News - Visualisation and Precision Workshop

Sigrid Rasdal Eliassen, Brian Klejn-Christensen & Richard C. Anderson

Author: Bjørn Lovén

This week the Zea Harbour Project (ZHP) has a workshop on how to export digitally surveyed (CAD) plans and sections so they will remain ‘true-to-scale’ as Adobe Illustrator CS (V.12) drawings. Illustrator has become the standard for digital submission of “artwork” for publication and it probably is a better medium than CAD for the preparation of 2D book or poster illustrations. Many problems present themselves during this exportation work and in order to have no quality loss, skills are required in both CAD and Illustrator.

Previously, it seemed to have been necessary to print a satisfactory CAD drawing then scan it, a process the inevitably caused a loss in quality and sacrificed other information such as layers that might still be useful in the “artwork”.

Turning from recording methods to recording media, traditionally, serious problems have occurred due to the instability of fibre-based drafting materials which become distorted mainly by variations in humidity. As Richard C. Anderson has stressed, a true-to-scale paper drawing must include a scaled grid, so that the scale can be controlled.

Drawings often become distorted when reproduced in publications, and here again a grid is essential to allow reasonably trustworthy measurements to be scaled from plans. The Zea Harbour Project Area 1 plan is now locked into the Greek National Grid (E.Γ.Σ.A. 87) and this grid can now be included on Zea Harbour Project drawings.

The digital plans in question are surveyed with the Leica TCR407 Total Station using the Nigel Fradgley survey system designed for MicroStation. These plans have a very high order of precision, and in the interests of taking a more accurate and scientific approach to a wider public, we believe that it is now feasible to publish architectural plans as CAD files, either in a parallel publication on the Internet or in a data storage device presented in addition to paper publications.

The workshop will both solve some problems and help us discover others in the next few days.

Participants
Sigrid Rasdal Eliassen, Architect to the ZHP
Richard C. Anderson, Architect to the Agora Excavations, architect consultant to the ZHP
Brian Klejn-Christensen, computer graphic designer ZHP
Bjørn Lovén, co-director of the ZHP