ArchiCAD Intermediate Level Training

This software is important to know, because it's an architectural offering tool, that is designed by architects, for architects, which enables designers to focus on building the model that automatically generates your construction documents, while reducing errors and omissions. When you're done with this course, users will be able to create a detailed model using the most productive tools within the software, while maintaining flexible workflows that allow you to edit and make changes to your model throughout the different design phases. All the files that we'll be using here will be available to members on the course website.

Once you load the Office Library, you'll see that if you go back under the window pull down menu, and you go under Palettes, and you go from Palettes to your Library Loading report, this is what you should see: "Library Loading report, all library parts were loaded successfully." If you are missing that, you need to make sure that again, you have loaded into your project, the file "Library Manager", that you're loading the Archicad 21 library, the office library, as well as the Archicad Migration library folder. That can be found, if I remove that here, under Add. If we go to your Applications folder, and we go to Graphisoft, under Archicad 21, you will find the Archicad migration libraries.

This gives me the ability now to use these layers or work with a single layer in ARCHICAD as I'm referencing in a site plan. This one is clean. It gives me the opportunity to use this.

Again, I just hold down space bar, I click on the contour line, fit to use a ridge, click okay. We can speed up through this process and create points contouring the model. From here now, I have the ability to go in and start setting each of these elements to a point-height, referring to my contour.

Often if 593 is my lowest point that I'm working off of, or 593 is the point that I'm wanting to make sure of top of slab on grade, then I'll reference that point and make sure that I start that at zero and I'll use these tools here as I shift click my mesh and I go back while I'm on my mesh tool, if I space bar, if 593 is set to zero and I wanna go back down two feet, I space bar click on this contour line. And if this is going to be at 591, I would set that to negative two feet because it's so much easier for me to manage working off that zero and going up or down as opposed to trying to keep up with 593 six and three quarters. It gets to be very tedious and time consuming and I try to simplify the process as much as possible.

I will Shift + Click on my mesh, I'll get target element, then, I'll deselect my mesh, I'll select my slab here by shift clicking, always shift clicking, that's a much faster process than going over to arrow every time. I'll get my operator elements. So, now we're going to change the shape of the mesh with the slab.

If I zoom in here on brick coursing, you'll see that we have utility brick and standard brick. If I shift click on my brick, I'll see that this is an object, brick coursing. If I go into the object settings here from the info box, I will see that this is set to standard brick.

If I click ok, go back in here, Alt and click, that upper right hand corner, and I go back to my object settings, we'll see that that point of insertion is now the upper right hand corner; this is very important, and this is going to streamline your work flows, so what we're going to do right now, is a right click, millwork, shows a trace reference, we can see that in plan; understand that the plan views are the 3-D objects. How I created these 2-D views of the elevations, I go in, I Alt click, let me just drop this into place, let me Alt click here on this element, on the upper left hand corner; I want to make sure that I'm placing this by a rotated method, I always place with a rotated method, because it gives me a lot more control on how I want to place elements, we'll demonstrate that in just a moment. So I go to my rotated method, and let's go ahead and wait here for a moment, my guideline will appear, and I'll draw this, and you can see I can rotate that around, let's go back to my sync, Alt click; I'll rest here, the guideline will appear after a second, I'll put in my sync, I'll rotate it to the correct orientation, and let's pick up my corner cabinet, which place I want to place that by Alt clicking.

If we go to worksheets here, and I right click on worksheets I can create a new, independent worksheet. We can give this a reference ID. So we can define that by an ID so we can label these correctly.

I right click, shows a trace reference, when I do not see it, I can double click on my scroll wheel, double clicking on my scroll wheel, as a Fit in Window. I'll move here to my trace reference command. I can go back to drag reference.

If I'm referencing a specific detail, we can trace reference in this view and you'll see that we have our line types and we have objects, these happen to be line types. So, it's very easy to take this line type, Alt click on it, and then draw this back in, at the correct location here. Need to be using the correct geometry method and that will reflect that, we can even pick up that line type and inject that line type here as well, should we need to change the insulation out in the future.

In the model, Override Surfaces, we can set this wall up, even though it's using a building material that has a surface applied to it, as well as a fill, we can go back in here and we can override those settings and apply a surface to the outside. This is the reference line face of the wall. This is the center of the wall, the top and bottom and the edges.

For example: if I know I'm going to create a siding pattern at 7.5 inches, I would come here to Parallel six-inch horizontal; I can set this to New, and I'll set this up as Parallel, and we'll set this to Parallel, 7.5 inches. I can set that up; let me change that from a capital letter. We're going to duplicate this; we're going to create a new fill.

I type in V-E-R and it isolates down everything that has V-E-R in it, so I can now find vertical seven and a half inches, and when I click okay, what I want to make sure of here, let's look at this in 3D for just a moment. In 3D, I've overwritten the siding material, so it automatically reflects that. I don't have to go back into the settings.

So when you look at the image and it doesn't reflect how you want it to reflect, or it's not consistent, you can go back and you can search further here in ArchiCAD under the texture settings and you can look at all the different options that are embedded right into the ArchiCAD library. Out of the box. But remember, you can also go back to your browser.

If I click on priority again, it shows the highest to the least priority. And if I click on these elements here, for example airspace, it has zero on their intersection priority settings. If I go to metal iron, it's set to 900.

So right now the hardwood flooring training building material has a higher priority than gypsum board. Currently though, flooring wood is what we're applying to our composite. So I'll click okay.

Now, if I choose to change the way that this is being framed, we can very easily go back in and select the wall, select the floor system, and then go back in under Options, Building Materials, it will reflect by highlighting in green, what is being displayed and what's currently selected on your screen, so it makes it much easier if you select what you want to work with when it comes to building materials. Then go into your Building Materials settings, so you can see that. I can tell you, without going into the Composite settings, that wood light frame horizontal is what wood framing its showing for my floor systems.

Remember, if I go back into this composite, right-click, go to edit-selected composite, and then by clicking here on wood, light frame, roof, if I wanna create another surface here below, so we're creating another building material, not a surface, it's important to make sure that we understand, surfaces are linked to the building materials. I'll insert skin. So with this selected, I insert skin.

How we want this building material to reflect and floor plan and section and other 2D views is all defined in the building materials settings dialogue box. How we want this to reflect in 3D with the appropriate surfaces is all defined here in the building materials. You can control the line weights.

So this is a simple Complex Profile, that has your horizontal stretch showing these vertical lines. The horizontal stretch reflects in the vertical lines, whereas the vertical stretch feature is referenced here with the horizontal lines. Right now, if we change the height of this wall to be two feet taller, it will only stretch between our vertical stretch lines that have been set up.

So as I change that from a composite to a complex profile, I'll apply the profile that we just created, our typical wall metal stud with brick to that element. You can see here, based on the materials and how this was created, the metal stud has a higher priority than my wood floor system for my floor. Go ahead and grab the wall here.

This is a quick way to transition from a simple wall to a composite wall, and then capture those parameters and apply them into a complex profile in your profile manager. So this starts from here. We can store a profile, and as we store the profile we'll set this up as Wood stud ...

So I'm just going to mirror in place here, so I can go back into move and mirror, and since I drew counterclockwise, that's what I want to happen, and I wanna make sure right now that I go to the outside face of the wall. It's aligned with that x, and then I wanna come back in now and I wanna go the top of the footing. So this is exactly where I want this to go.

But if I go back and I look at that plan under my demo plans, how is that going to reflect right now what's being demoed, you'll see my main floor demo is showing new layers, it's showing more detail, it's showing more information under the construction documentation settings. And if I go back to live safety, these are filtered out views. Right now, life safety is very simple, it's not showing all the hatching that my demo plan was showing.

I see a lot of ArchiCad users out there when they go into their view settings and I see them look at their floor plan for example, and I go into their main floor plan level, I want to see that, I go look at the settings, I don't see a layer combination name here I see custom. If you're working with multiple people in your office and you see custom, what that typically tells me, is they've gone in and they've done this. They've taken a particular layer and they've said right click, on the section, go to layers, and hide layer.

Now if I want to take floor plan here for example, and I want to go back in, and I'll hit new. I'll set up key plan. As I set up key plan, I'll click okay.

Now we know we copied off, floor plans so the one thing I need to do is under the clone folder, is go back in here, under settings, I wanna make sure that my layers are correct, and when I do this correctly, key plans, my scale that was set up here, I'm gonna set this to one foot and 10, my pen set, I can set up a key plan pen set, for how I want my pen sets to display, my model view options for key plan, my graphic overrides for key plan, my renovation filters I'll keep them the same, my dimension types key plan, will set all of this up, and define that when I hit OK, here's all my key plan views. And I can do my main level, So key plan, my upper level key plan, and I could tell this again here do I wanna show foundations? Or I can set this up do not use with my clone folder.

I'll click here and if I just come back here and double-click, I can type in text but on this master sheet I want you to use as much auto-text as possible, not manual-text because that means that we'll have to go back in and update individual sheets. You want each sheet to automatically update for you reading from the master sheet using auto-text. One of the things we can do here, on the master sheet, is once I start to type in text, I can move up to the window to edit the text.

If I wanna go back in to the Architectural D sheet, we have the ability from here to drag and drop right here from one Master sheet and one project over to another project. That Project Chooser and the Organizer, remember, we went under Project Chooser, back in here, under Organizer. I came here to the top left-hand corner and I did a Browse for project.

If I want to apply that master sheet to a layout, all I have to do is scroll back up, click on the layout sheet that I want to apply that to, and then, at the bottom of the screen in the property settings, you will see that I have the access to all of my master sheets that I can change this to on the fly. Now, changing our schedules to reflect that and show the grid. I'll go back right now and change this back to 24 by 36 and whenever we make a change to the 24 by 36 inch sheet, that will reflect across all the sheets here as well.

Now here I've created a subset folder under Plans for reflective ceiling plans, for roof plans and you can see that's the 1.10 series, the 1.20 series and if we go back in and we add another layout for my roof demo plan you'll see that as that's set up it's going to create that as 1.22, due to the numbering structure here that falls in under the subset folders. Now in some cases we'll have one drawing on a sheet. In other cases here, like the Elevations, we can place multiple drawings on a single sheet.

I'll go to my section sheet right now, and from my section, I wanna make sure here, if I'm looking at my sheet, if I want to pull a section, or a plan, or a view, we always want to pull here from the view map. You never want to pull from the project map. I see users do this all the time, where they go in, to the view map, they have it set up, it looks the way they want it to look, and they take this and drag it, and drop it right onto a sheet.

I'll go to my view map, go under my details, set up the correct scale, inch and a half equals a foot, I'll go to inch and a half equals a foot and right click, save current view, we'll get rid of our bubble there, we'll call this our footing detail. The scale, the layers, all the other options here that we want to define. Remember, if we do go back in we create text, and we drop in text here.

We often run into issues with ArchiCAD when we export out to DWG of multiple lines, overlapping, fills and hatch, and too much information that our consultants have to clean up, so you want to make sure that when you're exporting out DWGs as backgrounds and as references that you keep these as clean as possible so you'll find in your template here that we have a DWG export option under the view map so we have our collaborations folder and under collaboration folder this is for our export, we have our DWG plan exports, we have our DWG RCP export, and then we have an IFC exports folder as well. Now from here, you will see that we've gone in and we've set this up to have a clean model view option, we've set this up to remove all the fills so it's showing the lines but it's removing fills and we have a custom layer combination that's set up for DWG export as well so that it's going to be clean and not export duplicated lines from the template that you're accessing and using through this training session. So that's helped streamline the process.

We want to make sure that when you're bringing this in, if we're going to export out layouts to DWG, that we're using Add to Shortcut and that this was not accidentally dragged from the left-hand side under the Layout Book into the Publisher Sets. We wanna make sure that's not the case because we know then, at that point, it's not going to automatically update for us in the Publisher Sets. Now, from here, you'll see this is where we can go back in, we can set everything up to export out as a DWG, but we do wanna make sure here, again, that when we're exporting out, we can set up our translators here.

So we'll go to our publishing sets here, we'll go back here to the bottom, we'll see the plus sign, we'll create a new publishing set, Schematic to PDF and from there, double-click just to look at it, it's empty. I'm going to pull just my layout book here. I'm going to add Shortcut, and then I'm going to go back to my publisher set, and from here we can look at the publishing properties.

Let's go in and let's set up a publishing set that we want to print to our Ricoh printer in the office. It can be 11 by 17. From here, what we want to do is we wanna go in, we wanna set up a new publishing set and we'll call this our Ricoh 11 by 17.

All right, let's talk about the Morph tool in Archicad 21. I'd like for you to begin by going to your block spectacles Archicad 21 template that we've set up for you. That's now available.

If I want to go back in and give this a radius, I can give this a radius, if I want to define a curve, you'll see I can start to create a curve and I can curve that plane now, that I want to adjust this, so we can start to adjust it there, and if we go back, and I go to the curve edge, I can move this, you can just hit E, I'm adjusting this now, it's going in the X plane here, so we're just starting to look at this, you'll see it's moving in that Y plane, and then if I go back in, I hit E, I can now start to adjust this now, which direction is it moving in, so we can tweak that, we can adjust that. Now I'm going in the Z plane, as we wanna change our planes here, so you can see how I want to adjust that or manipulate that, it's something we can do very easily. Now, one of the powerful tools with using the morph tool, in some cases, I just want to go into the morph tool and I want to draw a line to help me reference a space or a shape, and I want to work with the morph tool just creating lines, so if I need to reference an element or a point that I want to work off of, I can just come back in and draw in different directions and create lines that I can reference and use here in the software, so you can see, I've just created a simple line to segment this out, and as I do this now, what this allows me to do is, it can define points so I can rest on other elements and create these lines.

Back in my section I want to go in here and I want to create a profile element that I want to extrude along a plain, so I'm going to go to my Morph tool, we could draw with lines and we can do a space bar click using our Magic Wand Settings to fill that in. But I'm just going to draw this with my Morph tool here in this view, and as I create this profile, you'll see that I have the ability to edit along the plane to create curve edges. If I want to curve I can do so, if I want to come back in and create new points I can do so.

By taking those objects that came in, converted from an SKP file if I convert them to a morph and then I save them back as an object it reduces polygon counts and it streamlines the weight they show in reflect and plan. This element right now I converted this to a morph and once I converted this to a morph I can go back in and I can edit and I can change points and all the same commands apply that we had previously we can start to adjust and we can push and pull each segment, we can manipulate that. But once we've done that to clean this up now and simplify this, we can always go right back here under file, we can go back in here and we can save this as an object.

It's whatever plane that I want to go to, but I can start to manipulate that now, and determine which angle, what plane, how do I wanna set that up so I can always rotate that around and adjust that element from each view. So, as we start to set this up, now, maybe we wanna go back in here, looking at each point. Now, I would have set this up initially.

I'll hit F2 on my keyboard to go back into plan view, and from there, I can do a command T or right-click, go to my section selection settings. And from here, I want to go to drawing, and I'll click okay. We can turn that section to a drawing, which now will convert our elevation here, our section that we created, to 2D elements.

I'll hold down space bar and click, and I'll create my morph. I could've gone in with this simple shape, go back to a rectangular shape, and I can draw the shape here. And once I've drawn the morph now, let's give this a thickness.

The custom door leaf that we can start to choose in that list is now going to be set up to custom training leaf. And, as we look at our door now, that is going to reflect in our door showing all the same settings. So, what we've just created, now, by doing this, all the other settings and parameters apply.

If I change my ID here to wall hole, all one word wallhole doing it lower case, setting my ID to wallhole and when I click okay I want this to trace the shape of my window, by just space bar clicking it added a new slab there that's based on the thickness of the glass the thickness does not matter, the shape it's just applying what I had set up there in my slab settings so that when I look at this now. In 3D I will see one new slab that's overlaying this using the ID wallhole, this slab that we're using with the ID wallhole is defining the shape that we want this to open in the wall. So you will have to do this for any element that has a custom shape, top, left, right, bottom if there's a curve or a slope or a slant a cant or a bat you'll have to make sure that you use a slab with an ID using wallhole to give it that definition as you create this for a window or for a door.

And if i want to go back in here now, we can delete or we can change the element, so here that we've now extended out our wall hole size to encompass the entire boundary of the window let's make sure that we select our window here, only selecting our window let's go back to file, libraries and objects, save selection as, we'll save this as a window, save and continue. This is our final window that we want to use, it has the correct wall hole sizing, it has the frame, it has the additional details that we want to reflect and as we set that up now, that window will be available to us with the frame and the settings and the additional options that are set up here. And as we rest on the wall we can set that up, we can adjust this both inside and out.

And in Solibri I can hold down shift and pan at the same time, just like in ARCHICAD and I can orbit and you will see from here that the geometry is very clean on this import, if I go back here to my model, let's hold down shift and click, I'll select a couple of different elements here, if I wanna select multiple elements at a time I can hold down my command and click and select multiple elements here and I will go ahead right now and I can right click and I can hide or I can go back in and take each of these individual elements and control them in the settings, in the filter options, you can see I can start to hide the elements back here in the navigation pane within Solibri, but I want you to see back here as I hide my first floor end wall and my foundation you will see that geometry is now reflecting even my key and the other information that we set up here is now reflecting back in my model. So my stem wall, all these other elements that we were reflecting are showing up here. So as we hid those, we'll see a high level of granularity in the model, in the detail that's showing up here and all the complex profile details that were created in ARCHICAD export very well from ARCHICAD into Solibri using the correct IFC export process that we just used.

In this course, we learned how we can model more efficiently in ARCHICAD, while leveraging the models to automate the documentation process. It's important to know this, because this is the basis for all BIM workflows. Creating a clean model enables architects to better communicate their designs, while reducing errors and omissions in their construction documents.