Tutorial 20: Perimeter Inventory Layout

Lay every panel in the project out as a tidy rectangle around the building — one row per side, each at its true size and numbered — so you can count and eyeball the whole set at a glance.

Tutorial 11 laid the panel set out with Attach Panels and stood it on the wall lines with Tilt-up Panels. Tutorial 12 tipped that set down flat into the casting yard, arranged for the pour. This lesson goes back to the first of those views and reads it closely: the perimeter inventory layout, the shop calls it the “dumb dump.” Attach Panels takes every panel the wall lines list and drops it into a clean, non-overlapping rectangle outside the building footprint — north panels in a row above, east panels in a column to the right, south below, west to the left — each panel at its real width and height with a P-NN mark on it. Nothing is optimized and nothing stands up; it is a visual bill of materials you can scan with your eye and count against the project list before any layout decision is made.

Note

This lesson is AutoCAD-only. ConstructiVision on the web has no equivalent today — the browser page for this lesson explains why, so you are not left hunting for a feature that is not there.

What you will build

From the Riverside Distribution Center site drawing as Tutorial 11: Attach Panels leaves it:

  • an inventory rectangle of every panel the wall lines list, laid flat around — and clear of — the building perimeter, each from its own panel drawing;

  • one straight row per side, filled in panel-number order around the perimeter, each panel on the side its wall faces (north row, then east column, south row, west column);

  • a P-NN mark centred on each panel so the set counts at a glance;

  • a layout that is idempotent — re-running it reproduces the same rectangle rather than stacking a second copy on the first.

Before you start

  • Complete Tutorial 11: Attach Panels — this lesson runs inside the riverside site drawing from Tutorial 10, with the set standing on its walls as Tutorial 11’s Tilt-up left it. It reads that drawing’s wall lines to find the building footprint. If the site has no wall lines yet, Attach stops and tells you so; nothing is guessed.

  • The layout needs the panels’ real dimensions. It reads each panel’s width and height from that panel’s own drawing — never a made-up default. If a panel’s size cannot be read, Attach names the panel and stops rather than invent a size, because a placed rectangle built on a guessed width is worse than no rectangle at all.

  • Riverside is a two-panel teaching project, so its rectangle is deliberately small — Panel 1 on the north edge, TP08-12 on the east. On a real building each side fills with dozens of panels; the behavior is identical, just longer rows.

Tip

Joining here? Download the Riverside site solution — the site as the attach lesson leaves it — and keep it in one folder with its panel xrefs TP08-012.dwg and TP08-001.dwg. The inventory layout reads the panel drawings from that folder, so it wants them alongside the site drawing — not opened from a downloads folder.

Lesson

Step 1 — Open the site drawing

  1. Open riverside site.dwg from the project folder — or click Site Plan on the toolbar and use Edit Existing Site Drawing to pick it from the project’s site drawings.

  2. Both panels stand on their walls, where Tutorial 11’s Tilt-up Panels left them. The building footprint the inventory rectangle wraps is measured from the wall lines, not from the grid — the grid extends past the building, the walls do not.

Step 2 — Clear the standing set

  1. Click Site Plan on the toolbar, then Detach Panels in Site Options.

  2. Every panel xref goes; the grid, wall lines and slab stay, and the wall lines still list the panels. Attach Panels will not lay a standing set flat — on a site whose panels stand it refuses rather than undo the construction — so this Detach comes first.

Step 3 — Lay out the perimeter inventory

  1. Click Site Plan, then Attach Panels. No question is asked: each panel’s width and height come from that panel’s own drawing.

  2. The command line reports its progress as [ATTACH] lines: the panel-name prefix, the building’s wall-line bounding box, the panel slots to fill, and finally attached N of M panels in rectangle-perimeter around bbox.

  3. Zoom extents. The two Riverside panels now lie flat in a rectangle outside the building — Panel 1 above the north wall, TP08-12 to the right of the east wall — each drawn at its real 25’-10” width, with its P-NN mark centred on it.

Note

This is a flat inventory, not a standing set. The panels lie in plan, clear of the building, so nothing overlaps the footprint or its neighbours. It is meant to be read and counted before anything stands.

Step 4 — Read the rectangle the way it is filled

The dump is not random — it walks the panels in number order around the building and puts each panel on the side its wall faces, one side at a time:

  • North row (top) fills left-to-right, then

  • East column (right) fills top-to-bottom, then

  • South row (bottom) fills right-to-left, then

  • West column (left) fills bottom-to-top.

Each side is one straight line of panels, centred on that edge of the building; the rectangle simply expands to fit however many panels a side carries. Every panel is turned into reading order for its side (north panels upright, the columns a quarter turn, the south row flipped), but its P-NN mark stays horizontal and sits on the panel’s true centre so you can read every number without craning. On Riverside you see only the start of the walk — one north panel, one east panel — but the same rule scales to a full perimeter of eighty-plus panels.

Step 5 — Confirm it is an inventory of the wall lines

The rectangle is built from the wall lines’ panel lists and the panel drawings:

  1. Every panel a wall line lists is attached as an external reference (xref) from its own <prefix>NNN.dwg panel drawing, at the size that drawing records. What you see is the current saved state of each panel drawing — a panel you revised in an earlier lesson shows its latest geometry here.

  2. Because they are xrefs, the inventory never goes stale: reopen the site drawing, or reload the xrefs, and any panel edit carries straight into its tile.

  3. The count on the command line (attached N of M) is your first takeoff number — how many of the listed panels actually have a drawing yet. A gap between N and M means a panel is still listed but undrawn.

Step 6 — Prove it is safe to repeat

  1. Click Site Plan → Attach Panels a second time. Watch the command line: it first sweeps its own previous panel tiles and P-NN marks, then lays the rectangle out again.

  2. The result is the same rectangle, not a doubled one. Attach never stacks a second copy. The one time it refuses is on a standing set — after a Tilt-up, Detach Panels first, as you did in Step 2.

Check your result

Tip

There is no CV-CHECK-LESSON20 command — check the outcomes by eye against the list below.

You should now be able to verify all of the following:

  • Detach Panels then Attach Panels in the Riverside site drawing produces a flat rectangle of panel tiles outside the building — Panel 1 above the north wall, TP08-12 right of the east wall — each at its real 25’-10” width, none overlapping the footprint or each other.

  • Each panel carries a P-NN mark on its centre, and the mark reads horizontally regardless of how the panel is turned for its side.

  • The command line ends with attached 2 of 2 panels (Riverside has two drawn panels), and the count is your at-a-glance takeoff of what exists.

  • Re-running Attach Panels lays out the same rectangle — its previous tiles and marks are swept first, so nothing stacks up. On a standing set it refuses; Detach Panels first.

  • The site drawing’s own etched panel numbers and dimensions are still there — the inventory hides only the panel tiles’ internal layers, never the site drawing’s own annotations.

If Attach stops with a message about missing wall lines or a panel whose size cannot be read, that is it refusing to guess — define the wall lines (Tutorial 10, Step 4), or open that panel’s drawing and save it with its Main Panel dimensions, then run it again.

Where next

  • The other two views of the same panels: Tutorial 11: Attach Panels stands the set up on its wall lines with Tilt-up Panels, and Tutorial 12: Construction Layout tips it flat into the casting (pour) arrangement. The perimeter inventory here is the plain count that sits beside both.

  • Reference depth: Lay out the site is the full field guide to the site toolset — the site buttons, the wall-line and slab dialogs, and the layer families this layout respects.

  • Turn the count into totals: Generate a materials list totals the quantities the inventory represents, and Print a panel book batches every panel drawing into a printed book.

Watch the lesson

The recording picks up the Riverside site drawing as Tutorial 11 left it, with both panels standing on their walls, then works this lesson end to end with Site Options buttons only: Detach Panels, Attach Panels laying the perimeter inventory (Panel 1 above the north wall, TP08-12 to the right of the east wall), and a second Attach Panels that lays out the same rectangle again. Nothing is pre-built: each step runs on the drawing the previous tutorial produced.