January – June 2013

These are the archived coaching sessions from January through June 2013.

How to create a lightwell in a hip roof in AC15 and above; The slightly revised Dormers dialog box in ArchiCAD 16; How does a dormer show up in the plan view; Walls of different thicknesses that form the walls of a dormer roof are joined together vertically; 3d hotspot placement tool; ArchiCAD bim objects; The curtain wall tool for front-store facades; Does a hotspot work with gravity on a mesh; How to reset an origin of a material; How to make Zones update and how to calculate the volume of Zones; How to fix the link with a modular file when it's been moved around to two locations; best practice for controlling where saves occur when working with both pln and mod files

Renovation palette and the status of newly created objects; How to make barrels in ArchiCAD; 3D wall trimming to roof issues; Custom pensets; What is the best way to show chamfered edges at corners; Making a patch; Assigning different materials to each side of a morph created as part of an intricate roof (AC16); Problem with morph showing up fine in 3D; How to use the complex profile tool to create intricate wall details

Is there a command that converts text to polygons that can then be extruded for 3d signs?; Turning 3d text into linework and applying effects; Carving a sign using text and the slab tool; Rotating an entire project that contains a building of several stories; Using solid element operations on ArchiCAD objects; Problem with not being able to select objects with the arrow tool; Issue with building elements not connecting when the model is switched to core view only; How to create a timber-frame wall assembly (composite); If you are unsure what composite materials your walls are going to be made of, then you can insert a wall with a blank composite infill (made to the correct thickness) and go back and fill it in when you decide on the composite materials; General discussion about fills and the attribute manager; How to bring in and make best use of a detail dwg sheet showing various details of windows; How to make ceiling lines and elevation markers show up in red on a black and white pdf print out

Is there a way to set a priority selection in the pet pallet? and how to quickly move an element; How to make your homemade dimension set the default in your project (without it being reset when you change the view that you are in). And how to change the dimension precision; Project north in ArchiCAD 16; How to change the scale of door types in schedules; Wall dimension not updating properly. Eric explains what the round and square bullseye mean in the dimension tool, and the dimension settings; How to create decorative gable boards; How to make two separate intersecting fills join together to form one fill; How do you show door and window trims to match real casing profiles, so that it will display in the 3d model? Window in a stairwell between floors. How to get the window opening to subtract out of both floors; Issue with the level of accurency (project preferences) switching back to previous setting from what the user had set; How to use fills to colour/color an interior 2d elevation; How to take a jpeg image of a patterned tile, bring into ArchiCAD, and use it in a 3d view on a floor. And how to make the same jpeg image into an image fill, so it could also be used in the plan view; Issue with a vertical line showing at the junction of an elevation between two walls. The walls are in line with the same colours/colors

Is it possible to make the extension lines in a dimension run parallel to linework (at 30 degrees) in a 2d axonometric sketch?; How to make details that are not referenced to a particular view. The details also need to be numbered with scales and titles; Caller had mistakenly deleted some of his preformatted sheets in master template, and wanted to bring them back; Is ArchiCAD 16 worth buying or upgrading to; Questions on interior elevations; Caller wants to show a full elevation of a particular wall together with a section of an adjacent wall that contains the window; How to print a drawing showing the trace reference of a floor below; How to drag an entire building that has more than two stories; How to get zones to show up with the same colours/colors in 3d (in this case to match the colours/colors that show up in the plan view). Eric also shows how to change the zone’s colours/colors in the 2d plan view); Lightworks and matching with internal engine; Why would we use 3d documents as opposed to full renders for some presentations; How to align a texture to a given point or direction; How to change the direction of a fill, and how to distort a fill

The publisher tool; How to save a group of files for archival purposes when making publishing sets; How to update a publisher set; Why use manual update when you can leave it on auto update permanently; Updating with the drawing manager; Issue with a pdf that is being re-published failing to update; Dimension settings keep reverting back to original within the project preference dimensions box; Problem with ArchiCAD 12 crashing when publish command is used; How to calculate volumes of materials; Brief look at quantities in scheme settings and also discussion on lists; Do zones have volumes that will be useful for HVAC calculations

Problem with module file not showing up correctly when brought into a project; Is it possible to be able to group the module file together as one object; Is there a way to have different elements with different linetypes display on stories above and below? Library part created fancy architectural window not cutting into wall properly; Is there an efficient way to handle revisions and manage drawing transmittals? Eric explains what “fields” in sheet Index settings are. This question was based around the above question on revisions and perhaps they should be viewed together; Caller unable to add remarks in the schedule for library objects created using the morph tool; How to delete an object after it has been created and is no longer needed; If you trim an existing wall to a roof that is to be demolished using solid element operations, will it revert to its full height once the roof is turned off in planned status; Caller asks what would be the best tool to create a bow roof and a bow roof trim

Description of the uses and differences between – Details and Worksheets; How to create a detail of part of your completed building; How to change the scale of your detail; How to turn off the detail callout boundary box; Cleaning up a detail; Problem shooting when a detail isn’t showing; Putting details onto a grid layout and quick explanation about detail settings; Eric shows how using the trace reference can help when drawing details; Eric shows how the split command can enable you to break a line up into being part solid and part dashed; Cleaning up sections. Using solid element operations in a section view and changing the fills on certain elements to stop them merging together as one; Explanation on details and clone folders and how they work together; Drawing a double wall plate in a detail view using line and fills. And a look at ArchiCAD’s inbuilt 2d details library; Creating a bird’s mouth in ArchiCAD; What is the best way to use photographs as details; Detail management strategies

Problems with getting a roof to clean up properly with the walls beneath it, and how to make walls join together cleanly; Item blocking the view; Explanation of the pivot and contour line for the roof tool; A strange looking notch in a wall where it turns a corner (the wall had been trimmed to a roof); Is it possible to have more than one set of story levels for a project?How to draw hexagonal patterned linework quickly and easily. This was then used to create a fill type pattern; Is it possible to alter the model tile fill patterns for walls and floors? How to split up a wall for different decorations; How to draw hexagonal patterned linework quickly and easily. This was then used to create a fill type pattern; An angled wall meets a pair of walls at their 90 degree intersection and the caller can’t get this joint to clean up; Drawing a foundation complex profile to put in a project; Cleaning up some walls slabs and roofs in a section view; How to create doors with no head; Shortcut to make two currently unconnected independent roofs meet up and join at the ridge line; How would you take a door from ArchiCAD 6.5 and convert them to ArchiCAD 16

In the renovation palette how can one default all elements being created to new rather than existing; How to apply 20mm thick plaster on “L” shaped column as skin/fill; Caller wants to know if he can add element ID and control the parameter when he hovers over an element with the arrow and information pops up; How to adjust the infobox so that the items that are most important to you appear at the start of the infobox toolbar rather than at the end e.g. moving the ID from the back of the infobox to the front; How to change the units from cubic metres to squared metres in schedules scheme settings; How to make zone area show metres squared; Is it possible to have another type of label frame other than rectangular? How to create your own fill; The caller wanted to show a type of fill in a wall at a certain scale and a different fill in the wall when he changed the drawing to a different scale; In schedules is there a way to list demolishing of door openings with their area or volume? In the renovation palette what is the icon to the far right used for? (the caller describes it as looking like a series of files on top of each other); The objective addon; Using solid element operations in conjunction with the renovation palette

Special Coaching Call Topic – Schedules (entire coaching call devoted to this topic); Eric explains the differences between element and component schedules; Eric starts by making a basic window schedule; The scheme settings; How to show each of the same window type as a single entry or as a group in schedules; How to change your elements ID name or number (in the schedule and across your project) and how to change the ID’s position in the infobar; Adding in more text element parameters; How to put a schedule onto a sheet; How do you eliminate demolished (renovation palette) windows from the window schedule? How to show the front elevation drawing of a window or door separately below not within the schedule row; How to insert a header cell (for when you want to group things within a cell); How to change the schedule cell size (to a particular specific size that you require. This is a more precise way of changing the cell size than the manual button); Calculating and listing new areas for doors and windows with their demolition area/volume. And also the same procedure for existing openings. And how to override the renovation palette to change the colour/color of the lines and fills shown on the various status’s; Where to go to find out what the listing parameters actually mean; Finding the quantity of the core and various skins of composite walls in square meters and also some in cubic meters; Listing a skylight in a schedule; How to save a schedule as an excel file; Setting up a schedule (demonstration). A caller had sent in several different schedule types that he wanted Eric to replicate

Trouble-shooting titles on layout sheets; Issues with layers and getting the layers with line selections to stick; How to shorten the layer list; How to quickly unlock a layer and the quick layer palette; Strategy for when to have types of layers turned on-off; How to record the time you spend working on ArchiCAD; Issue with rendering when using an add-on from cadimage; Explanation on marked distance

Recording of the session of May 14, 2013

Recording of the session of May 23, 2013

Recording of the session of May 29, 2013

Recording of the session of June 13, 2013

Recording of the session of June 19, 2013

Recording of the session of June 25, 2013