T i m wrote in message . ..
Hi All,

My Brother in law is looking for a PC based package for assisting with
plans / drawings for his lab refits and general building work.

Any *good* packages come to mind (he's willing to spend some money on
a decent PC and package for this), maybe something that would provide
a modular breakdown to provide pricing (benches / services etc).

3D view would be nice (to give customers a better feeling for the
final look).

If he finds something, maybe I can get the Roland pen plotter out of
my garage .. ;-)

All the best ..

T i m

I use Sketchup from www.sketchup.com for conceptual 3d design and
customer presentations. This is very easy to use and really quick -
look at some of the work in the gallery or forum.

For main CAD work I now use Revit from Autodesk. This is a parametric
design program, which means you don't draw things as lines to make up
the drawing, but you draw using representations of walls, doors,
windows etc to make up a model. The items have attributes which let
you pull off a full material schedule, and you can add costings etc.
Its not cheap, but the time and labour savings over normal CAD are
incredible.

dg