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set /room layout programmes


Julian b

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Can anyone recommend a good room layout programme - I run a Circus theatre company and we perform at all sorts of events indoors, outdoors, arenas etc. I use sketchup for set design or employ someone else to help when I need something more complex. I'm looking for something to do basic room layouts to show a plan view of stage, audience , truss.

 

needs to be able to save it in a format I can share with others easily as I usually work with a bigger team with people from different companies.

 

 

Thanks

 

Julian

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Autocad or an autocad-like program (Draftsight) would be the industry standard for this sort of thing (or Vectorworks). This will save to dwg which is what most production companies will want to work with. Bit of a learning curve from Sketchup if you've not used a cad package before though.
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I continue to like Visio. Sure, these days its more used in the same breath as powerpoint, but it is (and always has been) dimensionally capable, which is the single most necessary attribute of something used for layouts. It can export to DXF, and indeed to DWG, but DWGs are a minefield of version incompatibilities. And its Microsoft, so very acceptable in the corporate space.
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Vivien was developed for room layout applications- I've only played with the demo briefly and that was about 5 years ago now, when it was relatively still in it's infancy- I've no idea what it's like nowadays, but I managed to produce the visualizations on the left hand side of this page:

 

http://www.irwdesign.com/br/IRWDesignGarrickStudioJPG.jpg

 

Since then however, I've generally managed to persuade AutoCAD to do much the same thing if the situation has arisen. (If you use AutoCAD, and don't know about the 'Array' function, your're missing out!)

 

Ian

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Somtimes I need to do purely 2d layouts - Sketchup so want something quicker to do those jobs. J

 

 

What do you find wrong with Sketchup? That's what I use as well, I find it's becoming more and more common.

 

 

 

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If you are at all handy with Adobe Illustrator, the Hotdoor CADTools plugin makes 2D scale drawing a joy, as you have access to all the graphic design tools and text controls, along with accurate measurements and dimensioning. One of my favourite features is to be working in metric, but occasionally entering values in feet and inches rather than jumping about to make conversions. With a bit of cleaning up you can usually drop AutoCad drawings and objects into it, and Illustrator is the best way of 'recycling' objects out of a pdf file.
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