When you set our hourly rate for 3D drafting against your own costs, you want to know exactly what goes into that hour. We only bill pure working hours. If someone goes to get coffee for five minutes, you will not see those minutes on the timesheet. That makes the bill traceable, because every hour stands for work on the model, the drawing or the revision round on the table.
We charge by the hour or per project at a fixed price, and we decide together with the client which option fits best.
For a clearly defined set of drawings, a fixed price is often more convenient. For a project that grows as it goes, such as a revision round on existing DWGs whose scope only becomes clear halfway through, an hourly basis works more smoothly. What ultimately brings costs down is not the figure per hour, but how many actions we can take out of the work. Below we explain how we build up the 3D drafting, what you get back and where the hours go.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Where the hours go in repetitive 3D drafting
Most of the 3D drafting that comes our way is not exciting, but it is extensive. A piping diagram in greenhouse construction consists of dozens of identical valves, couplings and brackets, each time in a different size. A drafter who redraws such a valve by hand in 90 and then in 110 loses only a few minutes each time, but across a whole project that adds up to days. That is exactly where the room in the hourly rate lies. At the start of an assignment, we first look at which part of the set repeats and which part is truly unique.
We simply draw the unique part. We build the repeating part properly once, after which it recurs everywhere without anyone having to model it again. In that kind of work, this approach saves at least seventy per cent of the time. For the client, that means fewer hours on the invoice for the same result, and your project lead notices it straight away in the budget. We also scale with the volume. If the drawing office hits a peak, our large, variable team scales with it and we deploy as many drafters as needed.
The team is already in place, so we do not have to look for anyone. High numbers of drawings are the rule rather than the exception for us, because for Firefly we have now completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings, almost always with a lot of repetition. That experience means we quickly see which actions in a set are unnecessary. What remains is drafting that genuinely needs attention, and that is where we spend the hours.
What we deliver within 3D drafting
Within 3D drafting, we build the model and derive the drawings from it. That starts with a 3D model in Revit, Rhino or Inventor, depending on what the client already uses. From that model we produce floor plans, sections, elevations, detail drawings and the associated overviews. We also deliver standalone 2D drafting in AutoCAD when a project still runs entirely on it. As-built drawings are a regular part of our work, as are revisions to sets that have been in use for years. From Firefly we received as-built material that had been printed incorrectly and was partly hand-drawn.
We sorted it out ourselves instead of calling the project lead every day, and still delivered a clean set. That is how we prefer to work: investigate first, then ask one targeted question. What you get back is a set that is immediately usable in the next stage, not a folder of loose files. We deliver in parts, collect feedback, process it and move on to the next part. That way your project lead can see along the way whether the direction is right, and nobody has to roll back an entire set at the end. We do not do engineering.
We do not make calculations and we do not give structural advice. Our trade is drafting and modelling, in high volume and with the precision that goes with it. That boundary also keeps the hourly rate fair, because you pay us for drafting hours, not for advice that already sits elsewhere. If you are unsure about the scope, we start with a small first assignment so that our team's speed and accuracy are immediately visible.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
Parametric Revit families bring the hourly cost down
A parametric Revit family is a smart component that adapts to a new situation or a different size. We build such a component once and then place it everywhere, without drawing it again. The material schedule updates along with it, so if the component changes size, the schedule changes automatically too. For the hourly rate for 3D drafting, that is the difference between paying for a hundred actions and paying for one. Many companies in greenhouse construction still work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not smart at building components such as valves in piping systems. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110 there, you redraw it by hand every time. With a good family it is placed in a single action, in the right size and with the right data attached.
We build families from scratch or clean up an existing set. Which is wiser depends on the state the set is in. If a family set is very messy and carries years of ad hoc changes, rebuilding is sometimes faster than repairing. We say so beforehand, because you gain nothing if we put hours into patching something that will fall over anyway. The same applies to templates. A template that is right saves time again in every subsequent project. This kind of work is an investment that pays for itself in the projects that follow, and that makes the conversation about hours much more concrete. At the start, we look together with your drafting team at which components lend themselves to a parametric set-up.
Software, versions and formats in our drafting
Our main packages are Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, alongside Inventor, Grasshopper and, to a limited extent, Dynamo and Vault. We always work with the latest versions and our own licences, in our own environment. There is no need to log into the client's environment, which saves many IT departments a lot of hassle. We deliver files in DXF, DWG, the Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format the next stage requires.
Fitting into an existing set is our starting point. We draft to the client's standard and drawing conventions, so with the layer structure, naming and title blocks already in use.
We receive those conventions from your drafting team at the start, and where they are missing we derive them from the existing drawings and present our choices. That is why we go through those choices with your drafting team at the outset. That keeps the set consistent, even when several of our drafters are temporarily working on it. For larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we work with software the client can log into to follow progress.
For standalone AutoCAD drafting we keep things simple and deliver by email. This way of working also affects the hours, because the better file exchange and the standard are organised, the less time leaks away into converting, fixing and figuring things out again. That is the dull side of cost control, and at the same time the side that delivers the most.
Frequently asked questions about the hourly rate for 3D drafting
Let us handle your 3D drafting
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.