Best Practices Course – Week 19 Part 3 – © copyright 2014 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 19 – Renovation Projects PART 3 – Renovation Using Layers

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices training lesson. This will be focused on renovations and remodel projects. This is week 19 part 3, and we’ll be looking at an approach that I think is very common with many users. This is to have multiple layers that you control to show existing, demo and new elements. This was certainly a very common way to do it before ArchiCAD 15’s dedicated Renovation palette. Still, there are times when it’s important to know about this. [0:00:41]

So let’s get started. I am going to draw a basic box of walls here. These walls are the existing building, and we want to draw some news ones that are going to be a change, so we’re going to extend the building out to here. All of these are showing in the model right now. How would I show only the existing building, and then sometimes show the new building? And in fact, I want to delete these. And let’s say that this is going to be split here. And this part is going to be demoed. [0:01:33]

The same with this one, it’s going to be demoed here. We will get rid of these interior partitions. So how would we do that? I am going to go into the Layer Dialog box. I am using the standard ArchiCAD layers that Graphisoft provides. This would be the same since version 10, and the layers in the U.S. template would be about the same. The layers in the international version would be different, but still the idea would work the same way. So we have an exterior wall layer here. I am going to create a new layer. [0:02:11]

We will give it a similar name here. We will call this “Demo” and copy this here. I will create a new one that will be “New”. Alright, I have three layers for the exterior walls. I am going to hide the new layer. Nothing is on it right now, but I am going to make it hidden. I will select these elements here and put them on that new layer. So now here we have in the existing project without the new stuff. You will notice that we have a problem here in the gaps, because ArchiCAD is still trying to clean up as if those elements existed. [0:03:09]

This is caused by the fact that these new elements here are on the same layer intersection priority as the other ones. Now if I change this to “#2” for example, then you can see the problem goes away. If I manually say that I would like to show the new ones and hide the demo ones, then we are seeing the new ones. These ones were not put on the demo. Let’s select them and tell them to be on the demo. Now they disappear, but still the cleanup is not happening correctly because the new ones are on the wrong group and the demo ones were on the same as the regular walls. So I am changing that around. [0:04:02]

And now you can see we have this arrangement. Now if I go to the Layer Dialog, I have manually played around with the layer settings. I am going to create a new layer combination. And we will call this “New Building”. So the new building here turns on the new layer, turns off the exterior wall demo layer, and remembers that this is a “#2” here. This now will work if I turn on that layer combination. If I go back to the floor plan, which was the original one, you can see that we have a problem because the floor plan is only showing the original layers and not the new ones. And it does not change the layer priority number for the new ones. So we need to correct that. [0:04:53]

So let’s say that we will change the name of the floor plan to “Existing”. When we do that, we can also tell it that I would like to make the demo show and the new ones be on a different priority. Now I will update it. Now the floor plan, “EXISTING” -and let me make this all caps so it stands out here – is going to have a particular arrangement that is different than the new building. Here is the floor plan “EXISTING”. I say OK, and this looks normal. And when I switch between floor plan existing and the new building, you can see how it works. [0:05:39]

So the idea here is that we can put elements of a particular type, say the walls, onto a set of three different layers, and get control over them. We do have an issue if we wanted to have both an existing plan and a demo plan. We won’t get that. In other words, if we wanted to have the demo information dashed. So how would we do that? Let’s put it back to the existing floor plan, and we select these two walls. And how would we make them dashed? Well, these are composite walls right now. You can see these walls are set for a generic wall type of composition, but they are set as composites. [0:06:30]

As such, in ArchiCAD 17, we can’t actually change the cut lines to be dashed. We can change uncut lines, which would be ones that are below the cut plane or low walls. We can change overhead lines. But we can’t change the cut lines because these are composites. So what we would have to do is edit the composite. In ArchiCAD 17, we can go and right click on one of these and say that we would like to ‘Edit Selected Composite’. We can only have one selected to do it. You can see here is the exterior generic. We don’t want to edit this, because that would affect all of them. [0:07:15]

Let’s duplicate it, and say “Generic” and say, “Demo” here. And one option would be to just change this to a dashed line here. In the demo version, it’s going to have all this dashing. And say OK. I didn’t actually change all these elements to be dashed; I just created a new wall type. Now I could say that I would like it to be a demo wall, and you can see how it shows up. So now, if I go from floor plan existing to new building, you can see what we’re getting here. If we want to have the original building show up normal without the dashes, and we want a demo plan also available, then it runs into even more complications. [0:08:13]

This is why the layer options before ArchiCAD 15 and before we had any options to override the appearance of things based on their state, that’s why this required a fair amount of manipulation. So even in this very simple case, I have had to create two new layers, an extra layer combination, and I have had to either change the settings of the wall – before ArchiCAD 17 you could manually say you wanted them to be done with dashed lines. In ArchiCAD 17, if you followed this procedure, you would have to create a new composite that has a different style. [0:08:54]

If you wanted to have both styles, or the walls show both ways or sometimes show one or the other, you would have to jump through more hoops. I am going to select this and put it back to the original wall type so that it is not dashed, and I will create a demo plan possibly in a worksheet. So we can create a worksheet in a variety of ways. One way is to right click on the Worksheet folder in the Project Map, say ‘New Independent Worksheet’. [0:09:33]

We will call this “Demo Plan”. This is now empty. I will go back to the floor plan and select everything, copy it, go to the worksheet, and paste into the original location. This is important. I want to make sure that if I did want to look at this in relationship to the original elements that they would line up in a trace reference. And we paste this in. it didn’t paste in here. Oh, there it is. It did paste in, but I didn’t tell it to move. Anyway, now I can go in here and you can see these are actually lines. They are not walls anymore. There are different types of handles here. [0:10:28]

I can make these dashed like that. So now this is the beginnings of a demo plan. It’s in a worksheet. If I go back to the floor plan, it looks normal here. If I change this from ‘Floor Plan Existing’ to ‘New Building’, you can see the new design here. So let’s quickly go over what this does in the context of ArchiCAD 14 and earlier and where you might use it in ArchiCAD 15 through 17. Before we had the Renovation palette, this was one very standard way to manage renovations. You would have extra layers and layer combinations possibly supplemented with worksheets to create a 2D version of the construction document for demo purposes. [0:11:26]

Now the setup that I just did only took a few minutes and frankly, if you already have it set up in your project, you already have those layers and layer combinations, then it’s not a big deal. But some issues come up when you are putting in objects. So say you put in a cabinet here, and you have other elements that are going to remain and some will disappear. I’m not going to do anything too useful. Let’s put in a dryer here. Let’s say this dryer is in the original project. If I go back to the existing here – and this is in the floor plan for the existing – let’s put it on the equipment layer. [0:12:41]

Let’s update that. Now this is in ‘Existing’. And when I go to the new building, it’s still there, but I want it to be demoed. There are potentially some interior walls. So let’s actually put in some existing interior walls that are going to be moved. I will put these on the ‘Interior wall’ layer and change this to an interior wall. And let’s say that these walls are going to stay and these are going to change. So would these walls go on the ‘Exterior demo’? Maybe you could get away with that, but sometimes you really would need to separate these out instead of having them interior. [0:13:48]

So we would have to start creating new layers for the interior walls. Without belaboring the point, I will copy this and create a new layer here. Now I have three layers for that. And the ‘Equipment’, we have the same issue. I will copy this, so we have ‘Equipment demo’ and ‘Equipment new’. So we might need to have all of that. So for the existing one, we don’t have the ‘Equipment new’, and we don’t have the ‘Interior walls new’. And we don’t want the walls to clean up here. We don’t have to worry about things like equipment, only things like walls and beams will clean up to each other. [0:14:45]

I am going to update here, that is the ‘Existing’. We will go to the new building, and the ‘New Building’, I need to tell it that the ‘Equipment New’ is showing but not the ‘Demo’. And the ‘Interior New’ is showing, but not the ‘Demo’. And the ‘Demo’ has to be on a different number. And I will update that. Now let’s put these elements onto the ‘Demo’, and put this onto the ‘Equipment Demo’. Now I can switch back and forth between the new building and the existing building. [0:15:21]

It is doable here, in terms of being able to manage the project. But you can see that potentially you end up with triple layers for multiple things, depending on how much you need to demo or put in new. One thing here – these are sort of floating in here. They are hard to see in the long list, how they stand out. Sometimes it is useful to put this as an extension here and get rid of that in the name, and the same thing with this one. So when you are referring to the layers, you will see it as such and such “.w’. Such and such ‘.demo.’ [0:16:11]

It will be visible in the layer dialog that way. Let’s just again move this, and I have to actually put in the demo extension before I change the name so that it doesn’t think that this has exactly the same name as this one here. By having this with extensions, we can also have something where we filter by extensions. So by having my cursor in the new ones, filter by extension is now able to show what the new ones are. And if I click on the demo and say ‘Filter by Extension’, we will see that the demo ones. [0:17:01]

This is a great way to be able to turn on or off groups of layers, because we can always say ‘Select All’, ‘Hide’, ‘Show’ or ‘Lock’, things like that, after we’ve done a filtering. In general, I would recommend using this extension, particularly if you did want to do some of this type of layer manipulation. Changing the name of the layer like this does not affect the layer combinations; they still know that the layer in this position is what is being referred to in their list. [0:17:32]

So we now have the option to show the new or the existing by turning on and off groups of layers. So this is the basics of layer manipulation. I just created an extra layer combination here, but in the View Map, we would want to say – so the first floor plan, let’s say that this one is going to be the new design. So we are going to then change the settings of this. Instead of using the floor plan – in fact, here you notice that because I changed the name of the floor plan it doesn’t know to use the new version. So I could say that it would be ‘Floor Plan Existing’. In this case, I want it to be the new building anyway. [0:18:21]

So we will just do that. Now we will create another view. I will just switch it back to the existing and I will create a new view here with the ‘New Existing’. I will change the name to ‘First Floor Existing’ here. And now we have ‘First Floor Existing’ and ‘First Floor New’ available by simple double clicking on a view. So this is the essence of how we would manage a renovation project with layers. Obviously, the more things you need to be able to turn on and off based on demo and new, the more potential layers you would add into your system. I have seen people go really wild with this and have lines and text and labels and all sorts of layers that are duplicated into new, existing and demo. It can get pretty complicated. That is why Graphisoft introduced the improved version with the Renovation palette and tagging in ArchiCAD 15. [0:19:32]

However, there are some times that just understanding this will help you even in ArchiCAD 15 and later, because in the Renovation palette – and I will just bring that up as a reference by going to Windows, Palettes, Renovation – we only have three states. We have ‘Existing to Remain’, ‘To Be Demolished’ and we have ‘New’. So we only have three tags. Now, we have only done three here, but if we needed to, we could do ‘Scheme 1’, ‘Scheme 2’, ‘Scheme 3’. We could do multiple schemes or phasing, ‘Phase 1’, ‘Phase 2’, ‘Phase 3’. [0:20:11]

You could do something similar to what I just did. And instead of thinking of it as existing and new, you could think of it as ‘Existing Phase 1’, ‘Phase 2’, and ‘Phase 3’. Or scheme 1, 2, and 3. So the same method could be used just with a different naming in any version of ArchiCAD. And it would fill in the gap in ArchiCAD 15 or later where the renovation palette does some things but just doesn’t handle phasing or multiple schemes. [0:20:48]

We have a question from Ken B. “Can the original layer “A-WALL-EXTR” serve for the “A-WALL-EXTR-New”?” I am not sure what you mean by can it serve for that. The basic idea here is that the layers that are going to remain here or the elements that are going to remain are on this layer. Elements that are going to be built new are on this layer, so you couldn’t use this one for the new. Unless you wanted to basically show only the new conditions. But what I wanted to do was show the existing sometimes without the new and sometimes show it with the new. So that is why these are on separate layers. [0:21:32]

In fact, the whole idea of layers or certainly the primary reason for layers is to control the visibility of elements. In other words, it turns elements on or off when you want to. They also control locking, so you can lock elements based on a layer. Those are the primary things, visibility and locking. Now in the new system, you basically would designate with the same layer, that this element is existing and this element here are demoed and certain ones are new. I am going to be doing a separate lesson on this, so I don’t want to dwell on it. [0:22:12]

I just wanted to point out that this approach to layers can be used even when you have the renovation palette for multiple schemes or phasing. So the main disadvantage of this is that it can get complicated, depending on how many triplicates you need to create. Your layer set can get bigger and bigger, and that’s why it can get unwieldy. In the simple case, where you are just demoing some elements and showing some elements, and maybe you are only showing walls and equipment, so two or three categories of things, it is certainly very doable in this manner. [0:22:54]

Now in terms of your elevations and sections, obviously when we go to an elevation here – and let’s go to the east elevation to show this – you can see that it’s showing some information. What is it showing? This elevation is set up with a layer combination called “Sections”. Let’s look at the layer combination, and the sections layer combination is showing the exterior walls, but only the existing ones, not the new ones. [0:23:27]

So we would need to go through all of the layer combinations and make sure that, for example, if we wanted to show the extra new ones in the elevations and sections, then we would turn that on. We would also do that if we were showing equipment and the interior walls as well. We would want to make sure these are set up not to clean up to each other so they won’t interfere. I am changing the priority for the layer intersection group. This is what this layer intersection here is. I don’t have to worry about equipment ones here, but for clarity I will make this a 2 as well and update. [0:24:11]

So I would need to go through all of my layer combinations to do that. Now you can see here is the elevation with the bigger building, not that there’s much to see, but this is correct. If I go to the south elevation, it’s showing the two pieces as opposed to the original one. So these views are referring to a layer combination called ‘Sections’, which I now have updated to have the correct information. So we would want to have all of our layer combinations updated. That would in general make our elevations and sections and interior elevations work. [0:24:46]

Although you would have to double check to make sure that it’s using the right layer combination rather than the existing building it’s using the new one. Iain D. says “What are the advantages and disadvantages of locking and unlocking?” so that’s a separate question, but basically, what would you want to lock in a project is a basic question. What do you want to avoid moving around? So we will just take a minute to talk about that. If I am in the project, and I am looking at the floor plan, let’s say that there were some property lines that I didn’t want to accidentally move around. [0:25:36]

So I am just going to – we have a layer for property lines in the standard template – topo or site – let’s see. I am just going to do it on topo. What would be the standard one? I don’t use the standard template for most things. There is no layer that I see in the U.S. one for property lines, so I will just do it on the topo for now. So I will do a poly line here, and take this and close it here. We will put this into a line type that looks like a property line there. Now I could lock this individually. I can go to the locking in the Edit menu and say “Lock it”. [0:26:34]

Or I could just go to the Layer combination and say that I would like to make this layer locked. I might want to do that for all the layer combinations just to show you that if I manually lock it, the handles become gray, and I can no longer edit this element. It will actually refer to the layer being locked. You can see the popup referring to that. So you can lock layers, if you don’t want to accidentally move the property lines. You can lock them temporarily or lock elements as well to do that. Now sometimes you may want to move or change something on a project, and you don’t want to affect the walls. [0:27:19]

Maybe you want to grab some furniture and move it around. You want to quickly be able to select it. What you can do is temporarily lock those elements by going to Window, Palettes, Quick Layers. Let’s say that I select – here is an existing, and here is a new. I am going to say that I would like to take the selections and layers and lock them. Now if I go and drag a selection you can see that it’s dragging only the things that were unlocked, it left these ones alone. [0:28:01]

So it just makes it easier on the fly to be able to lock stuff. Or we could lock everything. I can say ‘Lock Everything’ here, and then say I want to be able to edit this layer. So I am going to unlock this layer. So now this layer is available, but everything else has the gray handles. So with the quick layers you can lock everything except maybe the one layer that you want to manipulate. Then if I drag, you can see it’s only affecting the layer that I have unlocked. [0:28:38]

That is a little side note in terms of unlocking layers. So Tom D. says, “Can windows be shown demoed if the wall is not?” Well, in this particular approach, no, not easily. I take that back. Let’s go to the Window tool. Why is it not putting in? Oh, because it’s locked. I can’t put a window in when this layer is locked. Let me unlock these. Now I will pop in a window. So in terms of a window, if I select this, there is certainly I imagine we can go into the 2D information here. We have the plan symbol here, and the wall contour lines and frame and sash. [0:29:49]

Is there a way to make that dashed here? Shape and opening, where would that be? Let me go under these parameters. I might be able to find it more quickly under options, 2D representation here. Do we have any line types? I don’t see something where we can say line types. I am not quite sure if we can do that in the current environment, because it doesn’t seem that you can choose the line types. Let’s just look at floor plan options. Maybe we can do it here. [0:30:42]

So here is ‘Symbol Lines’. We will make this a dashed. That is going to be rather crude looking. Let’s make it a hidden line; that will make it closer to the symbol line. And perhaps all of these similar like that. I am not quite sure. Let’s see what that does. Now the window is looking somewhat dashed. So that would be one way to do it. However, there is no way to say then that this window would be removed and the wall would be healed, at least not with the layer settings. So this is one of the things again that is a limitation in this approach. [0:31:37]

If you wanted to do some 2D work over the top of the wall, then maybe that would be an option there. It just gets complicated in this approach which is why the renovation tools in ArchiCAD 15 are superior. This concludes our lesson 19-3, the training on working with layers and layer combinations to manage a remodel project. Please add your comments and questions on the page down below. This has been Eric Bobrow. Thanks for watching.

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