in Document Setup/Paper. Low=72/96 DPI, Medium=150 DPI, High=300 DPI
I’ve been seeing that using Acrobat Pro with assembled sets and then using the File>Compress PDF function. For raster heavy files, the compression amount is huge and I have a hard time telling the difference just looking at them.
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In my old Acrobat Pro version 9 (came with suite CS5) it is in Document>Reduce File Size.
Another more drastic trick that often helps with CAD-originating PDF-s that refuse to print and take a lot of time to open is to export pages as images and to recreate the PDF from them.
Often drawings simply may not have the dimension they are looking for, and it may not be accurate in the drawing, because it is dependent on products or conditions in field, requiring it to be worked out (or someone missed putting the dimension on the plans!).
In my experience, any designer good enough at what he or she is doing will rarely miss a measurement that is important. When you use the word often, it sounds like multiple measurments are missing from drawings often, this is rarely ever the case with good designers. None the less though, still a decent point to be made.
Tying in my texture comments from above to reply to you @Anssi , basically textures that are a resolution of minimum 1080, when zoomed in to a realistic degree, it’s extremely hard to tell the diffference at 100% zoom from a texture with roughly 1080 resolution vs. one at 4k, even increasing the texture size to say 1420 or something like that would let you zoom in quite a bit and still have a very tough time noticing the issue. I just think personally that although I used to think these are issues, I just personally don’t think they are realistic. I can see however if someone is trying to take a measurement from a point and they have to zoom in a lot to touch the point, I can see that as an issue, but still, even then… Idk, raster has been great for me since I let go of some of these unrealistic ideas that pbacot is mentioning…
I am confident I can easily solve all of the problems you’re talking about here, and solve them elegantly. I’d be happy to do a screen share.
I only use an iPad in the field. I haven’t printed plans in years. The pixelation is a non issue. It’s there like anything if you zoom in too far. In the printed sets, it’s difficult to notice unless you are nose down.
You misunderstand me. It’s should not be often that a dimension is missing, but not everything on a drawing will have dimensions. That is if they aren’t given, they should not be given for a reason.
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Not in my experience really. But I appreciate the ideas about working with pdf file size etc…