Rhino for 2D drawing production

[glass99]

Does anyone use Rhino to make actual formal 2D drawings in place of ACAD? I am just looking at optimizing my software cost, and Rhino seems to do everything ACAD can do and more. We basically never use Revit, but we use Rhino all the time for 3d studies and details. In the olden days Rhino was not good for drawing production because line weights and section marks etc were not as good, though release 7 seems much better. ACAD has not evolved basically at all since 1985.

 

[structuralCADspecialist]

2d documentation in Rhino isn't great, but depending on what you're doing, it might work or it might not - you may be able to completely side-step all of it's flaws. You'll have to experiment with it. Unfortunately, not a lot of structural designers use Rhino so you'd be what I call a "workflow pioneer". In short, you can absolutely create 2d drawings (plans, sections, details) in Rhino. Few people do it however.

There is an architectural add-in (you might already know about) called VisualARQ. It's good, especially for section cuts, but not intuitive. There are also a lot of options and settings that don't actually do anything; I found that to be frustrating when I first got going. I can say for certain that someone could build a good set of structural standards using Rhino and VisualARQ, but as of yet nobody has done so.

VisualARQ provides the opportunity to cut "live" sections. They are equally as versatile as Revit's but require a far different workflow. For my purposes I prefer them to Revit's. That will kind of be the theme: For every task you perform you'll need to find your own way of doing it. There isn't a lot of good learning references online for VisualARQ.

I'm using Rhino to do 3D construction modelling. Anything I annotate is usually exported to CAD. Due to this I haven't fully-explored the annotation capabilities of the program, and therefore cannot give a detailed synopsis of the pro's and con's.