July – December 2014
ArchiCAD Training – Coaching Call – October 15, 2014

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 ArchiCAD Training Session Notes

ArchiCAD Training – Coaching Call – October 15, 2014

QUESTION ANSWER SUMMARY AND NOTES START TIME
Cleaning up windows and walls using SEO. Material priorities. Window sills and their side extensions. Begin by creating a new wall and window with the same settings by using the eyedropper. If they display properly but your originals do not then look at the originals to see what is different. Select the wall with the window and look for the icon that shows connection. Using the icon you can undo the connections as needed. Also look at the settings for the wall. You can also drag the wall away from the other walls to look at it alone and see if that will identify a problem. This is a good practice for trouble shooting in AC. If your element will not clean up for some reason you can just use the copy or make a copy that does function properly and replace the incorrect one. 0:09:00
How to get the wall to run up to the shingle or slate roof and hide the rafter? Temporarily change the roof setting to show on all stories for viewing purpose to make your edit. Edit the roof to snap to the wall. It should then clean up and only show the shingle top. If you want your slate roof to stick out a bit you could create two roofs, one is the structural element and the other is the slate that extends out to create the eves. Or you could create another piece of roof that would extend and possibly cut out a piece of the roof. 0:29:30
Using the roof wizard and problems with rafters. The roof wizard is activated in the plan view. If you want your roof to be visible in plan view and not have it affected by the cutting plane you can change its settings to “outlines only” or you can change the cut plane to be above your roof. Now that you can see your roof go to the Design menu>Roof Extras>Roof Maker. There is a lesson in Best Practices in the basic use of Roof Maker. We will be creating a rafter or multiple rafters or use the Roof Wizard to do everything. AC will ask you if you want to use a particular layer and default settings. You can then make your choices in the settings menu. Once the framing is created you can move them around individually because they are all separate and editible. If your roof is not working correctly just look at what is and is not working to identify the problem. You can pick up settings from one that is working and inject them into the one that is not. The pivot line for your roof may need to be near the lower part. 0:42:00
Transfering details from one file to the other. Walls cleaning up to each other using building material priorities. Simply select what you want to transfer, Copy, and then Paste it into the correct file. If the detail was originally taken from some other view and has a source then you can go to your Trace and Reference palette and there will be a source for it. If you create a detail by drawing a box around an area within a drawing and make it into a detail drawing then it will have a source view from that original drawing. You can rebuild from source view if you need but it will rebuild from the original. If you had made changes then it will be different. If you paste into a detail those are independant. If you have the Trace and Reference turned on this is your context for where your detail is in plan. If you turn it off then you just see the detail. In order to clean up a connection in walls you need to adjust either what the walls are made of or teach AC how the components in the walls relate in terms of priorities. Start with one possibility by selecting both walls and go to Options>Element Attributes>Building Materials. The walls are made up of composites made of building materials. In this window you see the materials highlighted in green that are in current use. The priorities determine what elements are stronger or weaker. If you take a material and drag it down to be stronger then it will change the way walls clean up. If you are changing material priorities for a special condtion then you go to the building materials and make a copy of your material and give it a new name and then move it to where you want in priority. Or if it is to be a wall using the special material in more than one place you can change the material name in that for that use so that it doesn’t change your other walls and materials. The building material priorities is moved manually. If you want to start over go to get the building material attributes from another file and overwrite them by index. 1:15:37
How in my layout can I reference the demolition drawings to the right drawings? In the layout menu if you double click on an item in the list it will select it and it will be highlighted on the layout sheet. If you right click on the drawing it will take you to the drawing settings and it will show you what view it is associtated with. If you right click on that and choose go to source view it will take you there. If you look at the viewmap the source view gets hightlighted. If you want the change the source view, go back to your layout sheet and right click on the drawing and select “link drawing to” and choose your new view. Each one is a separate view so you have to do each one independantly. 1:48:00
If you have missing drawings. Importing and scaling dwg files. If you have missing drawings you can go to Drawing Manager and highlight a missing drawing. You can choose to unlink the drawings or you can go and find each missing file. You can do this for all files that are missing to keep from having an error message when you open the file. When you have a dwg file the scale is based on your translator file and you will have some control when you bring the file in by setting the drawing units for example. When you are placing an external file it will be opened and translated from the translator file. If you get files from a regular place then you can use the same translator for for that source. If you need to resize your drawing you can go to Edit>reshape>resize and you can do it manually or type in a specific size. If you want a specific size click on two points that you want to define the distance and then shift D and type in your distance. Then if you look at the drawing settings you can then read off what your resizing magnification was in percentage. 1:53:00

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