QuickStart Course – © copyright 2011 by Eric Bobrow

QUICKSTART COURSE – MODULE 1 PART 4 – Connecting and Orienting Walls

Hello this is Eric Bobrow, and in this section of the QuickStart course we’ll look at connecting and orienting walls.  So I’m in the Arrow tool. I’m going to switch to the Wall tool to draw a wall. And in this case, I’d like to change back from a box of walls to just doing a single wall.  Now, I’ll zoom in, and I’ll just roll my mouse wheel into the area that I would like to do an interior wall and press down the center of the mouse to get the pan; press down and hold and move the viewing information down, and then let go. [0:39]

Now I’m going to go and create in interior wall. Later in the course we’ll be of course learning how to place things exact distances, but for right now let’s just say that I’d like to place a wall starting about here, and I’d like to take it in this general direction.  And I’m able to see the guideline there so I can go off the angle or I can go and snap onto here and simply click.  And you’ll see how it automatically makes that intersection clean there.  Now let me zoom out by rolling the mouse wheel down, and then pressing down the hand tool to pan over.  And let me draw another wall from the other side.  Now I drew the first one from the inside face and I’ll draw this one from the outside.  And you’ll see that the results are actually quite similar.  [1:30]

Now as I’m drawing this, you’ll notice that my cursor, which has the got the three line symbol for the Mercedes because I’m on the guideline, of course when I’m off it just becomes just a cross hair.  But that cursor is attached to a rubber band line.  And that is heavy, as opposed to the line below it which shows how thick the wall is, which is lighter.  So I’m controlling that line in space that we sometimes call the rubber band line, and the thickness of the wall right now is falling below.  However sometimes I would like to have that wall go the other side of my cursor.  And this can be controlled using the construction options here, where I can choose left, center or right.  And I can switch this right on the fly. [2:21]

So I’ll switch from the current one that is highlighted, which is this one on the left, and I’ll switch to the opposing one.  And you’ll see as soon as I move back into the screen, that the thickness of the wall now is above.  And if I were to move this around in the circle, you might see that the thickness is to the right of my cursor.  It just stays consistent regardless of the direction I’m going.  And I’ll click to finish it.  So this is actually the right hand one, but as we rotate around the circle, it will fall on different sides above or below.  In any event when you’re drawing you can switch on the fly to whatever you need.  So I did start that on the other side, in other words, the outside of the wall and it cleaned this up. Here I started it on the inside and it cleaned it up.  We’ll learn some more rules for how this works in a minute. [3:19]

Let’s switch to center method, and I’ll draw something say in between these two doors.  And you can see now the cursor is drawing with a pencil. Sometimes it changes between the crosshair and Mercedes to a pencil.  And what you’ll see is that as I zoom in on this, that that pencil has a line in the center of it.  And when I move away from the guideline, the pencil shows empty.  So when I’m on a line in space, it indicates that I’m on that line.  Now let me just pan this down so I can see better, and we’ll see that if I go to the other surface here, that we get a rather interesting looking cursor which is meant to resemble a T square, or a perpendicular indicator.  When I move along the edge of the wall here, you’ll notice that it has a stripe in it. [4:39]

Again when I’m not touching anything that it recognizes, its white, when I’m on the edge of something, it will have a stripe in it.  And when it’s straight, perpendicular, we’ll see the crosshair.  And one other option we’ll see is when I get to a corner point, we’ll see the pencil get shaded in with black. So if I go, for example, to the corner of this wall we’ll see it black.  Now there are some subtle differences here between black with a white eraser and black with a black eraser, but let’s not worry about that right now.  So mainly what we want to be able to do here is to say, “I’d like to go and meet this other wall perpendicular, because that’s going to be nice to straight.”  You’ll also notice that the track, or feedback, indicates that I’m at an angle of 90°.  And a distance that’s a nice even number, 33 feet 3 inches, which is I guess about 11 meters.  Now I’m going to click, and you’ll see how it completes that operation. [5:42]

So by making sure that I’m touching the wall with the correct cursor, the correct smart cursor, that I’m going to get a very nice clean result.  Now how do I make this wall here connect to that one?  Well, I’ll go to the Arrow tool to select it. I’ll go on top of this wall to highlight it by clicking it.  It has the green indication showing that it’s selected.  And you can see in the info box that there’s one wall selected.  Now in order to make this stretch, there are a number of different ways to do it.  But the simplest in this case is to go to the shortcuts in this area, where I can use the adjust command.  Which does have a keyboard shortcut of Command+dash or CTRL+dash (or hyphen).  [6:29]

Now I’m just going to click on this once, and it basically is going is expect me to click on where I would like to adjust this to.  And I’m going to go to the center of this wall where I have aligned the center line of the wall that I was drawing, and I’ll click. And you can see how it has extended it to that center point and it looks like its meeting cleanly, although it hasn’t opened up the line.  Sometimes ArchiCAD will clean that up instantly, and sometimes we need to just zoom in or out a little bit.  And you’ll see as soon as I change my view a tiny bit, it cleaned that up.  So let me go and select this one and do the same thing.  So I’ll select this wall, I’ll go and do adjust, and I’ll go to the center line of this wall here and click.  And you can see how it adjusted it. So that is one way that we can make these walls clean up, is to select one and tell it to adjust to meet another one. [7:32]

Now let’s take a look at drawings and walls separate from the current building shape. And I’ll draw, let’s say, a series of walls using the “Poly Wall” option. So let me just do this off to the side.  I’ll just draw a wall.  Let me change this right on the fly.  I’ll say that I’d like to have the construction method be left so that the line I’m drawing will be the outside of the shape.  You can see how that changed now.  My line is the bottom; the heavy line is on the bottom. And let’s say that I move this up, and I go across and I’m making sure that I’m going on the guideline. You can see the angle the 90° angle, and I’ll go up here. And of course, normally I might want to type in values, but for now I’m simply sketching a concept.  And I’ll click again. [8:25]

Now to finish, I can either click again on that same point or I can’t right click and say OK.  Those are two different ways to do it.  So you can right click often to bring up something.  Cancel would get rid of all of those walls. OK will say that I’d like to finish this group.  Now, suppose that this was something that I had done and then I realized afterward that I didn’t want these two walls, I wanted the outer two walls to simply connect directly.  Well let’s go and see what happens.  I’ll select this one wall here, and you’ll notice that it selects just the one wall, even though this was drawn in one action, much like a poly line in some CAD programs.  It actually created a series of separate walls. [9:11]

Now to delete something, I have a few different ways that I can do it.  I can right click, and there’s an option that says “Delete”.  Now I’ll select this other wall here, I’ve got the Arrow tool active, I’m going to click on it. And I can – instead of doing that, I can just use the Delete or Backspace key on the keyboard.  So then that’s even quicker in many cases.  What I’d like to do is select these two walls and connect them.  So I’m going to click on one and hold down the Shift key while I click on the other one.  Now both of them are selected.  And up in that area right next to the one that has the Adjust command, there is the Intersect command.  Now, this is a very powerful one that I use frequently.  Simply click on it, and obviously these two walls just extended far enough to meet each other. [10:09]

So at this point, we’ve looked at some of the main options we have when we draw walls, for the geometry of the wall, in terms of doing single walls, multiple walls in any of a variety of ways. We haven’t looked at the curve options, but those we will get to later.  We have looked at the construction methods, left center and right, to see how that affects placement of the walls. And we’ve looked at how you can draw a wall that starts from the inside or the outside when you are drawing. In most cases, it will automatically just intersect or connect it. [10:51]

And some of this Smart Cursor options for showing a wall and how it’s it about to touch another wall and connect perpendicular or at another angle.  And then we’ve looked at both the adjust and intersect options for connecting walls together.  So this concludes this lesson, and in fact the entire first module of the QuickStart course.  Congratulations on completing the first module, and thanks for watching.  [11:24]