We stopped playing dress-ups...

When I say nothing ever changes in this BIM game, I am exaggerating of course.

One practice I used to see a lot has almost disappeared on largish projects.

We called it the ‘dressing up’ game; views from loosely modelled buildings were isolated and decked out with hatches, dimensions, labels and notes. Depending on the tidiness of the host model, a cover fill was also employed to various extents. It concealed minor blemishes as well as not-so-minor ones.

Some-of-us used to go OTT with the ‘cover up’, performing extensive drafting exercises in 2D and relegating the model to an almost totally insignificant role within the documentation process.

The ‘two section syndrome’ typified these projects, where two or less graphically-beautifully presented sections were a good indication on the quality of the overall documentation.

This, ‘Putting lipstick on a pig’ practice has been abandoned by most largish design-practices I deal with, and is being replaced by a new tactic I code: ‘kill with sections’.

In this method the model is developed a bit further than before, so ‘reasonably’ looking sectional views are taken off and not a lot of makeup applied.

(Creative work with scales is often needed for it to work...).

I have been advocating for publishing a lot of sections of the model for a long time, so I should be pleased. I am not.