Introduction
Dynamic Construction Documents
Higharc Live Plans is a powerful feature set within Higharc Studio designed to fundamentally change how you create and manage construction documentation. Moving beyond traditional, static CAD drawings, Live Plans offers a live-updated, data-driven system that dynamically pulls from your home models and keeps your documentation synchronized, saving time, reducing errors, and enabling unprecedented flexibility.
Live Plans addresses these challenges head-on by introducing a templated, data-driven approach to construction documentation. Instead of static drawings, Live Plans creates "living" documents that are directly linked to your Higharc building model. This means that any modification to the model – whether it's a change in wall dimensions, window sizes, or the addition of a new option – automatically propagates through to your Live Plans drawing set. No more tedious manual updates across multiple files!
Key Live Plans Capabilities
Dynamic Updates: Changes in the Higharc building model instantly reflect in your Live Plans documentation, ensuring accuracy and consistency across your entire drawing set.
Templated Approach: Live Plans utilizes a system of templates – Plan Set Templates, Sheet Templates, View Templates, and Drawing Templates – to establish standardized layouts, styles, and content. This templated approach promotes consistency and efficiency, allowing you to create drawing sets quickly and reliably.
Master Plan & Lot-Specific Documentation: Live Plans is equally adept at generating master plan sets for entire communities or lot-specific drawings tailored to individual homesites. This versatility makes it suitable for a wide range of residential construction projects.
Option Management: Easily manage and document design variations and option selections within a single Higharc file. Live Plans allows you to create option-driven drawing sets, ensuring that the documentation accurately reflects the specific features and choices for each project or lot.
Centralized Standards: Enforce drawing standards across all your projects. Live Plans allows you to define and maintain centralized drawing standards for dimension styles, annotation conventions, and visual representations, ensuring a consistent brand and professional quality across all your documentation.
Efficient Regional Deployment: Adapt your construction documents to meet specific regional codes, materials, or construction practices without duplicating entire drawing sets. Live Plans' parametrization capabilities allow for efficient regional customization.
Automated Schedules and Data Tables: Generate dynamic schedules and data tables directly from your building model. Window schedules, door schedules, material takeoffs, and area summaries are just a few examples of the data-driven content you can automatically include in your Live Plans documentation.
Live Plans Fundamentals
Live Plans is built upon three fundamental concepts that work in harmony to deliver its dynamic documentation capabilities:
Layouts: This pillar focuses on the structure and organization of your drawing sets. It encompasses Plan Set Templates, Sheet Templates, and View Templates, defining how your drawings are arranged and presented on sheets.
Content: This pillar is about the information displayed in your drawings. It includes Drawing Templates for title blocks and standard details, and Data Tables for schedules and data-driven information extracted from the model.
Parameters: This pillar unlocks the dynamic power of Live Plans. It utilizes Parameters and View Overrides to control how content is displayed and how drawings adapt to different options, regions, or project requirements.
Why Use Live Plans?
Significant Time Savings: Automate drawing updates, reduce manual revisions, and streamline the documentation process.
Reduced Errors: Eliminate inconsistencies and errors caused by manual updates, ensuring accurate construction documents.
Increased Efficiency: Generate drawing sets faster, manage design variations effortlessly, and deploy documentation across projects with ease.
Improved Consistency: Enforce drawing standards and maintain a consistent visual style across all your construction documents.
Enhanced Collaboration: Work with a single, dynamic source of truth for your building design and documentation, improving team communication and coordination.