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Broke my rule about digital vs paper drafting this month
Always said I'd never use CAD for rough concept sketches. Spent 12 years doing all my early work on gridded vellum with a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. Last Tuesday I had a client in Phoenix who needed three revision sets in two days. Finally caved and tried laying out the initial floor plan straight in AutoCAD. Honestly the parametric constraints saved me about 4 hours of redrawing. Does anyone else find that switching tools for different stages of a job actually helps more than sticking to one method?
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daniel_walker17d ago
Totally get that 12 year rule, I had the same hard line about hand drafting for years. What finally clicked for me was keeping the pencil for the first 10% of thinking, then jumping to CAD once the big moves are locked in. It's less about betraying your process and more about letting the tool handle the grunt work when the deadline is breathing down your neck.
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keith_rodriguez17d ago
10% is probably too little hand time to really figure out the hard stuff. I found that pushing it to about 30% made a huge difference in how clean the final model turned out. Nothing wrong with hopping into CAD, but short changing the sketch phase usually means more fixes later.
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