Hi All, I’ve been searching tirelessly online, but cannot find a good solution for my workflow issue for interior design on residential projects. Hoping you have some insights. My problem is a combination of 3 things, all of which have individual answers, but none that work together:
1- Models being too heavy to work with when you start adding all of the finishing details
2- Having too many scenes when you’re doing every elevation of each room
3- Needing people to work on the same house at the same time, but on different rooms.
I have seen that Nick Sonders imports master models into separate drawing files to create scenes for only interior elevations, or only plans, etc, but no editing happens in those. So that solves the scenes issue, but not the heavy model or the multiple workers on the same project.
I saw someone say that you can make a single room a component and save it, and then work on that as a separate model. That works for multiple people working on the different rooms of the same project, but that poses all types of questions like do the walls become part of that component? Electrical, ceiling, floor? If not, then it is just for millwork and furnishings?
Is there any workflow that interior design or architecture offices use that meet this criteria?
1 - You need to structure your approach. Create a fast style & scene, switch off shadows and fancy rendering like jitter or such. Close Outliner unless you really need it. Hide (or switch the layer off) whatever you’re not needing to show in the particular scene when modeling. Model appropriate detail, no need in modeling fine detail you will not really notice in the end product. Together here goes layer management. See Layer Organizer and Layer Manager.
Depends on what you mean by “finishing details”. It is good practice to “fake” as much as possible. If a cupboard isn’t going to be used for manufacture it can simply be a facade, maybe textured without geometry if it has intricate doors, and in that case the finishing details would be in the image.
How many scenes is too many? I commonly use 20+ sometimes up to 50, with several which are temporary for quick referencing between work areas. Scenes don’t cost anything and keep me organised.
You can break up a complex design into separate drawings and work between files using copy / paste in place to move common elements between drawings. You just need to have a protocol to ensure which is the latest. Having good hierarchy in your Outliner is important.