Architectural building plan

[judy rj29992565]

I need to design a club building in the USA well enough to show options.  The plan will print on letter size, but I will present it from laptop onto big-screen tv for the members, so I can show it with different layers of terrain from Google maps.  Need setup instructions so that I have usable scale and so forth; the videos I've found online so far are metric, and we would need feet and inches or the members won't understand.  Further, my plan is to use pre-built commercial buildings, 2 of them to be hauled in (maybe 12'x40' each), then a pole building connecting them to be built later with a roof spanning all three, supported by arched trusses, and the floor by flat trusses, and the whole of about 40' square made weathertight.  A few years ago I did well in an Adobe Illustrator class, but don't have time to completely retrain myself; can fake it if I can get the setup right to start off with (probably... or, I can ask you some more?).  If they like the scheme, we'll take my plan to the portable-building professionals to do up right.  I mainly need to get the proportions correct -- how many tables will fit in the dining area, etc.  And I'd like to do elevations for the persuasive pitch.

[Monika Gause]

You just need to apply the metric methods to your feet units.

The methods are the same.

[judy rj29992565]

Thanks, but you give me too much credit.  I need to make 3 or 4 choices in a couple of setup windows, and so far I'm defeated.  BTW, I sent a cell-phone image in an email reply, showing my extremely crude concept sketch.  Hasn't shown up here yet.  Maybe I can get it through iCloud...  Hasn't shown up on iCloud yet.  Maybe my email post sent it; we'll see.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Please log in to the forum's web interface and then embed your sketch in a post.

You do not want to display a scale in the drawing right? You want absolute measurements? Then the scale factor is irrelevant. Just draw the thing, put your measurements into it and print it at the desired size.

[judy rj29992565]

I'm back at my laptop now, and logged in, it says, to the Adobe Community.  I think I just sent the image, and it will show up soon in another post.

It's ok to have a scale in the drawing.  I think (floundering, here).  The reason I wanted to get the settings precise was so that when I import images of furniture forms I can see that they are resized to the proper proportion.  The club is very demanding about how many tables, how close.

[Kurt Gold]

Great plan.

Can you show what you created so far? And can you clarify what exactly you want to know in order to hone your creation?

[judy rj29992565]

So fast, the replies; many thanks.  I would like to set the scale, et. al so that the 40' x 40' building can be drawn for letter-size printout at a scale that would fit the bldg onto about 1/2 of the artboard, and leave room for comments and dimension indicators.  And when I do a rectangle or resize it, the object measurements must show in feet and inches.  I have to set the grid some way too, I guess.  I have an extremely crude pencil sketch; shall I send that?  Truly amazing how, when you set out on your own and not following the provided files, it becomes so difficult (I got an A, back when).

[judy rj29992565]

 My handwriting is so bad because I had polio as a child, and my fine motor neurons are failing ever more as I get old.  Heh.  I found out that no amount of practice would better my precision touch in recent years, and when I was mistakenly entered into the regular art class instead of the computer art, it really showed up.  

[judy rj29992565]

OK, here is Ver 1 of the Overview, in an Illustrator file.  If I can get it transmogrified to achieve a scale setting I can use, I'll put in furniture.  We absolutely need that to visualize how big a crowd can fit for events.  Even better, if they even consider using the plan, would be to make a 3D rendering, with color and so forth, but I'm not willing to put in that much work if it's a non-starter.  Meanwhile, I've exported a copy of what I've got so far to jpeg, to send to the rebuild committee.  I know they're going to ask how many tables will fit.

[Bobby Henderson]

Do you have anything like a site plan where the club house would be built? I assume this is going to be something added to an existing property, correct? A site plan would take out a lot of the numerical guess work.

Google Earth has a measuring tool that's reasonably good (and it lists measurements in any unit needed). Those measurements will allow terrain screen shots to be set at an accurate scale. If the property where the club house would be built isn't very large then using screen shots from Google Maps/Earth might be good enough. The overhead imagery from Google Earth and Google Maps isn't perfectly flat, which becomes a problem when trying to stitch together multiple screen shot images for larger/higher resolution terrain images. Bing Maps works better for that. Its imagery is more flat. Plus it's possible to remove graphical lines and labels and just get terrain-only screen shots. The downside with using Bing Maps is the overhead imagery may be older.

I wouldn't recommend drawing the original building plans on a letter size piece of paper. The scale might be really tiny, making it easy to get errors in small details. Illustrator's maximum art board size isn't very big. It's 227" X 227" normally and 2275" X 2275" in large canvas mode. Big things might have to be designed in scales like 1" = 1'. I design signs in my day job; I usually make the original design at full size if possible. Client sketches are just a copy with the art reduced to whatever scale is needed to fit on letter or legal size paper.

[judy rj29992565]

The club is part of a 700 acre RV membership complex, leased from a Native American tribe.  They're anxious to control the forest environment, and there aren't many spaces large enough that aren't too close to the lake or other watershed.  The former building site cannot be reused, and in the next few weeks we'll find out where the Tribal Environmental official rules that we might rebuild.  That's why I started with minimal dimensions and indicated possible expansion.

I have some Google images with scale indicated, that I plan to put into layers in the Illustrator plan and toggle so the Steering Committee can see during the presentation how the building would fit (some sites are being fiercely defended by other clubs from encroachment).

If all goes well and the Steering Committee likes my proposal, it will be turned over to a real architect anyway.  I want to be able to print out onto Letter size only because that's all the bigger printer we have, for making interim copies.  The Illustrator file artboards can be anything -- I just want the ability to get proper proportions for the furniture, some how, some way.  If somebody can tell me the exact setup to use on my file, I would be very grateful.

I see that in another post in this community I attached the jpeg version meant for the Steering Committee.  Here is the Illustrator file.  Oops, forgot to post this when I finished earlier this afternoon. ... No, needed to revise the file title, so trying to post again.  Huh.  Keep getting error message:  "Correct the highlighted errors and try again" about file extension.  ...But that's what I just saved inside the updated Illustrator software.  Guess I'll put the jpeg version in this post after all.

Thank you for your help.  

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm not sure how you can design much of anything specific if you have to wait and see where a tribal government will allow you to build the club house. The property location, lot dimensions, access to utilities, etc are all important details. It sounds like they're making you put the cart ahead of the horse.

[judy rj29992565]

Well, the campground has wiring and water along the roads to all the camping sites, and septic with drainfield at each -- we can hook the new building up and put in the septic wherever the Tribal Environmental Official approves.  It's a matter of finding such a site that's large enough, which is why I designed to minimum size with indication of how it could be expanded if appropriate.  We can't use the storage lots because they are just fill, not very well compacted.  The portable buildings have to come through forest roads and so can't be too big.

The problem all along has been that nobody would generate plans, which I have now done, and maybe if they don't like that it will stimulate some other.  I, of course, would be delighted if mine were accepted.

[Monika Gause]

Illustrator does not have such a thing as a scale built in. Just set up a Large Format document or maybe you do not even need that and then you have to pretend like you are working in scale, like one tenth of the actual size or whatever. 

And when you print it out, just make it fit on paper. And maybe you could link to the videos you mentioned above, since I still do not really understand your problem.

[judy rj29992565]

OK, thanks.  So I just don't mention the scale on the title box; that'll work.  If I just go by the resize-indicators on the select arrow, I can tell well enough how big the furniture is -- I had been coming to this conclusion anyway.  When you know you don't know about something complicated, it's easy to go off in the wrong direction.

The jpeg version I sent to somebody on the committee who had worked with similar structures in Alaska, and he just called to say my scheme looked perfectly feasible.  So now I'll send it to the Steering Committe with his approval, and maybe it won't be rejected out of hand. 

I'm going to try again to attach here the ai file version in case somebody has suggestions.  Maybe this page will work now it's been refreshed; I've updated the Illustrator software, so that shouldn't be a problem.  Nope, still won't work.