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Best Practices Course – Week 20 Part 1-A  – © copyright 2014 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-A – Intro to Element Attributes: Working with Custom Line Types

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices Course lesson. We are starting week number twenty. This whole module will focus on attributes as well as project preferences and work environment. What all three of these have in common is that they are not things in your project. In other words, they are not walls or annotation, but they are the definitions of how the project or how ArchiCAD works with you, such as materials and composites, etc. [0:00:36]

A composite would be a type of wall assembly. And a material, depending on what version of ArchiCAD you are in, would refer to the surface appearance of the elements; so not the actual elements, but the attributes of those elements. The original series that I had laid out had six pieces. I think this probably will get a little modified because we’ve been going over a few versions and I have to cover more things. But we’re starting section 1, and we’ll be looking at the basics of attribute management. [0:01:14]

Let me switch over to ArchiCAD, and we’ll look at ArchiCAD 17 to begin with, because that’s the current version, but I do have ArchiCAD 14 and 12 open in the background so I can show you some differences for those of you who are still on older versions. So what are attributes? Under the Options menu, there is a section called Element Attributes. And all of the items in this menu here are attributes. [0:01:47]

If I open up ‘Attribute Manager’ at the bottom of that menu, we will see that there are sections here for managing layers:

• Layer combinations
• Pen Sets
• Actual definitions of individual pens in any particular pen set
• Line types
• Fills
• Composites
• Complex Profiles
• Surfaces (which used to be called ‘Materials’)
• Building Materials (which are new in ArchiCAD 17)
• Zone Categories
• Cities (or locations on the planet)
• In recent versions of ArchiCAD: Operation Profiles, which have to do with calculating energy usage based on the use of certain areas or zones in a project. [0:02:46]

So these are all handled by Attribute Manager, and we are going to look at how you can create, edit, and manipulate these attributes and why you would want to do so. So I am going to cancel out of attribute manager and just point out that in this menu here, you see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 things here. Some of them are actually not managed inside the Attribute Manager, such as the Renovation Override Styles which are managed in their own dialog box related to the renovation palette, which was introduced into 15. [0:03:30]

Now if I switch over to ArchiCAD 14 here, and we go to the Options, Element Attributes, you will see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. So there are fewer of them here because we didn’t have Building Materials. We didn’t have Renovation Overrides and there may be something else, maybe the Energy Operations Profile. So there are several that are missing. And if we go back to ArchiCAD 12, it’s similar here, but we are going to see some differences in the way some of these are defined. [0:04:05]

Let’s go back to 17. We are going to start out by just looking at the very first one, Layer Settings, because this is the dialog box that we all should be very familiar with where we are able to turn on and off the visibility of layers, we are able to create new layers here, and we are able to create layer combinations. Now I have dealt with this extensively in other parts of the course, so although this technically is an attribute, I am not going to spend any time today looking at how you create a new layer or layer combination. [0:04:38]

Please refer to some of the other lessons, I think particularly in week 8 and 9 we were looking at layers and layer combinations in the view map and things like that. So there were some changes in this dialog box, just the appearance of it that happened in later versions. If I go to ArchiCAD 12 and we open up that layer dialog box, we are going to see that these were all text things; select all or deselect all. Compared to ArchiCAD 17, well those are text, but you can see the icons. And in ArchiCAD 12, lock unlock, show and hide were all text and now are more compact in terms of the icons. But other than that, the functionality of the layer dialog box is pretty much the same as it used to be. [0:05:38]

Now if we go to the next one down here, we will see Line Types. In line types, these are the lines that we have access to when we go to the Line tool. If we go to the Line tool, these are all the line types currently defined in this project. Now the lines are also used in other places. For example, when we have the Dimension tool or the Wall tool; there are going to be things that define the line types. Even in the Slab tool I think we can draw the slab with a different type of line if we want. So dashed line or outline, things like that. [0:06:24]

The basic Line tool and other 2D tools like Arcs and Poly Lines all share access to the Line Types that are defined here. The line types are extensive in the standard template, and you can add to this. They are divided into the first group which is called ‘Dashed Lines’. They start with solid, but then there are all of these different variations of dashed. And then there are ‘Symbolic Lines’. We can see the difference between them when we say New, because it says, ‘Do you want to create a dashed line, a symbol line type, or do you want to duplicate something that already exists and modify it?’ [0:07:03]

Now let’s look at the most basic dashed line here and see that the dashed line has a length for the dash and a length for the gap, and in this case, we can see that they are even. There is a certain distance for each one of them. If we go to one that is longer like the dashed long, you can see the numbers here are slightly different. Now if we go and say New and I say I want to duplicate this, say, dashed long copy, then I can go ahead and edit this. For example, if I make a bigger gap, you will see the dash has more of a space.  If I make a longer line here, the dash will be longer. [0:07:49]

So now this particular one I have just defined, and I have created it, and I can say OK. If I draw a line – let’s just draw a line here and we will make a few copies of it. I will select this and do Multiply. We will make 5 copies of it here. And I will select this one and we’ll make this the dashed here and make this one the dashed long. And the new one, which I just created, will show up at the bottom of the dashed line types. So you can see it’s here: “Dashed Long Copy”. So this first batch of about ten lines, you can see how that works. [0:08:46]

Now these spaces between the lines are based on a certain size on paper, meaning that it doesn’t matter what scale we are drawing at, they will appear a certain way on paper. If I go to the 100% here, this is basically showing a representation of what it might look like when we print that on paper. If I draw a wall here, and I am going to draw a box of walls around this here, and put in the door. Now if I go and switch this to 1/8 in. scale, so half the size for printing or roughly 1:100 for metric, you will see that the building got smaller but the dashed lines still have the same spacing. [0:09:44]

If I go back to that 1/4 inch and you look closely at this, you will see that the dashed line and the long dashed, etc. look the same. Of course, they take up more space, so you are going to have more dashes, but the amount of space between them is constant. So this is based on a setting in the line types for – let’s go to dashed here – that is ‘Scale Independent’. This distance, and I am not quite sure what .10 refers to, but it actually mentions inches, in. and I assume that if you are working in the international version it would refer to mm. [0:10:24]

So this is scale independent. Now scale with plan would be something that you probably wouldn’t do with dashed lines, because it probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, but we would want to do that with certain types of lines that represent physical elements like this concrete masonry unit or these stones. So these types of elements may actually have a physical size that we want to coordinate with so they would have a model size rather than a paper size. [0:10:58]

So the basics of creating the dashed lines are pretty simple. You can create a new dashed line or duplicate one and then you can adjust these. And if you did want to have more pieces, like this is a triple dash, then you can see there are several segments. And you can either manually move the flags or you can type in a new value here. So you can have some fined tuned controls on that. Now let’s look at what a symbol line type would be. The simplest one is this zigzag here. And you can see it has this little down and up indicator. It’s indicating that it’s going to take a certain size on paper and there is no gap. So it’s going to repeat. And you can see what that does. So let me just create a new duplicate of it. [0:11:51]

Let’s say that I made this a little bit bigger like that. I will say OK. So now if I were to select this one and make it a zigzag line, and then select this one and make it a zigzag copy – which will show up at the very bottom of the popup list – you will see how it’s much bigger because I changed the size of it. It kept the same proportions. I guess it’s still 45˚ in each direction, but it changed the size. Now if I were to go into the line types here for that zigzag copy and add a gap by pulling the white flag here out, or typing in a gap value, then you can see how it changes its look here. [0:12:49]

So another thing to realize is that elements that are already drawn with a particular type of attribute will update if that attribute is redefined. So in other words, I changed the definition of this line type and the line that was already drawn looks somewhat different. Now I can also go into the attribute definition and rename it. I can call this “Zigzag 2”. This may seem trivial, but if you think about it, the line says that it’s “Zigzag copy”. In a minute, it’s going to refer to “Zigzag 2”. It works intuitively. You can see here the name shows up as “Zigzag 2”. [0:13:30]

But behind the scenes, what’s happening is all the elements like these lines refer to the attribute, in this case the line type, by an internal number or an index number. So if I go to the Options menu, Element Attributes, Attribute Manager, what we are going to see is that for these line types, “Zigzag 2” is line type 51. So it doesn’t matter whether I call it “Zigzag 2” or “Zigzag larger”, if I change the name here, it will change there. Basically, the line itself says, I’m using line type 51. Whatever it’s called, I will show that here. [0:14:14]

I am modifying this here, and you can see how it has a different name. So that’s an important part of attributes that you can use to your advantage and flexibly reconfigure things as you need to; to rename them or to possibly to redefine what they look like. Now let’s look at how the line types work when they are defined with a certain distance. Let’s go and create some more lines. Drag a copy of this and multiply it down same distance just for symmetry. And now let’s look some more ornate lines in here. [0:15:08]

So we have break lines like this here. Let’s say that we wanted to create a variation of this where the distances for the break was longer or shorter. How would we do that? Well, I am going to show you an option here. I will go to the Options menu, Element Attributes, Line Types. And we will go find that break line. We will see that in addition to being able to adjust the length visually here, there is an option here for the symbol line types to copy the line components. So if I copy this here, and then go and paste here, you can see that this has been brought in as a series of individual lines. And it looks similar to this, although the proportions are not quite the same, or the scale of this is not quite matching. [0:16:17]

Now what I am going to do is let’s say change the style. Let me actually go and make this a little different like that here. So I now have a rather different proportion for this. If I select these and copy them and go to the Element Attributes, Line Types, I could duplicate the one that I had earlier or I can say New. I can create a new symbol line type. And we will call this “New Break Line” and say OK. Then use the option here that says ‘Paste the line components’. And you can see how it shows up. You can see the taller line here. And if I don’t want to have a gap I can just type in a zero for that gap. Then it’s going to zigzag like this. [0:17:17]

So I say OK, this is now a new line type that I have created. And if I go and select this line, I can go and choose this new line type. Now you will notice that this line type is offset, meaning that the actual mercedes for it is between these two end points, but the main visual line is not on that. Whereas this line type here you can see is nicely centered. Now you might think it’s because this is centered in between here, and it probably is centered in between the extense of it, but let’s say I wanted this to be lined up. I want to create this line type that had the main body of the line matching the endpoints there. [0:18:12]

It turns out that if I take these elements here – and before I copy them I have them at the zero point, so I am just going to drag this down to the origin point. So here’s the little “X” origin. This is the project origin for this particular project. Every project has an origin point, it’s an “X” that shows up in gray somewhere onscreen if you zoom out far enough you can find it. Now these are placed in this location. If I copy them and then go to the line types, and let’s just go back to that same one here and we are going to paste the line types. [0:18:55]

Now you can see that it readjusted its position a little bit. And now I can go and make the gap zero here. I am not quite sure about the dash. Let’s just see. It looks like this is continuous; it’s not reading properly visually here. But let’s see what happens when I say OK. I have just redefined that line type. And let’s go back now to where we were. You can see now this line has a natural axis or mercedes sensitivity along that edge. [0:19:36]

So the rule here is that you can take any linework that you want and copy it to create a new symbol line type. It will automatically create the axis line along the center. But if you want it to be along one edge or any particular edge, then you want to have this set up when you copy it with the origin point being in the right relationship to it. I am going to move these off to the side and keep them available if I need. And now let’s look at something that would be a little bit more elaborate in terms of the symbol line type and the ability for the line to actually represent physical elements such as blocks. [0:20:25]

So if I go and select this line here and change this to this CMU or Concrete Masonry Unit, you can see how it’s quite detailed. So this line is set up with the axis along the top in this case, rather than the bottom or the center. And you can see how these are spaced a certain size. If I were to take the wall and measure it – let’s pick up the wall and draw a little piece of wall here. You can see this is roughly the same thickness. Now the measurement of the wall we can do precisely. I can measure this and it’s 8 inches. I can’t actually measure this precisely, because if I measure it, you can see there is a snap point here but there is no snap point on the other side along there. [0:21:23]

But you can see that it’s not quite the 8″. The 8″, if I were to zoom in, this is 7 1/2″. So it’s probably set up so that there is a gap between one course and the next if you were to do that. And the distance along here is about 15 1/2″. And here it’s about 16″. So that’s the distance that we would expect for a CMU unit here in the U.S. And in fact, the name was given as 8x8x16″; so 16″, 1’4″ is that distance. So this is let’s say a real world size. [0:22:04]

Now if I change the scale here to 1/8″, what happens? The wall gets smaller, this gets smaller. If I change it to 1/16″, everything gets smaller because this is physically defined in relationship to the real world, in relationship to the plan. If I switch this back now to 1/4″ look at what happens to the dashed lines. The dashed lines still are the same. I will again back up to 1/8″ and you can see the dashed lines still have the same gap here between 1/8″ and 1/4″ visually, so they would print the same. But when we switch between different scales here, the line type that is defined in relationship to plan units will rescale just like physical elements. [0:23:04]

So while you can’t snap to this to show the actual coursing or masonry unit points, it is a good way to do certain types of detail drawings. So you could literally go into a wall and have a wall type that has bricks or blocks that you would just draw with that line type. Now how would you define this? Let’s go and see. If I open Options, Element Attributes, Line Types, and we go find this CMU unit, you can see it has some lines here. There’s no gap. And we can go and copy this. And by the way, it says, ‘Scale with Plan’. It also has a mention here of 3/4″ equals 1′. So that actually is a 1:16 scale. [0:24:01]

I am going to copy the line components here. And let’s see. If we had it as 3/4″ to 1′, that is 1:16. So that’s what that particular one is. Now given that the – if I paste, and let me just make sure – now this is sort of interesting, because I am going to paste now. And you are going to see something very odd with the line types. I guess I hadn’t change the default line type. When we copy the lines, remember I just copied this here – and let me zoom out a bit here – when I copy them, it looks to see what is the default setting for the line tool. [0:24:53]

In this case, it’s solid line. If it’s set up for dashed or some symbolic line, then all of the lines here will be drawn with that dashed or symbolic line type. And you can get a very strange result. So before you copy the line elements, make sure that your line type is set for solid line, otherwise you will end up with some odd things. Now you may notice here that this not the same scale as that. So that’s not so much an issue, it’s just something you have to know about. The size that is going to end up on the plan is not necessarily the size that you created or edited. [0:25:36]

Now you will notice when I brought it in that there’s a little “X” here. That is a snappable point that is a hotspot. The hotspot tool. The reason for that is, if you look closely, you can see that there is the block and then there is a small gap for the next one for the grout or spacing between the blocks. By having a dot, this hotspot is part of the definition of the symbol. It allows us to define precisely what that gap is instead of having to do it using the controls for the dash and the gap. You can use a hotspot and provide no gap so the next one will start at that hotspot. [0:26:25]

Now let’s see how we would edit this and what this requires. I am going to drag this down. Remember that if I wanted this to be lined up so that the one edge or another is the axis line, then we would want to make sure that we put this on the project origin on the top or bottom or whatever is the most relevant. Now I am just going to go in and get rid of some of these lines. I am going to simplify this in terms of the type of block. [0:27:09]

We will make this a very hollow piece right now. Not nearly as strong, obviously. Let’s just take this and I am going to copy this, and we will go into the Line Types. Actually, before we create the new one, let’s look at this one and we will see that it says that the dash is 1″. That means that the distance here is 1″. Now we know that this is actually as a block, the original block was 16″ long. Remember this 3/4″ equals 1″, that is a scale of 1:16, which is not a super common scale but is one that is used in some detail drawings, so it’s available. [0:28:06]

So basically, if I need this to be 16″ long, I tell it to be 1″ at the scale. And of course, that is going to end up when we tell it to scale with the plan, it will remember the size in relationship to the plan. So let me go here and we are going to make a new duplicate of this. And in this one, I will paste in the line components. You can see that it’s a little bit different looking. The gap here we need to turn to zero, because we don’t want to have a gap. That will move the two flags next to each other. Now I need to tell it what size this needs to print out at. [0:28:49]

So this is again, I am telling it how big I want this to be at the current scale, and that will define its physical scale for future reference. So I now go and say OK, and that has defined that particular one. And if I go to the line type here, and let’s just draw a line and select this and change it to that new line type that I just created. You can see what it looks like. Now if I measure this, and use the M key to measure it from one end to the next. Here is the 1’4″, here is the 16″ that is what I defined, and this would still be the same 7 1/2 or whatever was the original size there. [0:29:39]

Now again, we don’t have any snaps along here, even though there was a hotspot there. We just have the Mercedes symbol that indicates that this is the edge of the line. You can see the hotspot there. I deliberately placed it at the bottom as opposed to the top as a variation on that. So that is the basics of how you can create a custom line type. You can draw these from scratch or take something that already exists in the system, copy it from the dialog and paste it onto the plan and work it. Pay attention to the scale factor that you are in at the moment that you copy this and figure out what size this should be in order to fit it in properly. [0:30:28]

Now I have found that if I wanted to go into the line types, in some cases there is – well for this CMU here, I know that when I was looking at this in another file there was something that was showing at two decimal points; it was at a different scale. I wanted to do it at 1.33 or 1 1/3″. If I type in “33” that’s going to be 1/3 bigger, but in order to be exactly 1/3 bigger, I need to type in some additional decimal places here. You will notice how it just drops off those decimal places. So we can’t actually control that. What I have found is that if you sometimes need to get it down to 3 or 4 decimal places, you can ask ArchiCAD under the “Working Units” to increase the number of decimals in the dialog boxes from 2 to as many as 4. [0:31:43]

That will give you controls down to 1/10,000 of whatever your unit is. So if I go to the Line Types and take this line, you can see it’s now got four decimal places. So it will now retain that. So this is going to make this bigger. Just know now that this is going to be instead of 16 inches, it will be 1 1/3 times that. So obviously, that’s not a whole number here in terms of this unit, but you can see how it made that bigger by changing that definition there. And we can go back to this and again just change this back to 1.0 and now it goes down. [0:32:37]

Now these symbol line types are actually more flexible than you would think. We can do them in a straight line, but we can also use them on a curve or a spline. So to give you a real graphic example, I will select this curve and go here and switch it to something like let’s say that block. You can see how it’s doing its best to create this shape along the edge here. I am not sure why we are missing the top edge here of that. Let’s try the other one and see if we get that. [0:33:18]

So for this one, it’s working better. I am not sure what the difference was there, but it’s doing a credible job here. If I go to the Line tool and do the same one, we will see how they really are in scale. You can see probably it’s measuring along this axis line and making it this distance there. Now if we go to these other ones here that have letters or this stone, let’s look at how this works with the stone. I will select this and drag a copy of it. Now we will switch this to the stone. You can see how it has this nice edging that you could use on something that is rickrack there. Or you can have something a bit more different feeling, indicating the edge of the defined area. [0:34:23]

So if we look at the definition of this – why are we? We temporarily lost the menu. So if I go back to Line Types and go to the definition of this one, you can see it has the same thing. It says “Scale with Plan”. So it was defined at 1/4″ to 1′, that’s when the lines were copied. And it was told to be 2″ from this end to that end. So at 1/4″ to 1′, that is 1:48. 2″ would be 96″ or 8′ long. So this is intended to be 8′ in length here. [0:35:12]

Now if we look at the small one here, you can see this is 1/2″ to 1′, so that means it’s going to be 2′ long. That means that the sample piece is 2′ in length. If we were to copy these line components and paste them in here, you can see these are just a bunch of lines. Now it turns out that what you can copy, what you can work with here and paste into the line dialog box are lines, arcs, and hotspots. So you can have arc elements. If I select this – these are all straight segments and are done more simply. So this may have been drawn originally with arcs and things but then they were converted to lines. [0:36:12]

But you can bring in arc segments if you want, or circles, there. Now there are some lines that look different from these that appear to have text. Here’s an “A” for compressed air or “C” for condensate or “D” for drain lines. So let’s look at the drain line. Let’s copy the line component and go and paste it in here. And what you will see is that this is not actually a letter, this is a series of lines. So in other words, in order to have something that looks like a letter like one of these here, or this fill here, these are actually in the original definition were just a series of lines. [0:37:06]

Of course, that’s pretty easy. These are all straight ones. But ones like the “D” had to be simulated with a series of straight segments. So it’s not too hard to make these with letters, but it is a bit tedious because you have to draw it out of line segments rather than putting just text down. Now this can be curved, that’s a nice thing is that you can curve this, and you can see how it does this elegant smoothing of these elements here. This concludes the section on creating custom line types. We will be looking at how you can define these in a template and define them in one project and move or paste them into another project. That will be in another lesson coming up on the use of attribute manager and related things. So please add your comments and questions to the page down below. This has been Eric Bobrow. Thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 0:38:10]

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BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-B – Element Attributes – Working with Custom Fills

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices Course lesson.  We are going to be continuing on from the lesson where I showed you how to work with line types; the beginning of our section on working with element attributes.  We’re now going to proceed on to discuss how fills are created and manipulated.  If we go to the fill types in the standard template, we will see a rather large collection of fills.  These are different categories.  We see the names listed here. [0:00:38]

In earlier versions of ArchiCAD you may not have seen – at some point they changed this – but you may not have seen the name solid fills, vectorial fills, but it was organized in this structure.  Later on they did add these to make it clearer.  Solid fills as a concept were introduced maybe around ArchiCAD 12.  There were ways of course – we had 100% or 50% poché patterns before, but somewhere around ArchiCAD 12 they introduced a more general way to do a percentage covering.  [0:01:15]

Now beyond the solid fills of course we have vectorial fills, which we are all very familiar with. Simple line patterns that are repeated to fill an area, often representing the building material that is filling that area, either on plan or in a section.  As we go down further, there are ones that were introduced called ‘Symbol fills’ here.  The symbol fills were introduced quite a while ago, maybe before ArchiCAD 10. It might have been even back as far as ArchiCAD 7 or 8.  These allow you to, in a way very similar to the symbolic line types, create more complex patterns such as a stone like this here.  [0:02:09]

Now somewhere along the line, maybe in ArchiCAD 13, Graphisoft introduced ‘Image fills’.  So in the last several versions we have had that.  And these have picture maps similar to what we might see in a 3D surface.  They allow you to place that into any 2D drawing, including a rendered plan or rendered elevation or section.  They are not truly renderings, but they do give some of that effect by filling the surface with a picture map that could be rather ornate here.  So we’ll be looking at how we create and manipulate all of these fill types over the next while.  [0:02:52]

So let me save this one here. So this is “Week 20 line types”.  And let me go create a new file and we’ll look at the steps that we need to take to define the fills.  So if I go to the Fill tool, I have a choice of all of these fills here.  Right now I am creating a fill that is, in terms of a category – well, let’s see. That’s the category there. All of the sudden I’m blanking here on how we define whether this is a fill. OK here is the choice for whether this is a drafting fill, a cover fill, a cut fill, or there’s another choice here. I’m not quite sure the difference between these.  [0:04:00]

So we’ll be exploring that in a minute.  Right now we’re going to put in a simple fill pattern that is used just for drafting purposes, for annotation essentially.  So if I draw a box here, we can see this pattern.  And I will go and say ‘Multiply’ this here.  I will do a quick grid.  Let’s do 3×3 here. So now I have a bunch of fills that are all arrayed, and I can go and select another one.  And obviously I can choose to pick other simple patterns here.  And I can pick a solid fill with a shade or one that is an opaque color here. [0:04:58]

Now let’s just look at transparency – and I don’t want to dwell on the basics of those, but I want to make sure we understand a few things before we move forward.  If I take this fill and extend it, right now it’s behind the other fill.  If I take it to the front, we’re going to see that it’s opaque because the background color here is opaque. let’s just make it transparent and now we can see through it.  So with all fills we have a foreground linework or color, we have a background color or transparency, in this case making it transparent.  [0:05:37]

Now with a poché like this where it has a percentage, then the percentage gives a density of color because these two are obviously have same settings. I just changed it from 25% to 100%.  But let’s just take this down here and bring it to the front.  This is totally opaque because the background is opaque. But if I make it transparent, then we’re going to see that it actually colors this.  We can see how it has the color here.  So for a transparent type of fill or a solid fill that is not fully opaque, we need to make sure that if we want to be able to see through it that we have this with transparency back there.  [0:06:22]

Now if we look at the definitions of the fill types and we look first of all at the solid fills here, you’ll see that 12 ½%, there’s an opacity of 12.  If I go to 50%, there’s an opacity of 50.  So if I want to create a new one that is maybe just a little more dense, maybe I call this “percent 60”, and duplicate this, then I will just change the percentage to 60.  That’s going to be just a little bit darker. And you can see how that works. [0:07:01]

Now the screen only pattern is what we see here.  It’s basically trying to give us a quick representation of the fill.  If I wanted to make this stand out a little bit I can click on these dots to add more dots.  If I click or drag through them, this starts to look quite different.  It doesn’t really look like a wash.  So maybe I will remove some of these selectively so it looks a little bit different.  I can go in and edit this by clicking.  It’s a little tedious and a little bit funky; there’s no sort of easy way. But I now have something that looks a little different than the 50%.  And it still looks sort of like an amorphous blob here. [0:07:48]

So if I go to my fill pattern you can see that the 60% here looks slightly different than the 50 or the 75.  So that’s the preview image.  You’ll notice that it isn’t showing up in the proper order.  Why?  Because I didn’t put in an extra space. So it’s alphabetized after the one here and not after these others.  So if I wanted to go fix that just so it was in the right order or a more intuitive order, I could go to the 60% here, rename it, and put in another space.  So it is paying attention to the spaces. And now I guess as soon as I say OK perhaps, this will – no, it’s still not coming up in that order.  [0:08:35]

Let’s just look at that.  Options, Element Attributes, Fill Types, and let’s go to the 50% here, rename.  And I’m going to copy this text.  So I didn’t actually rename it. Now let’s go to the 60. I will rename it and paste in that text and then change this to a six.  And let’s see what happens there.  Did that actually change the order?  Yes it did.  So there was some character that was not included.  In any event, it was sorted based on things like spaces.  The reason that percent is put in the beginning here is simply to group them all, because otherwise they would sort in a different way, and maybe to control this 100% to make it at the top rather than at the bottom. [0:09:24]

The names here that say “Air Space” or “Background Fill” “Background fill international”, all three of these are actually the same zero fill; they just have different names.  Now why do we need different names for things that look the same?  It’s because when you have fills that are shown in a section side by side, representing different parts of a wall or other assembly or one thing like a beam resting on top of a wall cavity, ArchiCAD will remove the line in between if the two fills that are touching each other have the same settings.  [0:10:05]

In order to avoid that, you can use fills that look the same but have different names.  So what’s the difference between air space and background fill?  The name. What’s the difference between foreground fill and foreground fill international? The name.  We don’t have to dwell on the origin of this, but originally there was a template for the U.S. version and a template for other English language versions that had somewhat different numbering systems.  You may recall that I talked about index numbers being a way that ArchiCAD pays attention to fills.  [0:10:41]

So in order to provide compatibility between the U.S. and international versions, they copied the fill type from the international version and put it into the U.S. one but with that extra name there.  So we don’t have to worry too much about it, just know that the reason why there are some extra ones here is simply to allow you to have, say for example, a wood truss sitting on top of an air space cavity in a wall and still show a line between them.  Now there are some gradient fills that I forgot to mention because they weren’t showing up in the definition of the fill types.  [0:11:20]

In fact, you’ll see that we can’t actually define gradient fills as a new fill type because there are only the two special ones. There’s a linear one and a radial one. And these are ones that you simply choose. if I go and inject it into here, you can see that I’ve just changed this to the linear gradient and now it’s showing a smooth change from one shade, this particular gray, to the other shade which is the background color. And if I go and adjust the angle here, you can see how this change is where it starts and finishes the gradient. [0:12:07]

So you can’t define a new linear gradient. You can just use it possibly with different colors like this. So now you can see how it has this little bit of a taupe color here. And maybe I’ll make it into a different blue or gray color there. So we can get different effects using the same linear gradient but just with different settings for the pens.  In the same way, if I switch this to a radial gradient here, you can see that it’s using a circle here to define where the gradient extends to. And of course it has a boundary just like all fills, but whether we show that boundary or not is determined by this little check here.  So now you can see that there’s no outline there. [0:13:03]

So the fill types that we can work with, in addition to the solid fills, are vectorial fills, symbol fills and image fills.  Now the vectorial fills, such as – let’s go to something like the grid 24×48 here – this is a pattern that is defined by Graphisoft using a script.  It’s actually technically quite tricky to create a vectorial fill.  You have to write out, in text essentially, something that describes how the lines are going to be drawn. And I’ve done it, but it’s not really fun and it’s certainly not something that I recommend you learn because you don’t need to.  But they are very efficient, so Graphisoft provides quite a few of these vectorial fills that represent simple line work as well as some more complex things like roof tiles and other simple tile patterns like this ‘Tile Octagon’ one here.  [0:14:05]

Now if we wanted to create another variation of the vectorial fill, we can do that easily to make certain effects happen.  So if I say ‘New’, I can get a duplicate of it. And I will just call this ‘Larger’ here. And then this one, I could say that the spacing – and let me make this 8″ here.  Now if I do this disproportionately, you can see how I get a different shape. If I make this bigger on both directions, then it’s going to be symmetrical here.  [0:14:41]

Now we are going to be looking at pattern unit and those concepts in a minute. But I just want to talk about creating a variation of this.  So I’ve now created a new one.  If I select this and make this the – let’s see, I had it…what was the tile? Here’s the original one, and then here is the new one. Let’s do this. Where is it? So you can see how this works.  Now if I change my scale from 1/4″ to 1/8″, you can see how many tiles did we have going across here? There are three big tiles going across.  If I switch this to 1/4″, it’s still three. So these are real world sized divisions.  [0:15:37]

Because we have this set in the fill types for this particular one here, we have them set to be scaled with plan. So in the same way that we work with the line types, we can have things that are just graphic. Like fireproofing is just a certain line type and a line distance that will look nice on paper, but it doesn’t matter what scale we are at. If we change from 1/4″ to 1/8″ or from 1:50 to 1: 100, it will still look the same on paper. But with these physical ones, the ones that are scaled with plan, represent physical objects and will scale up or down; just like walls, doors and windows, etc.  [0:16:28]

Now if we have something that is drawn in one orientation – so we have let’s say a parallel 18″ vertical. So what is this?  This is a siding pattern. And by the way, if I zoom in on it using this, we’ll see that it just has a single line there. Some of the patterns here may have a double line.  Let’s see about the 4″ one. No, these are just single lines here.  Let’s go back to the 18 inch.  This is 18″. So that’s basically 1’6″ or roughly half a meter, a little under ½ m in distance from one to the next. So these are rather broad boards. And this set up for a vertical pattern. You’ll notice the 90°. [0:17:20]

Well I could create a duplicate of this and say that I wanted to make it horizontal here. Then make this zero, so now it’s going to be a duplicate with a similar name.  You’ll notice the other ones already had vertical and horizontal. I just made the horizontal one – and if I switch it to the vertical, you’ll see the difference there.  Of course I could make a new one. That would be at 45 here, and then make this 45.  So we can do that. We can also of course change the spacing just like I had with the tiles here. And these are scaled with plan, so that is a true 18″ or roughly half a meter gap in there.  [0:18:10]

So I’ve now defined a couple of new ones there. If I look at the patterns we will see they show up in – here are the new ones that I just created that supplemented. now review doesn’t show the distinction properly.  You can see it still looks like vertical lines. So let me go in under the Element Attributes, Fill Types and pick up say the 45 one here. See this line here? I’m going to go and carefully click a series of diagonals. I’m just clicking a series of points. And then I click on these or actually click on any black one and just drag my mouse through to remove the black ones. So you can see now this has a pattern here that is more indicative.  [0:19:04]

If I go now to the one that says “horizontal” – and again this is looking like it’s vertical but it isn’t – I press down in a white space. It starts making a black line, and I drag across. I press down on a black dot, make it white and drag down. And now it has line work that is at least not going to be as confusing.  So now if I go back in here we will see that the horizontal and the 45 now look a little bit more understandable here.  So that’s a little bit about how you create that preview in there.  [0:19:44]

If we go to the Options, Element Attributes, Fill Types and we look at these vectorial fills, there are many variations. And you can create your own different ones that are based on let’s say larger scale versions or different scales; possibly rotated versions there. But if you really want to create your own custom fill and make it more ornate or just have more detail, then you would want to look at some of the ones that Graphisoft already has. So what are they doing here? Let’s go to of the more ornate stone patterns, like this one.  [0:20:34]

Alright, so one of the things that we haven’t talked about is “Use with drafting fills, cover fill, or cut fills.”
So what that means that this particular fill is going to be shown when we’re in the Fill tool and we are drawing drafting fills which is basically just an annotation that we are drawing manually.  It will be available, in this case, when we are doing a slab, a roof or a mesh and we choose a cover fill. It will be one that we could potentially use to cover that surface. But it will not be available when we are choosing cut fills to represent building materials in a section when we are cutting through the element. [0:21:17]

So basically this is a choice that you can make so that your lists of fills or materials only show up in the right places.  We don’t want these stone paving patterns when we’re trying to describe the cut through of a wall.  You’ll also see here is the motif size and the scale and the stroke. So we’re going to look at that.  I’m going to copy this information here, and we’ll say OK.  Let me zoom out a little bit and we will paste here.  So you can see this rather elaborate but still somewhat simplistic pattern.  A series of lines; all of these are lines here creating that.  [0:22:14]

If I wanted to make a variation of it, it gets a little bit tricky. The simplest thing I’ve done is just to remove some things. So let’s say I wanted to have that center stone be a little bit larger here. I could go get rid of some of these things and I could clean that up. Let’s just select this now and copy it.  We’ll go to the Element Attributes, Fill Types here and create a new Symbol fill. And we’ll call it “New Stones”.  I will then paste here, so it has come in here.  If I zoom out a little bit we’ll see what it looks like. [0:23:10]

It actually looks pretty good.  This screen pattern is going to be hard to make anything really representative, so I’m not going to worry about that.  But I will say that it isn’t a cut fill, it’s intended for a cover fill or a drafting fill.  Let’s say it’s scaled with plan.  So this is the size. And this little yellow thing, that’s the area that I copied and pasted, that’s the pattern unit.  If I turn this off, it shows how it’s going to repeat.  You can see how the pattern is visible when you start zooming out a lot, but if you were zoomed in it’s actually less obvious here.  And here’s the pattern unit, that little yellow. [0:23:52]

Let’s say OK.  I’ve just defined the new stones here.  Now this is just the line work that I used for it.  Let’s compare those. So if I make this one “C Stone 13” there, and then this one we’ll make the “New Stones” – which show up at the bottom of the list here I guess in part because I didn’t start it with a number. So often alphabetically it shows up here like that. And you can see how these look very similar, but there is a difference in terms of the line work.  This has fewer lines in here; just a little bit less dense in terms of some of the detail there.  [0:24:39]

So it’s hard to make an organic pattern like this repeat. What you essentially have to be able to – and I will just demonstrate this crudely – you have to be able to create a pattern that if we were to drag a copy of it from one side to the next creates a nice, smooth transition.  That is what you need to do is make sure that the right side matches the left side and the top matches the bottom so that when you’re working with it, it all flows smoothly.  I’m not going to attempt to show you a way to do that.  I’ll just say that what you probably will want to do if you were to create that is draw some lines to indicate what your pattern area is. [0:25:29]

In other words, a line on all four sides of this. And in fact extend this out and make the grid to be 3×3. And then draw a bunch of lines that you think might work and copy them to the sides and top on the four different sides. Then adjust things to make them start looking better and copy them back and forth between a center and the outside. Ultimately after some work, you’ll be able to have something that when you copy it to the side or above or below it all blends nicely.  In Photoshop there are some tools that allow you to do an offset where you can take something and automatically offset a copy of it a certain distance.  [0:26:11]

So you can do some textures that way.  Perhaps the best way to create an organic pattern like this would be to find something that already exists as a Photoshop texture and put it in and trace over it because then you will already have something that has someone else has worked on and create it as an organic texture.  So I think that’s as far as I want to go in terms of explaining that concept.  [0:26:38]

Now if we look at the fill types here, and we look at one of these roof tiles like this, you’ll notice that there’s a motif size – how big this is in one direction or the other – and there are some strokes.  Now what does this mean?  It means it’s going to repeat these things at a certain offset.  Now the angle is pretty easy. If I make this 30° it’s going to rotate the whole thing here.  You know that you can rotate the fill on the plan.  You don’t have to do this, but sometimes you do want a fill this on an angle, so you would use it here. What if you were to change the scale? So if I were to make this 2, it’s going to be a wider version of it. [0:27:26]

So taking the same motif or the line work and extending it. Let’s make it 3 and see how we are going to get a different proportion to that.  In fact let me cancel this and we’ll go back in and look at the grids that they’ve got. So there is a “Grid 24×48″, that is a 2×4 and that’s roughly, in terms of metric, that would be about 600×1200 mm here. If we wanted to have a new copy of it, let’s say it was 24×60, we could make this here. We can start it this way and say 60 is 5′.  Now this is going to be a different grid pattern here. That is how we can reproportion it.  [0:28:33]

Now this is actually a vectorial hatch here rather than a symbol one, but the symbol ones work the same way. So let’s go the ledge stone or something like that. Here’s the pattern. Actually it looks like this pattern is quite extensive. It really has a lot of line work already included. And the reason why one might do that is to make the repetitions less obvious. So it’s a little hard to tell, but it says that the motif is going 20′, or 6 m across. So someone took some line work like this and just made variations over a fairly long distance so that your eye wouldn’t necessarily see the repetitions when you have this ledge stone used for a wall or for paving thing there. [0:29:22]

Now let’s take one that here, this is an octagon and diamond here. We’ll zoom in. If we were to put in a gap here – and let me just put in a gap of 1′, what we’re going to see is that this breaks up – let’s say 3′ here. 1’6″, let’s try that. So this is how far offset each repetition is from the next.  Since this was a 1×1 grid, when I offset this a specific distance that is not an even division, it will start to show funny. So if I say 4″, which is a third of a foot, you can see how I’m getting some nice little stair step.  So this is a different pattern than it was originally where this was a zero and everything lined up neatly. So that’s an offset that you can do.  You can also offset these things horizontally. so if I make this a longer space – 1″ here or say 3″ going this way, yes, you can see that we can get it offset in that dimension. [0:30:47]

Now if we click on ‘Regular Arrangement’ then it will just automatically take the motif size and repeat this. Depending on what you’re working on, you may find that there are some offsets here that are creating an effect that they’re taking advantage of.  So I’m not an expert on doing this. You can play around with these strokes and see how it affects the repetitions of that. I think this probably covers most of the things that we would want to cover. Actually, no I’m sorry, we’ve gone through vectorial and symbol fills but we have not gone through image fills.  So if we look at image fills here, you’ll see that instead of line work, there is an image.  [0:31:41]

If I say ‘Load Image’ – and let’s just create a new image fill – I can say ‘Load Image’ and then I can go and get a picture from any file on my computer or I can go find within the library, and there are some nice textures here. For example there is a stone pattern. And remember I was talking about tracing a pattern.  This has already been clearly done to tile.  If you look on the left side where my pointer is, there is a stone here and it matches this side of this stone. And the same thing, the bottom of this stone matches the top of that stone. So it’s going to repeat. Someone carefully worked this to make this a fairly natural looking pattern that repeats.  [0:32:30]

I am going to say OK, and you can see here that it’s actually repeating in a 2×2 grid.  If I make it 4×4, you can see this is what it would like if you zoomed out. It’s covering a larger area. Now the reason why we have these sample choices to look at in the fill types here is that we want to be able to not only see how it repeats but also gauge the size of this.  So how big is this in terms of stones?  Right now this says that it’s set up to be just over 1 inch across. That would be tiny, tiny little pebbles, also almost like grains of stand here.  [0:33:09]

That would be crazy. Let me make this 1′ across. That might be a reasonable thing; 12”, which would be roughly 300 mm across for this.  I’ve now created an image fill. I will rename this. We’ll call it “Stones” here.  It is scaled with plan so it’s going to be 1′ across here. Say OK, and let’s just see how that compares to some of these other things.  So we’ll go and first of all do a carpet one that we have already seen here, this carpet. And you can see as I zoom in on it, it has this little pattern. And I’ll take this one and put it in the “New Stones”, and that looks alright. Maybe those stones should be bigger. They look still a little bit smaller than I think is realistic. [0:34:03]

So if I go to the Options, Element Attributes, Fill Types, and I go to the one that I just created, “Stones”, I try 2′.  Obviously if it was bricks or blocks or things like that, you could actually tell ArchiCAD how big it should be and be precise, but right now it’s more for a visual representation so I’ll just say, “Oh, let’s try this.” And you can see how instantly it changes. Now it’s certainly closer to that one.  Maybe I should take it bigger. We’ll just go here in try “Stones” and say 5′ across. These would be rather large stones. Now you can see how they look compared to other things. If I go to the Wall tool and just draw a wall, you can see how big these stones are relative to the wall.  [0:34:55]

So in fact they could be even bigger if they were something like flagstones, but you get the idea of how you can manipulate that.  Alright, so I think we’ve probably covered all the manipulations that we need to do with creating and editing image fills, with creating and editing vectorial symbol fills, vectorial fills and solid fills. And remember that there were the gradient fills that you can’t define new ones but you can use them for special visual purposes. Again the image fills here we would want to use just a as a drafting fill or possibly as a cover fill here.  We certainly would never use them and in fact it doesn’t allow us to use them with an image fill.  I realize there’s one more special type of fill that we haven’t looked that and that is ‘Soft Insulation’.  [0:36:00]

So insulation is commonly done – and let me zoom in – with this pattern here. This is something that was introduced in ArchiCAD 13. When you have a pattern like this – and you can see the actual pattern is in yellow if I zoom in on it – it’s just this one area here. And if I copy this and paste it in here and zoom in on it, you can see this is basically just a series of arcs.  Here you can actually see some arcs that were a part of it as opposed to line segments.  So this is used primarily in walls when you have a certain type of wall here. So I’m just going to take this wall and we’ll select this and take one that has – do we have some insulation? [0:37:12]

Brick veneer, foam insulation, okay. Here’s an insulated one. If we look at that, this does not have the right type of insulation in it. So I’m going to go and just show how that fill is controlled. So I will go and edit this composite here. Let’s just say here is the insulation. I will change this to ‘Blanket Insulation’ here and I say OK. We are seeing it change the insulation there, but what we would need to do in ArchiCAD 17 is say that blanket insulation – let’s see. We have ‘Insulation Blanket’ is going to be set up to fit to the skin. So what that does is it makes sure that the fill in the case of walls is going to be oriented to face the axis of the wall and will be stretched to fit or shrink as needed to fit that skin. [0:38:36]

And now you can see what it has done here.  If I were to go into this composite and change that insulation here and make this thicker – let’s just make this much thicker now – you’ll see how it automatically expands. That was something that was introduced into ArchiCAD 13. It’s using this particular fill, but the trick or the setting that you need to do to make it a soft insulation that fills the cavity is that in the composite and in the building material you have to say that it should be oriented based on the skin. [0:39:23]

If I go back to ArchiCAD 14 and we look at the composites here, let’s go to the one of the ones that is an insulated one here. This is ‘Insulation Rigid’. I will change this to the insulation that is ‘bat’ here, and I also need to say that the fill orientation is ‘Fit to Skin’. Now I guess that one does not do that. Maybe it has to be a different – here is the symbol fills for the insulation that it would need. So you would need to make sure you have an eligible one. In this case a symbol fill rather than a vectorial fill. Then you say ‘Fit to Skin’, and now that will work. [0:40:20]

So the difference is that this is controlled under the composites as opposed to the building materials. So that would be true in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier for those soft insulation fills. You would control it under the Options, Element Attributes, Composites, where you would then pick the particular fill orientation for that skin there. In ArchiCAD 17 and later versions, that is handled not under the composite, but under the building materials where in general you’re going to say that a particular material like this insulation is going to always try to fit to the skin when it’s used for that purpose in a wall.  So this completes all of the explanation that I have for attributes and fill types; defining new and editing and adjusting the fill types. We’ll be continuing on with other attributes definitions next week. please add your comments and questions to the page down below.  This is been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

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BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-C – Element Attributes: Working with Custom Materials and Surfaces

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices Course lesson on Element Attributes.  Today we will be focusing on Materials or, as they are now called in ArchiCAD 17, surfaces. So we started week 20 with our focus on Element Attributes, and we’ve gone through the basic concept here. We went through types and fill types last time. Now instead of going on directly to composites I’m going to skip down to Materials in ArchiCAD 16 here. The dialogs that we will see in ArchiCAD 17 will be very similar, just have the word ‘Surfaces’ in many cases.  [0:00:46]

The reason why I’m skipping down here is because in ArchiCAD 17 – and let me just skip over to ArchiCAD 17 here – under the Element Attributes, we have building Materials that refer to surfaces, the Materials. So I wanted to define and show you how the surfaces – or the old word for it, Materials – work so that when we’re working on building Materials you know what they’re referring to a little bit more fully. And then composites actually refer to, in versions earlier than 17, they refer to fill types. Now they refer to building Materials. [0:01:27]

So I’m basically going to go through the Materials or surfaces and then in the next lesson we’ll be looking at building Materials and then finally the composites. I figure this sequence might be the best way to understand how everything fits together.  So in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, so going back many versions, probably back to version 8 I would think. Version 9 is when the Materials and surfaces started to integrate Lightworks. So they took on a certain form and shape at that point. So going back many generations. [0:02:08]

I am in ArchiCAD 16. We are going to go to Options, Element Attributes, Materials. Remember, if you are in ArchiCAD 17 it will say surfaces. But the dialog box will be almost exactly the same.  When we are looking at Materials or Surface settings, we’re looking at potentially a long list. Graphisoft supplies many common material or surface descriptions. Each one of them has a name of course.  They are displayed alphabetically. In the U.S. the system has some numbers at the beginning that are referring to CSI or Construction Specification Index categories. [0:02:51]

In international use they don’t have a common numbering system so it’s all alphabetical. But regardless, you’ll see a list of these Materials or Surfaces. You’ll see their name and then you’ll see little icons next to them that indicate whether they have an associated fill or an associated texture.  So if we look at the ‘Default Walls Exterior’, which is what we’re in right now, we’ll see that it has a surface color and some other attributes of how it responds to light. But there is no hatching pattern. So if you’re using this simple material or surface, it’s going to look plain in elevation or 3D view with no line work on there. And there’s no texture.  [0:03:42]

Now the preview here we are seeing represented using a tool or a method called the ‘Internal Engine’. And this comes from way back probably back as far as ArchiCAD 4. I do recall I started with ArchiCAD 3.4. And in ArchiCAD 3.4 we had very simple shading that we were working with. In version 4, this was back in 1990, Graphisoft introduced the first texture mapping which is the ability to show some type of surface material like bricks or wood or carpet. And I think they may have also started to introduce the shadow casting at that point. [0:4:26]

So ‘Internal Engine’ is the code that Graphisoft created years ago to represent materials that way. Later on in version 9, they introduced Lightworks as a way to represent your 3D model in a more realistic way. And I think in version 8 they started to use Open GL.  Now these are all closely related, but we need to understand them and we’ll go to them one at a time. So in the Internal Engine, we have the ability for any material to have a surface color. And let me just duplicate this here and call this “*Test”. I’m putting in a star or in asterisk here because when I do that, it’s going to show up right at the top of the list. This is a tip that you may find in many of the alphabetical lists of ArchiCAD, if you put in an asterisk, it will alphabetize it at the beginning.  [0:05:29]

I sometimes do that when I’m working on a project just to make all of the custom materials or surfaces stand out and just jump up to the top of the list.  So here I duplicated the previous one and if I open up the surface color by double clicking on it I can just pick any other color that I want. And this is a color chart here. There are other ways that you can pick colors. You can pick a color, depending on whether you’re on Mac or Windows, from many other different styles.  They all will pick a certain red green and blue value here. If you are using the one that has RGB here it also has the ability to, if you drag this in, you’ll see how it gets more pale, less saturation. [0:06:22]

Here it gets more intense. And this slider will take it darker and mix in black into the color. Regardless of what color you pick, when you say OK, you’ll see that this preview updates because the surface color is the dominant look of this material or surface.  When we look at these we’ll quickly go through them and then we’ll look at them in a little bit more detail as needed. Transparency allows you to simulate something that is more like glass. If I make this half way roughly, you can see we’re starting to see through it but it does look like there’s something there. If I make it 100% transparent, it totally disappears; 100% transmittance is how much light it transmits.  [0:07:16]

There is also this choice here of attenuation. You’ll notice how this looks even. You can’t really tell whether it’s a flat disk or a sphere. But if we increase the attenuation, then it will start to look a little bit more like it’s solid around the edges, particularly if I make the transmittance higher. And you can see as we look through the center of it we can see through it, but on the edges the transmittance attenuates or weakens. This means that as we are looking edge on, it’s not quite as transparent, it doesn’t transmit as much light. If we make that more, you can see how it really looks different. So I can make this quite transparent in the center and still have it visually stand out on the edges.  [0:08:10]

So these simulate to some extent how glass works. And you can just play around with it, there are no rules here in the sense that you can do whatever you like. But if we go to something like what Graphisoft has, the “Glass Clear”, you can see it has a high transmittance, no color, a very neutral color, and no attenuation. So really you can’t tell other than that there’s sort of a little bit of a haze on it. But if we go to “Glass Blue Ice”, you can see that it has attenuation, so it does look more solid around the edges. And the transmittance is lower. These are ones that are in the standard list of materials or surfaces.  [0:08:56]

Now talking about standard, this is based on any particular file. So it’s actually need to the file, which means that it is inherited from the template that you use to start out the project.  So when you say “I want to create a new project”, you generally will do it in one of several ways. You might create a new project based on a template, which is certainly a common thing. You might use the standard Graphisoft one or MasterTemplate one that you’ve customized. Whatever were the materials or surfaces in that particular file are going to be inherited and available in the new one. If you take a project that already exists and delete the building and save it under a new name, so now you have a new file with no building geometry, then it will have the same materials or surfaces were previously set up. [0:09:50]

If you make any changes, like I just created this test one, it only affects the current file and any descendants. This means that if I were to turn that file into a template or if I were to save a copy to start a new project, it will affect it. But it won’t affect any other project file.  This is true for all attributes in general. They get passed along to children, projects that are derived from one ancestor. There are ways to get materials or line types or fills from one project to another. We’ll be looking at that in a section on Attribute Manager. [0:10:28]

So we’ve looked at the most basic thing in terms of color, transmittance, and attenuation. Let’s look at Emission. If we go back to the glass, let’s take the “Glass Tinted Dark”. No, let’s take the “Glass Clear” here. So this one I’m going to duplicate and we’ll call it “Test 2”. I’m now going to start looking at the emission color and attenuation. So emission is a simple way of simulating light coming from behind or emitting from this surface.  It’s black here, which means essentially that there’s no emission or light coming from it. And if I double click on this chip and move this up even a little bit, you can see how it changes to just a bit of a gray tone. [0:11:24]

If I say OK you’ll see how it looks glowing just subtly.  So this adds just a certain amount of light that isn’t in the environment; that makes it glow.  If I take this higher, up to halfway, we’ll see that it starts to look more like a glowing sphere, like there’s light from the inside.  If I give it a color instead of having it be the center, and maybe take it out towards the yellow here, then you’ll see how it starts to tint like it’s a yellow tinted surface.  So what you can do here is actually make things, like a lamp or something that looks like it’s a lamp. I’m trying to see where – here it is, “Lamp”. It’s #26, hard to remember. [0:12:18]

But if I go to “Lamp” here, you can see how it really looks like something that is glowing like a light bulb so to speak.  And you can see the emission color is virtually fully lit up. There’s no black in it. And it has a little color in that.  So that’s what they have here. It does have some transmittance. We just barely see some things through there. You can see the checkerboard background there. Now the attenuation here, you can see how it’s less light around the outsides and more in the center.  If I were to take this from 34 down to zero, we’re not going to see much difference. [0:13:03]

Let’s take it up to 100, and you can see how it’s only glowing right in the center and the outside is not. If I bring this back you can see the outside has less but it’s getting in there, its glowing more.  So the attenuation again is the weakening or the lessening of the emission light as we are looking at it.  Now with sources that have emission, the reflection of light on the surface will not be very visible. So let’s go back to the test here and in fact let’s go to the standard default wall color and then duplicate that. And we’ll call this “Test 3”. [0:13:54]

Now let’s look at how the reflection of surfaces plays out.  So ambient has to do with the overall light in the space and how it reflects off the surface. It’s not directional light, its overall. At 100% here it’s basically telling the internal engine to try to reflect more light, as much as seems naturally possible. So you can see this is sort of like a plastic surface with the way it looks. Or maybe a semi-gloss paint. If I take the ambient down to 50%, you can see it looks duller like a flat paint. If I take it down all the way you can see the looks even duller, a little bit more like a natural surface, like a stone or wood or things like that. [0:14:45]

It still doesn’t look like a stone because it’s not rough, it doesn’t have a rough texture to it. But at least it does change. You can see how this makes it brighter and a little bit flatter.  Let’s take it about halfway up here and then play around with the diffuse reflection.  So this is all under the category of reflection. So diffuse has to do with the reflection from a direction. So you can see that as I take this down it’s actually not reflecting any light here. And as I take this up it reflects, but it’s somewhat directional here. and you can see how this keeps going up as I move this up. and it starts to get more of a hotspot as I bring that up.  [0:15:40]

So if I have less of a hotspot but I bring the ambient up – well, you know what? The difference between ambient and diffuse I’ve never gotten really clear on. I think you just have to play around with this to see the difference between what these sliders do. but I do know that shinyness has to do with the focus of that hotspot. So if there is some reflection of light, how shiny is it? If you make it shinier, then that might will – now that’s interesting. It’s 100% here. I am not quite sure, I thought that when we… [0:16:26]

So depending upon what you have set up here, you can see that when I have this way up here that shiny spot is very narrow. You can simulate something that is a shiny surface that if there was a light shining on it you would see that point. As I back this off, that shiny surface becomes a little broader so it’s not quite as much of a sheen. So if you think about waxing a floor and getting more of a shine on it, that’s what this has to do with. And if I take it down you can see at some points it’s just going to render in sort of a weird way. But if we take it down to a moderate level it’s more of an even shine rather than a pointed one. [0:17:15]

Let’s just see if we can find one that’s in the standard that would be shiny, like “Gold China”. So here “Gold China”, the shinyness is up fairly high. There’s also this glowing setting that we will look at. But let’s duplicate this and we’ll it “Test Shiny”. So here is a shiny surface. if I take the ambient down you can see in just gets darker. If I take the diffuse up it spreads it out so it doesn’t look quite as shiny. I take the shinyness up more and it gets pinpointed almost like it’s a polished glass. And I take it down and it sort of glows more broadly. so you can play around with these things and see if you can get something that looks more realistic to your eye.  [0:18:05]

Now all of the things that we’re looking at here are being rendered with the internal engine, which in fact is a simpler or cruder method for representing surfaces.  We’re going to see that this is often the basis that we’ll use for creating new materials. It’s certainly one way that is relatively straightforward to understand these controls. The controls for the Lightworks are actually much more complex and we’ll be spending a little time on then shortly.  [0:18:36]

Now here is the glowing specular. so emission would be how much light is coming out from the inside, at least that’s what it essentially tries to imitate.  There’s no emission here, and it doesn’t look like it has a light inside of it, but it does have this specular highlight. So specular, I am not quite sure the technical meaning but it does have to do with the way that light bounces off a surface on a shine and if it has a color. So if I go to the specular color here and I change it to say more of a pinkish color, you’ll see that it changed this shine. It is fighting with that. Let’s take this and make it more of a white color here. [0:19:28]

You can see how it’s more white. Originally this was more of this same yellow color. And you can see how what it does. So it colors that shiny spot with this. And this is the amount of color that’s mixed in. if I turn this down, you can see how it’s looking duller and here it’s looking more shiny. so again you can play around with these.  I haven’t really become a super expert at it, but I’m comfortable enough that I can create something that sort of works.  [0:20:02]

Now all of these things relate to the surface color. They are not using a texture. so in fact the more realistic surfaces or materials are going to be ones based on some type of a texture. So here we have a texture that is in U.S. version for river rock. These are picture maps that are being shown in the preview here and in your 3D view if you have textures shown in this. And here is a hatching that would show up when you have an elevation drawing where you are not showing any colors, you are just showing line work. It would use a particular hatch or fill pattern if you have that turned on.  [0:20:51]

So you’ll notice that there is a surface color here.  This surface color is essentially for the most part ignored. It’s basically going to use the river rock -this picture – instead of the color. But this little color chip refers to it. So it’s good if you’re creating your own material to make sure that if you do have a texture file that you change the surface color to be somewhat reminiscent. So you don’t have this one being red and this one blue, because then we’ll see a red color here and it just won’t correspond visually.  [0:21:35]

Now you’ll notice that this texture here looks smooth.  In other words, it’s repeating, or let’s say it’s a picture that we can look at repeated by changing the sample. if I change this to 3×3 you’re going to start to see that there is thirds left to right and top to bottom. And there is some repetition. You can see some of the lines at the edge. but it’s somewhat subtle.  We don’t see any hard edges here. and this is what is happening up on this surface is that it’s repeating as its going around that surface.  Now this gives you a preview of what you’ve got. If I go back to the 1×1, this is an important view that you need to be familiar with because the size of the texture file in terms of real world – this is 1’8″, that’s about ½ m roughly. That is the size of the stones. [0:22:43]

If I were to change this or if I were to cut this and type in 3′ or something like that, that would be a larger. You can see how the stones became much bigger. if I make it 1′, then they are going to be more like pebble size on here.  This particular preview I calculated at one point based on how they had bricks or blocks, but it was I think maybe 8′ high. it certainly was approximately one story high. Sort of a standard interior height.  Obviously it’s circular and not like what we would see on a wall, but you can just imagine that. So if you are just trying to get a sense of scale, a person standing next to it would be roughly 2.3 of the height of this. [0:23:35]

So the original size was this. Now you’ll notice this ‘Keep Original Proportion’ is nice because if I have that unchecked and I make this a different proportion, you’re going to see how it starts to get squished. And sometimes that’s a good ability to change the way things look. But overall we would want to keep the original proportion to have it look like the original image here. In terms of the angle of this with the rock, if we were to make this a 30° angle we probably wouldn’t see too much difference here. It does, you can just barely see that it’s sort of looks like it’s on a tilt. [0:24:23]

But certainly if we were to just put it back to zero and we were to go to a brick or block, like here is a brick pattern, if I were to change this to 30° we’re going to have a pattern that is tilted. So while you can manually change the orientation of a pattern using controls under the Design menu for 3D texture, this is one way to say, for example – and let’s just put it back to the zero – that we might have some materials like ‘Cherry Wood’ that is horizontal. Actually that one is not too clear there. What about ‘Walnut Horizontal’.  [0:25:06]

Okay, so you can see that this picture of the ‘Wood grain Walnut’ is going vertical in terms of the grain, but it’s been turned 90° so it looks like the grain is going horizontally. This one here that says “V” for vertical has a 0° so it looks a little bit vertical here. So you might use this in some cases when you are modeling to pay attention if you have some molding or something like that that is running horizontally across the baseboard or the crown. You might want to choose the horizontal version of this rather than the vertical one or create a texture material surface that was set up in that orientation. [0:25:56]

Now let’s look at how we might create a new surface or material using a different texture file.  So let’s go and take a stone one here. You can see here is this stone, and I’m going to duplicate it. We’ll call this “*Stone Test”. So again I’m putting the asterisk so that all of these new ones that I am creating are floating up to the top here, just for convenience. Now this texture file here is one that is loaded in the standard library in the U.S. and I’m sure there are some similar ones in the international version of ArchiCAD.  [0:26:45]

You can go ahead – and I’ve duplicated this so this is a different material – I can go ahead and search. And when I search, you’ll see that it brings up a dialog box allowing me to load an image from the library.  So we can load the image from the library or we can actually go to the File dialog box and find an image if you have a picture of a material that you’d like to use.  And if you want to load something in, like perhaps a folder with a bunch of these images, you could go from here to the library manager and tell it to load a folder of images and then they would all be available within this.  [0:27:27]

Now I’m in ArchiCAD library 16. Library 17 would be similar in the U.S.  We have some special textures related to Lightworks. there aren’t too many of those, in fact you can see just a handful. We have some standard textures here. This is C-Stone, the cultured stone we had. If I click on any one of them we will see there are some stone ones. They are also organized obviously into categories here. And you can see all sorts of different choices that we have under the standard textures.  Now in the U.S. there are, in addition to the standard textures, there are the Arrowway textures here which are actually higher quality textures. [0:28:20]

Now what makes the texture higher quality is more resolution, meaning that the number of dots that define that image are higher. It’s just more detailed and most likely more realistic in the effect.  Now a little tip here: in version 18, which will be coming out relatively soon, Graphisoft has changed the rendering tools and they are going to be even higher quality rendering options than what we’re looking at here. But the principals will still be generally similar.  And certainly I will have an update after 18 comes out that I will be adding to the course website.  [0:29:07]

But if we go under the Arrowway textures, and let’s say I was talking about stone. so maybe it would be under masonry here. Here is stone here, and here is a dark sandstone and different types of sandstone granite. This is a nice granite here. so this looks quite realistic. And you can see that it says 1×1. If I go to 4×4, we’ll see how it repeats. And it does have a bit of a repetition pattern here. Sometimes you can minimize that by using the option – let’s just take this to a 2×2 – taking the option to mirror it. And you can see how it becomes a kaleidoscopic image. [0:29:53]

If I go up to the 3×3, and we’ll see a slightly different effect between these. You can see how it’s changing that appearance. There’s another option here and another option here. so depending upon what that file is that you have, it’s possible that one of these mirroring methods may help it to be more natural looking. But regardless of what you choose there, if we go to the 1×1, you want to make sure that the size relates. So it’s hard to tell because of the grain pattern, but 5′ across so 1.5 m roughly. That could be fine. And you can see here if we were to imagine this being from floor to ceiling, that’s something quite possible. [0:30:40]

But maybe it should be a little smaller. So I could make it 4′ here. And you’ll see that it gets a little bit finer grained there. So I’ve created a new one and I’ve determined its size that it’s going to render at.  Now the only way to really see how these materials or surfaces look is to render them or to look at elements in 3D with this. This little preview is obviously pretty tiny. We’re going to looking at some of the other effects here shortly, but I just want to show you what this looks like. So “Stone Test” that I just created, let me go ahead create a slab here. [0:31:22]

We’ll put in a wall behind it with some context. And remember I’m in ArchiCAD 16, so we’re talking about here the material on the top. So I’m going to make this the “Stone Test” on the top. And in ArchiCAD 17 it would be similar except there would be a surface override that we might choose there. So let me look in 3D and you can see what this looks like. Let’s turn off this grid, because it’s giving it a slight distortion to the look. We will go to the View menu, Editing Plane Display. Turn that off, and you can see what we have there.  [0:32:09]

It’s not a bad looking texture. Obviously it does look a little bit artificially repeating, but if we have furniture or other things we just wouldn’t tend to see an issue with that. so that’s the new material that I just created.  Let’s take this wall and say we had a surface here. Let’s change it to the test, then we’ll see how that test was sort of – I made it glass-like so you can see through that. We can go to “Test Shiny” and this was a gold color. And you can see it does look like it’s coated in gold.  And when we render this we’re going to be seeing some differences, and I’m going to be explaining how we can make sure that they look similar between the 3D window and the rendering just shortly.  [0:33:07]

Let’s go back to the Element Attributes, Materials or Surfaces if we were in ArchiCAD 17, and let’s look at some other effects here that affect the realism. So if we go to brick here, there is something called “Bump Mapping” And what the bump mapping does is it makes this look a little bit more like it has depth, it’s a bumpy surface.  I’m not going to go into all the details. In today’s lesson I want to go into the basics of defining and controlling these things. I’ll be doing a section later in the course on rendering and fine tuning your materials or surfaces to get better results, and I will spend more time there on some of these fine details. [0:34:01]

Basically there is a concept of an alpha channel. Now the alpha channel allows in some cases materials to be re-tinted. And that is the most common one, that one and transparency are the two that are used most frequently when I’ve been creating my own materials. Graphisoft will do some things with bump mapping which are a little bit trickier to do. So let’s look at something like a carpet. And let’s see – here is a carpet blue. So this carpet here, you can see the preview is showing a bluish-purple color matching this little color chip. The actual texture has the name “CarpetAlpha.png”. [0:35:03]

I think we’re all familiar with JPG files. PNG is another image format that you may or may not be familiar with. It’s similar to JPEG but it allows what is called an ‘alpha channel’ or an additional set information. In this case, the alpha channel has to do with the surface color. So without getting into all the details of it, this “Carpet Blue”, if I double click on the color chip and change it to green, we are going to see that the carpet becomes green. It didn’t change the name. Of course, I could rename this to do that or duplicate it and create that. [0:35:44]

Only some of the materials or surfaces will actually change color based on the chip here. If we were to go to something like the stone and I change the color here to green, we’re not going to see any change at all because the alpha channel is not set up with a surface. now simply by checking this box doesn’t actually make it do anything. It has to be set up for that. You’ll notice that JPG – so that is the common image file format – does not actually support alpha channels, so it’s not going to actually use that information.  In fact, this probably is pretty much ignored as a JPEG file. [0:36:30]

But let’s go back to the carpet one. Here’s a “Carpet Gray”. So if we were to change this color it would work.  Here is that surface and here’s the alpha. Let’s see here, I know there were some other ones in here that are also…and I’m wondering what other ones have an alpha channel in there.  It might be concrete. So the concrete can be tinted here. If I go in here and we make this concrete there, you can see actually that was rather dramatic. Let’s just make this – oh, that’s interesting. I just crashed ArchiCAD. So we’ll just reopen ArchiCAD here and see if that works. Not that I’ve done much that I really need to retain. [0:37:31]

I will continue to open that project and go on to the concrete base here. It looks like we still have the little bit that I drew. Let’s go back to the definition of the materials here. We’ll go to the “Concrete Beige”. And again, you can see the name of the texture has the alpha in there. So having the word ‘Alpha’ in here doesn’t make it work, but it is a sign that Graphisoft puts on saying, “This type of texture file is setup to allow the Alpha channel to do something”. And in general I’ve noticed it being a surface color. So obviously if I tint this a little bit, this blue and taupe color, it will have a slight bit of coloring here. [0:38:39]

I will go back in and maybe make it a little bit less saturated and we can get something just a little bit more subtle there. Now obviously the texture does create a certain roughness or a certain appearance. This is not a smooth plastic or paint, and that is the whole point of these surfaces. Now I think that if I were to remove the texture, we’re going to see how it actually now looks totally smooth. And in fact it looks rather shiny. We might realize that it looked a little shiny with the picture, and if we had taken down some of the reflections it could’ve been a little bit rougher there. But I guess it’s a finished concrete as opposed to a rough concrete. [0:39:36]

Now let’s look under this dialog box at some things about how internal engine relates to these other previews and what that means in terms of rendering. So as I mentioned, it’s easiest to manipulate the materials in the internal engine. Here is “Stone test”. We were able to manipulate the size of this. We were able to change things about whether something is transparent.  It’s fairly straightforward to create something that’s at least somewhat representative of the real world material.  When we go to Open GL, what you’ll see is that looks pretty similar here. In fact, this is really what we’re seeing down here. So it’s close, but not quite the same. [0:40:39]

Now you can see that these controls just jump way up here. Let’s go down to Internal Engine. And actually for some reason this is set to 100. Let’s just take it down and go to the Open GL. It didn’t change that there, but look at this preview. It got lost. This is a bug that I’ve noticed occasionally with recent versions of ArchiCAD is that the Open GL preview does not show up properly after you’ve made some changes. If I say OK and I go back in to the materials and we go back to that “Stone Test”, it’s still changing. Let’s see if I were to change the scale. No. So this is not responding the way it should in terms of the Open GL preview. [0:41:45]

In fact, I generally don’t look at the Open GL preview, because it matches the Internal Engine in the 3D view fairly closely. But if we were to look at the Lightworks Rendering Engine, we’ll see something rather different. Notice that this looks totally different. You may recall that a few minutes ago I took one of the materials that was one of the stone materials and I duplicated it and I called it “Stone Test”. Then I changed it to a different stone texture. Well, the Lightworks preview did not change.  So let’s just take a look at how Lightworks renders compared to the 3D view, and then we’ll understand or be able to look at some of these things here.  [0:42:35]

So if I’m looking in 3D I’m looking into Open GL format. Also in our 3D View Options, I can switch to the Internal 3D Engine which in fact does not show textures and all.  So the Internal Engine – the only reason that I would generally bring this up is when I want to see how an elevation will look, because the Internal Engine will do a clean version of how lines or elements will touch each other. So if I go back to here and let’s say that I take this wall back and duplicate a copy of it here. Now if I look in 3D, we’re going to see that it still looks the same but it is two separate walls. if I go back to that 3D View Options, Open GL, we may see in some cases, depending on how it’s done, we may see a seam. I’m sure you’ve seen that in some views of a model. [0:43:40]

In the Open GL, you’ll see just a slight bit of a line of where things are joining.  But the representation here is what we would see if we had an elevation.  You can see here again this is two separate walls, but it’s removing the line because they have the same material.  And I will make this a different material, a different surface. Let’s just make it totally different here. now I can see the line in the elevation. and when we go to 3D, of course we are seeing the color change, but we’re also seeing a line there. [0:44:19]

Now in general I don’t particularly suggest that you work in the Internal 3D engine because it’s slower to update. But occasionally you can see how crisp and clean this looks just for the line work. you can see what it would look like in an elevation. Let me get this back to the Open GL, and let’s look at what happens when I render this.  So I’m going to go to the Document menu, Creative Imaging, Photo Render This Projection.  What’s going to happen?  It’s going to render this in whatever was the default setting for renderings. And you’ll see something very different than we had in the 3D window, because the new material or surface that I created on the floor was not actually updated for Lightworks purposes. [0:45:18]

it looked fine in the 3D window and in the Open GL, but the Lightworks was not coordinated. as a separate issue or limitation, the 3D window does not show actual reflections, but Lightworks can show this. and remember this was a shiny gold, so it’s actually reflecting quite a bit of that material. so that we can’t change in the sense that we can’t make this reflective or really show a reflection in the preview, but we can make this match that if that’s what we want. here is what you need to do. Go to the Options, Element Attributes, Materials or Surfaces, and we’ll go to that “Stone Test”. And in that “Stone Test”, if I go back to the Internal Engine, we’ll see here’s what it looks like. [0:46:10]

And we can open these settings here to look at it. if I go to the Lightworks Rendering Engine, look at how different it is. There’s a button here that says ‘Disable Unrelated Controls’. That means that it’s only going to allow me to look at how Lightworks controls things. if I uncheck that, then it will give me access to these controls that relate to the Internal Engine or Open GL.  Regardless of whether you have this turned on or off, there is a button here that says ‘Match with Internal Engine’. And you’ll notice that there are all sorts of settings in here which we haven’t even started to look at. And we’ll go into them to some extent. The main one that I pay attention to is if I create a new material, I set it up in the Internal Engine the way we just in. And then, at some point when I am relatively happy with it, I go to the Lightworks Rendering Engine setting and say ‘Match with Internal Engine’. [0:47:12]

And you can see how quickly it changes this. now it’s done some settings in here to make it pretty close to the way the standard one works. if I say OK, and now we render this, we should see something closer to what we had in the 3D window. So you can see how now this Lightworks view matches our expectations or what we were playing with.  So it’s important in general to be able to see your design in the preview and in the 3D window relatively close to the way it would render, because otherwise you’re working a little bit blind. So that’s why I would generally use the Lightworks option that I showed you, which you would match with internal engine for that.  [0:48:13]

Now sometimes you may want to go further than that. you may want to actually adjust some things beyond. And this gets pretty complex, and I don’t think that it’s worth spending lots of time explaining everything here, but I’ll explain a few of the highlights.  So in Lightworks, each one of these buttons when I click on it will show different options here. This one has no transparency. we can choose various ways of simulating transparency. So if we were to go into something like leaves – let’s see, we have probably landscape leaves shrub here. We are going to see is says ‘Transparency Eroded’. So this is an option that obviously has a certain look that would allow something to look like it’s not fully solid; things have been eroded away. [0:49:22]

And you can see some buttons here about scale or coverage of this.  If I were to change the scale here from .01 to .02, we are going to see that the leaves look a little bigger.  If I make them .05, we will see how the leaves look much bigger.  You can actually scroll through this, but now you can see how it looks totally weird here because this just jumped way up there.  Even if I take this way back down towards the beginning, you can see how it stays there.  In general, these sliders in Lightworks can be a little problematic. That is why it’s good to make a note of what they started with so you can always put it back in at .01 or .02 here.  [0:50:10]

Now this one looks a little simpler, it’s halfway up. if we take this up you can see it’s more solid here. if I take it down, it jumps way down. It’s somehow between 0.37 and 0.49. We’ll see how this works. And I guess there’s some fuzz factor, which we can play with.  So these settings here can be tremendously complex. I have never really spent the time to master them, but it’s important to know that for any particular one you’re working with, you can go into the setting in the class and then perhaps change what this is. So if I make this ‘Wood’, what would that do? That looks different. if I make it ‘Rough’, what does that do? [0:51:05]

If I make it ‘Cubed’, that’s rather strange here. Or ‘Blue Marble’. I’m not even sure what this was. Probably ‘Rough’ or something like that. Texture space, this has to do with the picture image. And this is one of the few that I actually will sometimes play around with. if we go back to that ‘Stone Test” here and look at this, you can see how the texture space says “Graphisoft Replicate”. So that means that it’s trying to replicate how the Graphisoft texture is represented.  Now in stone or something like that, it probably will work just fine. what I have found is that occasionally you need to do some changes here if you’re doing some signage. [0:52:01]

I have created some surfaces or materials that are basically to be used for a sign or picture. and occasionally I’ve seen that they get mirrored. So there is an option here to possibly mirror something.  And you can see how when I click on ‘Mirror’ it flips in a way that’s not too obvious to the eye here. But if we had a sign, it would flip it along a certain axis. it would be a certain size and things like that.  So the main thing in terms of Lightworks is to know that if you are creating a new material like we did here, like this ‘Test Shiny’, we may want to go and ‘Match with Internal Engine’. [0:52:51]

In this case, this was a duplicate of the gold one. and you can see how it’s actually more realistic here; it really does look like a shiny gold ball because of the way that it’s reflecting things. so I might not want to mess around with it. but if it is something that I’ve created that was intended to be a new surface, I may want to say ‘Match with Internal Engine’ in order to get that to copy that more closely. I guess you will mainly see that when you’re working with these ones which have a texture that you’ve loaded in in terms of the Internal Engine. So the settings that we’ve looked at here cover most of what I work with on a day to day usage. [0:53:48]

And what I mean by that is I suggest that when you’re working on a model that you apply surfaces or materials to your building components that use the Graphisoft standard ones as a starting point. So if you want something like Limestone here, perhaps this is a starting point. it has a certain exposure to light. of course you can tweak it, but let’s say that you wanted to use this Limestone and create something that was a different version. it was a different color or different grain pattern. So start with whatever would be closest, experiment a little bit with whatever you think might be closest to it, then go in and perhaps search for another material or surface. [0:54:47]

So here you can see limestone. And if I choose and I play around with looking at these you can see how there are lots of different choices for them. So that’s actually not limestone but it’s a very interesting material that I think could be very attractive for tiles.  So I’m going to take that and I will say OK. it doesn’t really matter that I am modifying this Limestone. In other words, I didn’t duplicate it because this is just a test file. But in general I like duplicating first so that I’m not modifying.  You’ll see that the preview didn’t change because it’s showing Lightworks. I want to tweak this in the Internal Engine and get this looking roughly the way I want. [0:55:36]

Maybe I want to be a bit shinier and reflect the light a little bit more here. so now it’s going to pick up the light more. and maybe I will give it a little bit of a highlight so it looks shiny. you can see the specular color starting to show. Adjust the shinyness which will make it more poignant or less here.  So I will make it a little bit more focused on that. And let’s say that I like that. let’s see now. this is what I would see then in the 3D window, roughly like that. But if I go to Lightworks it’s going to look dull until I go into the Lightworks and say let me match this. And you can see how very quickly it’s come up with something that is relatively close between the Internal Engine and the Lightworks.  So that’s the basics of how I work with these materials or surfaces. [0:56:35]

I take something that already exists, duplicate it, and then make some changes; tweaking it in the Internal Engine preview and then ultimately copying it into the Lightworks and possibly adjusting some things in here. I rarely do it, because it’s frankly very tricky.  Now the one other thing that I didn’t show you that you certainly will need to look at has to do with the hatch patterns. So here is a CMU, concrete masonry unit. It’s 16×8″ here. And we’ll see the vectorial hatching shows ‘Block Running Bond’. So let’s just see how this works if I apply it to a wall. [0:57:29]

So we’re going to take this wall and I will tell it to make this CMU here. So you can see this texture file.  If I zoom in on it you can see how it’s a little bit fuzzy. That’s the general quality of these images is a little bit on the fuzzy side. Graphisoft is going to be improving that to make much higher quality, more detailed surfaces in ArchiCAD 18. But this is just a surface description.  If I go to the elevation, this is showing some blocks as well.  Now what controls that?  If I right click in the elevation in empty space and choose Elevation Settings, there is the option to turn on or off in the model display what are called ‘Vectorial 3D Hatching’. [0:58:29]

So if I turn that off then this disappears. if I turn it back on, then we see it. now how many courses are there here? 15. And if we go to 3D, we have 15, it matches.  So this is perfect. one would expect that to be the case, at least I hope that would be the case with Graphisoft that what they created corresponds between the texture and the fill or hatch.  But when you create your own, it’s up to you to match that.  So if we go back in here and let’s say that let me go to ‘Herringbone’ pattern here. There’s a herringbone and this has a herringbone there. But let me duplicate this and we’ll call this ‘New Brick’. We’ll give it a master list to put at the top. And if we were to choose the texture and search under ‘Bricks’, here is a brick pattern that is probably not in the standard library and obviously it has a different feel. [1:00:13]

it looks like an older historic building. so let’s just do that. Maybe I shouldn’t call this new brick, maybe I should call it old brick here. Okay, now if I apply this to the surface here, it looks a certain style. But of course if I look at the elevation, it has the one that was set beforehand which was for the herringbone. so that obviously doesn’t look right and it doesn’t match. so what I need to do is go to that particular one and make sure that the hatching matches. so I’m not sure what would be the best, maybe we have to use a sort of small grid here and say OK. And you can see that at least represents the small ones. It’s actually offset, so it wouldn’t be. [1:01:22]

so we would have to go and pick whichever one makes sense.  The other thing is that those blocks, this old brick, what size is this? This is the 1×1. It says 1’4″ across. That’s pretty small. Let’s maybe make this 2′ across, so these are going to be a little bit bigger blocks here. And let’s see, do we have some type of brick grid here? Block masonry, we can say brick, fire brick, or something like that. So now you can see we have this here. And if I go to the south elevation that doesn’t look very good. So we’re going to go and of course make sure that this at least is indicative of that. [1:02:20]

so let’s do of face brick here. now if this sizing of this is not right then I might need to duplicate this hatch pattern and make a copy of it with a different size. So you can see none of those are really intended for that purpose. here is a running bond. We will take that running bond there. so the running bond is rather large compared to this 3D view. so how would we coordinate it? remember how in the previous lesson I would go to the fill types, take that one that is the ‘Brick Running Bond’ – I think that’s what I had – and say ‘Create a new one’. And we’ll call this ‘Old Brick’. And we’ll make this a larger size there. So let me say OK. [1:03:36]

and now if we go to the definition of the material and we go to that ‘Old Brick’ here and use the – where did I put it? Here is the ‘Old Brick’ here. So now here’s what we have in 3D, and here’s what we have on the plan. So we might need to keep adjusting it until we get a result that is satisfactory. But you can see that it’s a manual process that depends upon your eye as opposed to something that’s automatically coordinated between the line work version and the texture file.  So that’s important to know about.  [1:04:26]

So we’ve got a little bit over an hour, I think I’ve pretty much covered the important things that you need to know when you’re working with materials in ArchiCAD 16 or earlier.  Let’s just take a very quick look at ArchiCAD 17 where under the Options, Element Attributes, Surfaces, we have a dialog box that looks pretty much exactly the same.  So you can see all the stuff up here looks exactly the same. If I go to one of the stones here, we’ll see that it has the same texture down below. All of these controls are the same. Vectorial hatching is all the same. If I go to the Lightworks, we’ll see the same type of controls. So really just changing it to the word ‘Surface’ in everything that I was teaching you in this lesson applies. [1:05:25]

So let’s see if there are any questions before we finish up or anything that I’ve left out that you’ve encountered that you would like me to explain under this general introduction to customizing your materials or surfaces for your building model.

I see a question from Steve Nichol, “How does one convert a material created in Internal Engine to a Lightworks material? Do you need to make a duplicate and then do the conversion and Match to Internal Engine? Glad to know the ArchiCAD 17 surface settings look pretty much the same.”

Okay, so the answer is I’ve already demonstrated that. all of the ones that exist in the standard materials or surfaces have coordinated version in Lightworks. You don’t have to worry about that. But how do I create a new one? You basically duplicate one that is at least somewhat like what you want. Is it stone or metal or paint? Pick one that is roughly like what you want and call it ‘New Stone’ here. And in the Internal Engine, generally what I recommend is that you go and if you want a texture go search for it, load it in here. Let’s pick something. Here’s a different type of river rock here. [1:07:04]

I have now a new stone that is this river rock.  I make sure that it’s set properly like at 1×1, is that supposed to be 5′ across? Maybe that actually should be a little bit less. I’ll make it 3′ across so it’s a little bit tinier in terms of each grain.  Now I have something here to create the version in Lightworks.  I simply switch my preview to the Lightworks Rendering Engine. And then after it updates in a few seconds, we go and say ‘Match with Internal Engine”. That sort of worked almost automatically, that’s interesting. I wonder if that has changed in version 17. let’s go and put in a different texture.  So let’s pick something rather different. here’s “Castle rock”. I now have it in the Internal Engine. What if I go to Lightworks? [1:08:05]

You can see Lightworks has not changed. So I go and say ‘Match with Internal Engine’, and now that is roughly the same. The Internal Engine here and the Lightworks there, they look quite similar simply by going and matching. So that’s how you do it. Generally you work with the Internal Engine first. There’s one other thing that I forgot, and that is ‘Load Settings from Archives’. And a really hardly use this, but I believe that it could be useful if you are going to be staying with ArchiCAD 17 or earlier and not using the new ArchiCAD 18 stuff whenever that comes out.  [1:08:49]

There is an option to let’s say create a new – I will duplicate this – another stone here. And I’m going to go in Lightworks and say ‘Load Settings from Archives’. So it did not check this button before. This is available in ArchiCAD 9 and 10 and up through 17. Load Settings from Archives allows you to go look in some more sophisticated surface descriptions that Lightworks provides.  I have not explored this very much, but you can see they are grouped into five different categories. ‘Architectural’ probably is a very good one to be checking out, but there are other ones for ‘Basic’ and ‘Essential’. If we go to ‘Materials’ we’ll see that it is divided in several different ways: construction, paving and flooring, concrete. Let’s see, material components. No, that’s probably not it. [1:09:55]

Let’s go to ‘Walls and Bricks’. So you can see some sort of strange preview up here. I have not spent much time with it, but if I pick a brick like this – the preview isn’t very descriptive. I say OK, and you can see what it looks like here. it actually has a more realistic looking brick there. If I go in here and pick a different one, you can see what it’s doing.  Now I have not played around it much, but basically what happens is it just as a more realistic appearance based on some careful work that was done by the people who create Lightworks.  So you could have a preview in Internal Engine that you do manually or that you use the texture here, and create something. [1:10:54]

And then decide, instead of matching that here, you actually will use a more realistic archive of material and play around with these. And there’s just a whole lot of things in here that you can see. let’s just try this ‘Rose Roman’ one here. you can see that it looks very crisp right now, but I’m sure it also actually probably looks like a clean bump. In other words, it simulates the surface appearance more accurately.  So this is something that, again, I’ve hardly used but I think if you want to push Lightworks further this could be a useful way to do that. And we will spend some more time when I get into the rendering section looking at some of the differences with this.  [1:11:52]

So let’s see, Steve Nichol asked, “I should have asked about converting an existing internal engine material to Lightworks.”  Basically, if it’s an existing internal engine material then it already has a Lightworks equivalent if it’s existing in the sense of one of the ones from the standard Graphisoft template or MasterTemplate.

Bob George says, “How do you add a JPEG image of a material I found in my travels to the materials library so I can incorporate it into a project?”

Okay. This can be a little bit tricky. I will show you the basics of it but the issue is that the picture you take needs to be manipulated so that it will tile or repeat without showing the seam too prominently. So let’s just go a web browser and we’ll do something here. [1:12:58]

“Walls in Italy”. I am just typing in something that obviously has a visual representation. I am going to go to ‘Images’ here. So here is a historic wall here. let me pick this image. and certainly if you take a picture of any type of surface, you’re going to have something that has a specific size. And it’s not designed to repeat.  So let’s right click on this and I will say ‘Save Image As’, and I will leave the name here.  And let me go to ArchiCAD to the Element Attributes. We’re in 17, so it’s called Surfaces. And I will take the default exterior wall and duplicate it. And we’ll call it “Battalion Wall”. Then I’m going to go into the Internal Engine and I will go to the texture and say that I would like to search for texture file. I will load another picture from the file dialog box. [1:14:23]

So I’ll go and manually find this. It’s in my Downloads, maybe it’s going to be in this folder here. I will say open that. And you can see the picture. Say OK. That looks good. Here’s what it looks like, this is a 1×1 sample. If I go to 2×2 you can see the lines in between them. If I go to a 4×4 we’re going to see how it looks a little bit funny because it’s rather different on the left side than the right side there. let’s just start out by saying how big is the surface? It guessed 1 m across or 3×2.5′. That’s actually not too bad. I could live with that. And let’s say OK. [1:15:16]

And let’s draw a little building here and select these walls and tell them to have an override of the ‘Italian Wall’. And let’s look in 3D. You can see that when I zoom in on it, it looks like that wall, but you can see the tiling that’s happening which makes it look rather funny; artificial. if I go to the definition here for that Italian new material, when I am repeating it I could try to minimize that by using one of these mirroring options here. And you can see it’s like a kaleidoscope. Let me try that and say OK. And you can see now it looks a little bit more – we don’t see the lines between them as much, but it still looks rather odd because of the way that blotches repeat to our eye. [1:16:19]

Our eye will see that. so what has to happen in order to create a material successfully is you need to go and in that texture or find a texture that is designed to repeat. or you need to go into something like Photoshop and treat this so that it can repeat. It’s beyond the scope of today’s lesson to show techniques that can make this work in Photoshop, but it will be something that I will cover in a later lesson in the course. At least some quick and somewhat effective ways to take something like this and make it look less obvious that it’s repeating as it goes over the course of a surface.  [1:17:12]

That’s the basic idea there. And the main issue is just the repetitions when you have a simple photo. The other thing is that this is square on. Of course a lot of photos will be on some angle. if you do take it straight on or use your camera to make it fairly straight on it can work OK but you might need to skew it in Photoshop to try and make it as square on as it needs to be for rendering purposes.  So let’s see if there are any other follow-up questions before we finish up here, any comments. Did you find it useful? [1:18:12]

Bob says, “That’s fine for today. I wanted to see the process for importing an image. I understand the tiling matter.” Okay.

Tom Downer writes, “Very helpful.”

I will just wait a minute for any final comments. Colin Healy writes, “Good review. Thanks.” You’re welcome. I do appreciate your feedback. I know I present for many minutes at a time and I hope it’s clear. Just getting feedback during the session as well as at the end helps me to know whether I’ve hit the mark or not.

Magdalena says, “I find it very helpful, calling in from Australia.” Joe Archibald says, “So much detail and information. Nice to figure it out a little better.” Yes there’s a lot of detail there, and I think you’ll use it when you need it or let’s say it will be available for you. When you have a question, you can go back and review that. [1:19:21]

Okay Jim Belisle says, “Thank you, very helpful training session.” Paul Demars thanks me as well. Okay.

So thank you all for your time. We will continue on in the next lesson to go into Element Attributes.  We’ll be looking at Building Materials in ArchiCAD 17 which relate to Fills and Surfaces.  We’ve already looked at how you set up fills and we’ve looked now at surfaces or old-style materials, and we’ll be looking at the building materials and how they relate.  We’ve already covered this to some extent in some of the lessons about new features in ArchiCAD 17, but I will give you a general description of how to work with these building materials.  Then depending on how time allows, in the same session on Thursday, we may go on to composites. And composites are of course supremely important.  They are the assemblies that you use for creating wall types, roofs and slabs. [1:20:42]

These refer to the building materials as well as the line types. And inherently from the building materials they refer to your surfaces and fills. And before version 17, the composite structures refer directly to the hatch patterns or fill patterns. So we’ll be making sure that, regardless of what version of ArchiCAD you have, we cover that well enough for you to have full control over your composites which is so critical to getting good drawings and good clean plans and sections. So thank you all. I really appreciate the opportunity to work with you. We’ll be meeting again a couple of days and continuing on through the spring and summer to round out the rest of the curriculum for the Best Practices Course. This has been Eric Bobrow. Please add your comments and questions to the page down below.  Thanks for watching.

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BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-D – Element Attributes: Working with Custom Materials

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices training lesson. Today we’ll be focusing on building materials.  This is continuing on in our series on element attributes.  Recent lessons have been on working with custom line types and fill types. Last time we worked on surfaces, or before ArchiCAD 17 they were called materials.  Today we are going to be focusing on building materials which were introduced in ArchiCAD 17.  So if you’re in ArchiCAD 17 this applies you. if you’re in an earlier version then this is something that you can look forward to.  [0:00:42]

If you are in ArchiCAD 18, if it’s later on when you’re watching this lesson, of course this should be pretty relevant for the next few versions.  So building materials, what is this about?  Well in ArchiCAD 17 Graphisoft introduced this concept of a super-attribute. These are all attributes, line types, fill types and surfaces.  And building materials refers to the fill and the surface appearance of an element.  So let’s say that I have gravel, and gravel has a certain fill in a section or possibly in the plan drawing if you have a mound of it that is being cut through. And it does have a certain appearance in terms of when you’re in the 3D window or possibly doing a rendering.  [0:01:41]

So you’ll see a list of building materials on the left hand side. they can be organized by priority or by name by clicking on the top here. now if you are used to seeing them by name you’ll see it based on the first few characters. In the U.S., Graphisoft organized their standard template – which is what I’m using right now – numerically to match the Construction Specifications Index or CSI standard descriptions of these materials.  In international versions I believe it’s all alphabetical. there is no number at the beginning of it. but basically this is something that if you understand the CSI numbers or if you’re in the international version and you just I want to look for wood, it’s going to be down in the W’s, and you can go find it easily. [0:02:33]

Priorities are something we’re going to be looking at and I’ll explain in case you haven’t spent much time with it. you can sort by priority and see how visually we get an indication here as well as we see a priority number showing up. When I click on any particular building material we’ll see the intersection priority number and we’ll see the bar chart here.  Now what makes a building material? A building material has a name, so let’s pick some tiles. Here is “22-0930 Tiles”. That is its name. you could at any point change its name and everything in that particular file will still reference that building material. [0:03:19]

If you’ve created a flooring material with tiles on top or wall with tiles applied to it, they will understand even if you change the name because internally there is an index number.  So in other words, this is number “85” or whatever it is. If you change the name, then it will display that in all the dialog boxes but internally all reference to it will be talking about number 85.  [0:03:45]

Now the structure and appearance are the things that we focus on most commonly in everyday use. So tiles right now have no fill. It’s actually technically called ‘background fill’ but has no line work. and obviously the fills, the ones down in the vectorial fills or symbol fills will have line work and the ones in the solid fills may have a percentage. if we go down to something like Limestone here, we’re going to see that in a section it’s going to be shown with this particular brick face fill. And so that’s what it’s going to appear when you cut a section through it or in a wall that is being cut through because of the standard representation for the floor plan cut plane. [0:04:34]

Now in previous versions of ArchiCAD, we simply would create walls or other structural elements with fills knowing that the fill referred to something like brick or stone or concrete or something else.  Now we’re actually going to be making the walls and the elements with a building material or a series of building materials in a composite. And we’re going to explore composites in a following lesson that references either building materials, like in ArchiCAD 17, or in previous versions it would reference directly the fill. [0:05:18]

So the building material for the limestone here has a fill and then it has an appearance.  This is our surface appearance; formally called materials but now called surfaces. And that means that it will have a certain look when we draw something with it or if we have a composite that includes it and it’s exposed. In other words, the surface is being seen as opposed to an internal one.  Now the intersection priority, if you’ve been working with 17 you are already familiar with this. if you haven’t been or are just getting started with ArchiCAD, this basically turns how strong that building material is relative to other materials and when things intersect. when you make a wall and a floor pass through each other, then certain materials will have priority. [0:06:10]

They will pass through other materials and have a lower priority. So basically by either moving this bar, changing the number or sliding the material up or down in the system, the intersection priority can change. We’ve looked at this in some of the lessons on the new features of ArchiCAD 17, so if you want to see some of the mechanics of how this works in a section drawing I suggest you look there. We’ll take a little bit of a look here today but I mainly want to talk about how you manipulate these and create them and some of the other things that we haven’t talked about in those lessons.  [0:06:57]

To round out the overview here, the physical properties of something like limestone relate to thermal properties.  So thermal conductivity, I’m not really an expert on this, but I believe this has to do with how much the heat passes through it or how little. And heat capacity, this has to do with how much heat is stored in it. So obviously if you wanted a more efficient building in terms of requiring less heating, then you’ll want to have a lower conductivity. So let’s say that if we look at insulation here, you can see it’s connectivity is very low relative to something like wood, which is somewhat higher; or relative to something like steel. [0:07:54]

Concrete passes the heat through much more than insulation of course. But on the other hand, concrete can hold a lot of heat. so if you’re interested in passive house types of strategies where you have some thermal mass that is accumulating warmth during the day and radiating it back at night or possibly getting cool at night and therefore sucking out a lot of the excess heat during the day, then you’ll want elements with more heat capacity. And something like precast concrete is going to be having a lot more benefit in that way than something – I guess I am not quite sure what we would build things with. CMU, a concrete masonry unit – actually, that has a high heat capacity in here. [0:08:54]

As I said, this is something that I really am not that familiar with. I know the basics of this. Density also would be a factor that I’m sure if you’re working with physical analysis of your buildings this would have some relevance.  Now one of the things that I do know is that if we were creating a new material, let’s say that we have some structural concrete but it’s a different type of concrete and therefore has some different properties, we can go ahead and let’s say create a new one that is a duplicate. I will leave it with the default name that is a copy of this. And we might change the attributes here. we can of course adjust any of these things in this copy and I can give it a different name if I wanted. [0:09:49]

But sometimes if you’re creating a material that is not a building material that is not in this list, you might want to check the material catalog. by clicking the material catalog button, Graphisoft has provided a reference list. so here’s concrete, and we can pull this down and expand it, and you can see OK there some concrete with steel in it that has certain thermal connectivity and density here. Maybe you’re using that because the steel gives it more strength versus reinforced. So structural concrete that’s extra reinforced with a fair amount of steel. Say OK, and you can see how it’s taken this information. And let’s see if we – material catalog, concrete – I thought if I double click on this, there is the 1000. And that didn’t change it. [0:10:47]

Let’s take the material catalog and open this up. I know its supposed to be able to do this. If I say “Core Concrete”, double click on that, there. We see this change radically. So by choosing something in the material catalog, it will automatically allow you to pull information from that reference.  Now where does that reference come from, I’m not exactly sure.  And certainly Graphisoft has pulled that information from manufacturers or standard industry reference lists. The main thing is that if you have the data from a manufacturer, you can put it in directly. If you don’t, you can use the material catalog to quickly get something reasonably close. [0:11:33]

Now when would you use this? You would use this in energy analysis for the building using Eco Designer. Eco Designer used to be an add-on for ArchiCAD that was sold separately. It was rolled into ArchiCAD I believe in ArchiCAD 16 and later versions. There is a higher level version called Eco Designer Star, which I have not worked with but I believe it takes the same basic principles but adds more sophistication and better reports so that Eco Designer Star allows you to get certification. You can literally take your building and as a professional who is skilled in this area, run a report that you can submit for approval. [0:12:18]

The earlier version would be for eco design feedback and study, but the Eco Designer Star, which I believe does have a charge in terms of an add-on for ArchiCAD does allow you to create reports that are good for submission. So if you don’t care about this, if you are not really focused on energy efficiency professionally and you are not going to be referencing or studying the energy usage of the building, you can ignore these things. But if you do want to look at it either for design feedback or for submission, then of course you will want to make sure that what you build the project from uses the appropriate building materials. [0:13:00]

And you can create as many new ones as you like. Give them names that will be very clear. If it’s a manufacturer specific part or assembly, then you may want to actually put in some manufacturer information in the name. so in terms of the building materials, say I need to change the priority of something. let’s say that I find that the granite here, I would like this stone to be a higher priority than something like the framing, so that the framing stops when it bumps into this stone. What I can do is select this and change the number here. let me just type in a new number. [0:13:52]

You will see after a second it will just move into position. Of course, I can type in any number here. it goes up to 1000 I believe. You can see how it’s now getting up towards the top here. I can also literally drag this around and say, “Well, it should be under plywood, but above the other one.” So now you can see as I moved it into position, it found a number in between. So these numbers, if I drag it, this goes down to zero. It says that this particular material will give way to everything. And gravel makes sense, and earth makes sense that they would give way to everything if they are piled up against it. [0:14:29]

And then of course if we move it up to the top, which is 999, it will be stronger than any other material so we can adjust it in any of these variety of ways. I think it was like 435 or something like that here. So somewhere in that region. Now in terms of the fill orientation, what does that mean? If we are looking at a wall, so let’s just go here and I will just draw a wall, and let’s select these walls and choose them as an insulated wall. now these walls have a particular type of insulation fill. In ArchiCAD 17, you can adjust a composite by right-clicking on the composite and say ‘Edit Selected Composite’. [0:15:33]

In previous versions, you had to go find the composite in the list of the Options, Element Attributes, Composites but now this immediately goes and finds it. Now you can see here this is insulation, and it’s choosing ‘Insulation Foam Board’. If we were to choose ‘Insulation Blanket’, you can see it has a somewhat different appearance. It changed subtly. This will redefine all walls that use that particular composite. When I select that, you can see how this insulation area looks funny. It’s showing the insulation symbol, but it’s not really rotating around properly, and it just doesn’t look like blown insulation like we would expect. [0:16:20]

In order to make this work – and by the way, this is the standard Graphisoft template, so this has not been set up properly – what we would want to do is go into the building materials. By the way, if we have one or more elements selected that use building materials, then it will highlight in the building materials dialog elements or building materials that are in use. So gypsum board would be the interior face here.  I will scroll down, and we have the wood frame plus insulation blanket, etc. [0:16:56]

Now this is the ‘Insulation Blanket’. That’s the one that I just substituted here and it’s not showing the way I would like because the fill orientation for this ‘Insulation Blanket’ is not oriented properly. It’s making it all face the same way based on the project origin, so it’s all going upright. If we do Element Origin, it will rotate as the wall rotates. And if we Fit to Skin, it will rotate and stretch or shrink. Let me show you how Element Origin works. I will say OK and you see how it rotated this 90˚ for each of these. [0:17:38]

But it still doesn’t look right, because what I really want to do under the Building Materials for this one here, the ‘Insulation Blanket’, is I want to make it Fit to Skin. So I select that, say OK, and now you can see how it has this conventional description for the ‘Insulation Blanket’, the soft insulation. If I were to go to again right click on that composite and say Edit Selected Composite, if this particular insulation here was going to be a bit thicker, let’s make it 3.5″, so 2×4 instead of 2×2 in there, you can see how the wall first go thicker, and the insulation is filling the cavity, it’s filling the available space. [0:18:41]

So in terms of those building materials, when one or more items are selected, you can see them highlighted here. this makes it easy to make some adjustments saying, “Oh, I need to fix that insulation.” By the way, this will affect all uses of it. So in other words, other walls or possibly slabs or roofs that use this ‘Insulation Blanket’ will now all properly have the fill orientation. So it’s nice that you can fix it once and it will fix it in any composite that references it there. You see fill orientation is only available for composites and complex profiles, so this soft insulation, fit to skin or element origin here will only be of use when we are working with composites like this or a complex profile that has multiple skins like this. [0:19:39]

Okay, so we’ve covered the basics in terms of naming, being able to choose a particular fill. We do have some additional options. Sometimes you may want to make this a different line weight or color. Let’s make it a red here to see what happens. So now this stands out. And again, every time this is referenced in any wall at any thickness, it will be red. Now let’s look at the line weights here. so View menu, Onscreen View Options, and we will go to true line weight. And that’s what that did there. Let’s go back to the building materials. [0:20:30]

We’ll take that ‘Insulation Blanket’ and let’s make it a hairline or faint color like that. you can see how it disappears almost. You can choose that and it will affect all uses of that particular building material. Let’s go back into the building materials now. We’ve looked at the fill, the choice of fill, and the different pens, and we’ve looked at the surface. Now when we are working with these elements, if I go to 3D here, we are going to see that – I have a different mouse going right now because I am having problems with my – there we go. Maybe this will…I was having a problem with this wireless mouse. I was using a secondary mouse, and it’s now having problems here. okay. so I am going to have to work around that and figure it out. [0:21:44]

I rotate with the Orbit tool here and zoom in like this. So in terms of the building material if I select this composite, we will see that it has brick on the outside, that’s the building material, and that brick has a certain appearance. If I go to the Options, Element Attributes, Building Materials, we will see this brick here has an appearance of “B-Common Bond”. If I were to change this to “Stack Bond” or something like that, then we are going to see this instantly change there. If I go to the building materials and change anything that is exposed here – so where was it? I don’t have it selected, so it’s not highlighting it. [0:22:46]

That’s why it’s nice to select things before you go in so you can quickly find things. But this surface is the default for the ‘Exposed Brick’. Let’s say that we wanted this to be a different appearance. Even though it’s made out of brick, it should show up structurally like this and have the same physical properties, but it’s going to be painted differently. Or some other attribute about it. So what we can do – and this is a standard part of 17 – is we can select one or more elements like this and go in and override the surface instead of having it automatically be whatever the building material was in terms of that brick. [0:22:31]

We can say we would like to override this, that made it all default wall color. I could say it’s going to be a different brick pattern. Let’s give it the herringbone pattern or something like that. We can override this – even though the wall is made of this same type of brick and shows the same on the floor plan and in a section, we can override the surface. Similarly, if we go and put in some walls that are – let’s go choose an interior wall here. I know this is a rather small little shape of the building, but let’s work with this. [0:24:37]

If I go to 3D – boy, I am used to having my mouse do things and right now it’s not cooperating so I have to manually do it, I’m not used to that. In any event, I can select any of the elements here and again override it. I can say it’s made from the wall with gypsum board. I am going to make perhaps all of these surfaces here, I am going to lock them together and paint them a certain color. So you can see what that does there. [0:25:21]

Now the edge appearance here that we are seeing in terms of the building materials is something that is new in ArchiCAD 17. Previously any cut through areas or exposed areas of the wall would have just a simple single color appearance. Now it’s showing the actual building materials. If you were migrating a project from earlier than 17 into 17, then under the Options, Project Preferences, Construction Elements, if you say ‘Use Legacy Intersection Methods’, which would be the default when you migrate a project in, then you are going to see just the simple edge appearance. And you will also get less sophisticated intersections in sections than if the project preferences are set up as I would recommend where it’s not using legacy methods; it’s using the new methods here. [0:26:23]

Then you are going to get the more sophisticated visual representation. Now I see a comment from five minutes ago from Tim Ball, “Try using a white fill on a colored background to color code materials.” Okay, interesting, so let’s see here. If I go to this and we go to Element Attributes, Building Materials with this selected, we will do a white fill on a colored background. Let’s pick that insulation here and a white fill on a colored background. So let’s say that we make this – I assume you mean a white line work on a colored background. Let’s just give it something like that. [0:27:22]

We will say OK. Now that didn’t do anything in the 3D, let’s go to the floor plan. If we zoom in on this, we’ll see that there we have that colored background and the white fill there. Let’s go back in here and that insulation here, that Pen 91 is fairly wide. Let’s use one of these other ones. This is .25 in width; this one is .1 which is much thinner here. Let’s say OK. Now you can see that particular fill there. So Tim, I am wondering if that is actually what you were referring to in terms of the color coding that you can actually show similar materials with the same background color to color code it. [0:28:32]

So let’s see if Tim has any response there. So meanwhile, I am going to go and see if there’s anything else about building materials that is important to cover in terms of this section of the course. This section of the course has to do with creating or manipulating element attributes. Other sections talk about how you optimize your sections or work with ArchiCAD 17 features for priority intersections using different options including the Merge Elements command. But here, I have pretty much gone through the fact that we can create these building materials by saying “New” and creating a duplicate of something or a brand new building material. [0:29:26]

When we create a new building material and give it a name, you can choose all of the attributes of how it’s going to appear in general including its thermal properties if you wish. So you can start from scratch here and the move this building material up or down in the list for whatever purpose if you are not duplicating one already.

Let’s see Tim says, “Yes, you can play with it to make sections easier to read.” Okay. So Tim that would be a nice thing for you to send in in terms of a coaching call so that we could take a look at how you are using the color coding in your sections. For now I will pass along your suggestion of an idea. [0:30:13]

Tom Downer asks, “With a new building material, can you use the asterisk to group the materials?” Yes, you should be able to. Right now, this new building material is floating up to the top because all of the materials are named in the U.S. with a number. So the letters show up here. What you are referring to in the surfaces, I would often put an asterisk at the beginning to make the new items show ahead of the other ones alphabetically. So the asterisk alphabetizes before the letter A. You certainly could do that but if you were to create a bunch of new materials, then you could – [0:30:58]

Now let’s see – if we sort by name here, here is the name. If I take this without the asterisk it jumps down to the bottom. So in fact, that is a good point. If you are grouping it by name as opposed to priority, then to be able to find building materials that are new that are custom to your needs, then by putting in an asterisk, they will float up to the top when you sort by name. [0:31:26]

When you sort by priority, and let me give it a reasonable priority so you can see it, of course it will just sort this way. So that is a good point. Now I’ve shown in other sections of the course migration of previous projects into ArchiCAD 17 and how the building materials get created based on the fills that are used in composites. So basically we have a composite wall made of framing, brick and drywall, whatever you had in ArchiCAD 16 or earlier, when it’s opened in 17 will create a building material based on that fill or each of the fills in the composites that are defined in the project. [0:32:19]

So you can end up with a rather lengthy list of these building materials that are based on previous fills. They will not have any physical properties. Generally that doesn’t matter too much if you’re not going to be doing energy analysis, but also the intersection priorities will not really have a sensible setting. So you will need to adjust those and you will find in many cases that it will create duplicates of the building materials. As you migrate the old project forward it’s trying to create, each time it sees somewhat different context with the linework, materials, or appearance and some of the old style intersection settings it will create a new building material. [0:33:06]

So you will end up with perhaps many building materials that are virtually the same but with slight differences. Generally in my other lessons I have shown how you can collapse these. And the basic idea here is that you can sort them in a variety of ways, but once you see something that is unnecessary you can delete it. And when you delete a particular material or possibly several that are selected, you can replace it anywhere in your project that is referenced, you can replace it with any material. [0:33:40]

Do we have the generic materials here? We will say ‘Replace’ that. If I said ‘Delete’, than anything that referenced it would have a “missing”, it would indicate that it was missing. If you say ‘Delete and Replace’, then anything that references this one in the future would reference that one there. You may notice here this ‘Generic Exterior’ material. There is a similar one for ‘Generic Interior’ material. So Graphisoft in the U.S. version has those two. We have a few additional ones in MasterTemplate. I think we have a generic building material which is not specific to interior or exterior. [0:34:20]

We also have I think a few additional ones that we’ve added to make the system work better. In the international version there are some similar generic ones as well as the ones that are specific here. Now one issue that we have with the Graphisoft one is that the interior material is lower on the list than the exterior material because the intersection priority ‘530’ here versus this ‘590’ makes the interior have a higher priority. So just as a quick review of a change that I would make – if you are using the standard template and you are having some issues with some of the walls cleaning up. This is what causes it. [0:35:14]

Let me just show you that context and that will at least give you a sense of what to do. I am going to go to the Wall tool and create a box of walls here with just a simple material here. We will take the generic exterior, and let’s zoom out. I will draw some interior walls with the generic interior material. You will notice that as I zoom in on this that the interior walls are sticking through the exterior. The reason is that the interior material has a higher priority than the exterior. So in order to fix this, and by the way if I select any number of these walls – remember I can go to the Options, Element Attributes, Building Materials and then see them highlighted, and you can see the exterior material is highlighted in this green. And here is the interior. I can grab this exterior and drag it down and put it above the interior. I will take it down far enough that it goes up above or manually change its number here and then say OK. And you can see how it cleans that up. [0:36:45]

The reason why there are solid lines here rather than open spaces is because they are made from different materials, so ArchiCAD is creating a line where the material changes. When you do have something like wood framing that is both in the exterior and the interior, then that particular skin might match and it will open up that line. In this case, if we were just doing a conceptual model, we might just work with, instead of generic exterior and interior, just make everything generic from the same material. In this case, I will choose exterior. [0:37:19]

Then it will give us a very simple diagram like that. So that’s some of the basics of how these things work without getting into the details. So let’s see, a question or comment from Bob George: “Can a building material be renamed?” Yes, I mentioned that right at the beginning. When you rename it, it will be seen in dialog boxes with your new name. But it will not cause any problem in terms of elements that are using it; they will see the new name. And composites that reference that building material will also see the new name. [0:37:57]

That is because these element attributes here, like building materials, have an index number. If I go to Attribute Manager – and we are going to have a training on that coming up next week – if we look at say the Building Materials here, you will see that every building material not only has the name but it has this number associated with it. So if I did decide to rename wood framing to “wood frame” or something like that, it still has this number here. Everything that refers to the wood framing would see that update. So you can rename it at any time. [0:38:42]

Now if you are copying things from one file to another – you might take part of an old building like an old kitchen into a new one so that you can create your kitchen more quickly – be aware that if the names of those attributes, like the names of the building materials or the names of the composites are different, then ArchiCAD will add them as new building materials or composites to your environment when you paste it in. if the names are the same, then it will assume that when you are pasting in a wall with the name ‘Exterior Material’ that it should use the settings for ‘Exterior Material’ in this project. [0:39:27]

So that is something I will be going over in the lesson on Attribute Manager so that you understand the rules that it uses for that.

There is another comment Tim Ball made about “I also find it useful to create materials for existing building elements such as walls, floors, roofs and site.”  Okay. I am not quite sure what you are saying. You are creating materials for existing versus new? Is that what you mean? I am going to guess that, but can you clarify that Tim. So that way you can color code in 3D perhaps, or maybe even on plan the difference between existing and new. Is that what you mean? [0:40:16]

So please clarify that. Okay, let’s see here. I think that pretty much covered all the things that are specific to manipulating element attributes with regards to building materials. Tim’s comment says, “It helps with priorities.” Okay. So I am going to make an exception here, since Tim is such a long time user and good friend. Let’s put him on the line. I am not doing that in general for these lessons. I do that in the coaching calls, but let’s give Tim a chance to talk. Tim, I’ve unmuted your line. [0:41:05]

Tim:  Hi Eric. That’s very kind of you. I’ve used this whole thing really quite extensively. I’ve actually completely recreated it from scratch to suit the way we work in the U.K. because we use a different classification system than the one you use in the U.S. So I’ve edited these materials completely different than the way Graphisoft does it. And really, it’s quite powerful, but it is quite hard sometimes to think it through, because if you are creating a composite wall, which maybe has several different materials in it, that composite wall is interacting with another composite wall that has also several different materials. [0:42:03]

It can really be quite tricky to work through which priority each material actually needs to take so that you actually get clean junctions. I’ve got to the point where I have about three different types of insulation at least, depending on where the insulation goes in the building. So insulation in drywall is completely different than insulation that might be in a cavity of a mason wall and different again to an installation that might be in a floor. So it’s immensely powerful, but it’s actually quite – it does your brain in some days trying to work out where the priorities have to lie. [0:42:52]

Eric: I know you are pushing the limits in ArchiCAD – not in a bad way, in a good way to get the most detailed section views in drawings as well as 3D cutaways or 3D details. I saw your recent posting on ArchiCAD LinkedIn group about detail drawings saying, “Do we really need 2D unlinked drawings that represent details. When we do it properly, we can make the natural generation from the model have all that information that we need.” So I know you have some interesting discussion rolling there. [0:43:47]

Tim: Yeah. If you are interested, in one of the coaching calls, I could actually send you in advance a file with a series of views that you could show what all that actually looks like. And that comment that we covered about inverting the color arrangement from the cavity insulation for instance, I actually got that idea from Jared Banks. He’s used it quite a lot. And I wouldn’t use it for every material, but if you want to highlight a material, insulation is obviously really important to buildings these days. If you have – and I generally use pink background color with white linework for insulation – and I use that for all insulation so when you are looking at section it’s really easy to see what the insulation is and what the continuity is between the different elements like a roof or junction. And I think that’s really powerful stuff to do. [0:45:03]

Eric: I think that would be an excellent idea for a coaching call. Let’s talk about this offline and talk about when would be a convenient time for you to join with me…

Tim: Yeah, sure Eric.

Eric: … where I can spend some time with you and with everyone going through some of the ways that you have pushed the building materials and the assemblies, composites, to generate the most useful information with the most legibility where it’s just easier to see the important structural relationships and thermal relationships and things like that. We can perhaps even focus that entire call on the whole question of 3D detailing. That you brought up of how detailed can you make it? [0:45:55]

We’re not talking about just for fun or wasting time doing it but in fact by doing it in such a smart way that it saves time and reduces errors and gives better, clearer communication in terms of the drawings and 3D model.

Tim: I agree. I think where I started with that was thinking, “Well, if I am going to draw something in a traditional 2D detail, which we usually create using a whole load of extra lines, fills, and all the rest, you can use exactly the same fills to create a complex profile and you then apply that to whatever element you are working with. You don’t need to detail it anymore then, because it’s there.  So that’s the principle behind it. [0:46:50]

Eric: Well, I definitely am interested in seeing more of the specifics of it, because I understand the concept, but there’s a difference between knowing that it could be useful and seeing it and going, “Ah. Now I know how I can use it.”

Tim: [laughs] Okay.

Eric: Yeah, so thank you Tim. I am going to move on if that’s okay with you.

Tim: Yes, that’s good, thank you.

Eric: So I think this is a good point to finish today’s session. I know that often I have been going well over an hour with these lessons. In this case, I have gone over as much as we need to for doing building materials, just the basics of how to create and manipulate the definitions of building materials. [0:47:42]

We will be looking at the topic of composites, which reference building materials, in the next lessons. We’ll be looking at composites as they existed before 17, and the ones that as they extend in 17 in separate sections. They are closely related but obviously some important differences. So let me see if there are any final comments or questions. [0:48:13]

Let’s see, Ken Brooks writes, “I think Tim has a grasp of the concept of priorities in section and plan in order to simplify details and utilizing BimX.” Yes, I do agree with you there. Now if there are any other comments or questions, please type them in now, and then we can finish up the session. Did you find this useful? Were there any new things that you discovered that you weren’t aware of?

Steve Nichol writes, “Okay from here. Another good one, looking forward to all the links between building materials, surfaces, and composites.” Absolutely. [0:48:54]

Waiting for any final comments that will be shared before we close up. Ken Brooks: “very useful Eric. Attributes is quite an arcane topic for me.” Yes, definitely it’s one of those things that a lot of people are confused about, but it’s such an essential foundational element for creating your drawings as well as the complete model. Alright. Thanks everyone. I see “Good Night” from Tim. Yes, it must be 10PM in the U.K.  Please add your comments and questions to the page down below this recording. This has been Eric Bobrow, Thanks for Watching.

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BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-E – Element Attributes: Working with Composites

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices Course training lesson.  Today’s lesson will be focused on composites.  We’ve spent the last few lessons looking at Element Attributes under the Options menu and covering line types and fills. For ArchiCAD 17, Building Materials and Surfaces in ArchiCAD 17 previously called Materials. We’re going to be looking at composites which are a fundamental. I think all of these are fundamental but this is truly a fundamental resource within ArchiCAD.  This is what you use to manage wall assemblies as well as assemblies for floors and roofs.  Now the composites dialogue here in ArchiCAD 17 will look similar to the one in ArchiCAD 16.  I will bring that up. There are some significant differences in terms of the way that it’s organized here.  So we’re going to be looking at the way composites worked before 17, and then how it works in 17 since we need to cover both. And some of you are on older versions. [0:01:20]

In earlier versions of ArchiCAD, composites were made of a series of skins that referred to fills.  So in other words, where it says ‘Brick face’ here, the fill down here, the skin pattern, refers to a graphic representation. And of course it says ‘Brick face’, so it’s referring to particular type of construction.  We can assume that this is going to be used for something made of brick.  But literally it doesn’t refer to a building material; it just refers to a graphic representation. So that graphic representation could be things like airspace, saying that there’s a cavity for framing. Or it could be something potentially even a poché of 25% or 50% for graphic purposes.  [0:02:12]

So we could use any of these graphic options for delineating a skin or component of the assembly.  In ArchiCAD 17, this reference in a similar way is pointing to a building material.  So although each one of these building materials, like let’s say wood framing, has a particular appearance in terms of the fill – or let’s go to maybe the concrete. Here is structural concrete.  So here is a fill that is being displayed but it’s actually referring to the building material.  So a fundamental difference in 17 is that we are in an integrated fashion referring to the actual building material that was being used rather than only indirectly referring to the appearance of that.  [0:03:10]

So here is 16.  Now separate from that fundamental difference, there are a lot of commonalities.  In fact, the basic structure of composites has not changed for many years.  There are a series of divider lines.  So for example, on one side of this wall it has a solid line with a particular pen choice, a particular thickness of pen. And in between every one of these there is usually solid lines, but occasionally we might find something or we want to define something with a dashed line.  You might find that if you have a double framed wall, you want to indicate that it’s maybe more soundproof or something like that or it has more insulation.  So it has two layers of framing in there.  [0:04:00]

You may want to have a dashed line there, or potentially you can even go and say that – here you can see different line types. And there is an option in fact to turn off a skin separator line here. So you can just barely see the difference there. If I go in here you can just barely see the difference visually in the dialog box. But it would actually disappear onscreen.  Now if you do turn off the separator line, it is still snappable.  If you were to draw that wall assembly and pass your cursor over the intersections it would still be there, but it would not show up. So you could potentially put – one time I’ve seen in earlier versions of ArchiCAD if you want to have it snap at the center of the core and it wasn’t at the center of the actual wall because the wall was asymmetrical, in some rare cases I’ve created the core in two pieces and essentially had no line there but still it would snap to the center of the core.  [0:05:17]

So in ArchiCAD 17 we have other ways of snapping to different components so that wouldn’t be necessary.  But in general we have this concept of lines separating skins. And each one of these skins has a particular thickness. And in versions before ArchiCAD 17, we might have some very specific controls over the individual cut fill pen and background. So essentially what is the graphic look of this?  Now in ArchiCAD 17, what we’ll see is this whole dialogue box become simpler.  Why?  Because the building material has controls over the way that it looks.  So let me take a similar brick one that is similar to what we had in ArchiCAD 16 here. Each one of these building materials already has some settings for what it looks like.  [0:06:21]

Now, we’ve spent some time in the previous lesson looking at the building materials.  And I think if you refer back to that you’ll see that there’s going to be a consistency for how brick or insulation is represented in the different wall assemblies or composites. Whereas in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, while you could have a certain policy or habit of making them look the same, it could easily have differences in terms of which pen or background pen you’re using and so on. And that actually can cause problems or challenges when you migrate a project from 16 or earlier into 17 because ArchiCAD will actually create for each composite that it finds in your project when it’s migrated to 17 it will create a different building material if it finds that the fill was done differently.  [0:07:18]

If there were any differences in the setting in a composite, then it will create separate building materials so that you have the same graphic look.  And while that is sometimes useful, it often will just clutter up the building materials in 17.  So getting back to the core of this, and the pun is intended, each one of these skins has the option of being specified as ‘Core’, ‘Finish’, or ‘Other’.  So the meaning here is of course in terms of architectural purposes the core is going to be structural. The finish is going to be some type of cladding. And then there is a concept of intermediate skins that are neither structural nor the exterior cladding of the composite.  [0:08:11]

Now in terms of the way that this works, if we designate something – if I were to go here and say that it’s core. Essentially all the ones in between have to become core. You can’t have core here, skipping a gap and then another core. Essentially, core is going to be a connected group of skins.  Now we can turn this into finish which is what it was here. And then this one could be finished or other. Basically it starts from the outside with finish. We can have one or more skins that are considered finish, and then we can have possibly one or more other skins here. But basically we can’t skip. It has to start with core and possibly go to the other and then end up with the finish.  [0:09:04]

Now the top of the list in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier would be the outside of the wall or the reference line side of the wall.  Essentially when you are drawing the wall, you have a reference line. So let me just cancel out of this and go – we are drawing the wall here. So if I zoom in on this, this wall right now is a simple composition here, just background fill.  In ArchiCAD 16 and earlier we can choose between simple fills and different types or composites in the same popup menu; which is actually pretty convenient.  In ArchiCAD 17, when we are doing a wall – let’s just do a single wall here similar – we have only the list of composites if we are in that mode. And we have to switch explicitly to single component if that’s what we want. Then we have the choice of just the raw building materials. [0:10:20]

Now it’s a little inconvenient, but that also means that the list is shorter so you can make one choice and then focus on which one you want after that.  Now in terms of the reference line, you can see that the reference line side with the heavy line that’s indicated with the dots at the end is always going to be on what would be the top of that list.  So if I go and say ‘Edit Selected Composite’, which is a command that was added into ArchiCAD 17, we will see that this brick is the first one. And then it has the airspace and the insulation, etc.  So that’s the sequence there.  [0:11:06]

Now in an ArchiCAD 16 and earlier we basically have the choice of putting the reference line on one side or the other or center and possibly having an offset.  Now if I switch here, in terms of which side of the reference line, you’ll see that it still has the brick attached to the reference line. So whether I flip it one way or the other it’s still attached to the brick.  Of course if I say it’s centered then it’s going to be just placed in the center. And arbitrarily which side is which terms of where the brick is or the outside depends on which direction you are going in. In other words, top to bottom or left to right, versus right to left or the reverse. [0:11:51]

In ArchiCAD 17 when I have this, I can be drawing on different faces. So we have more options for this. But still what is considered the outside face would be that first skin in the dialog box. So whatever you have at the top of that list is going to be considered the outside.  With ArchiCAD 17 we can say I want to put the reference line perhaps on the inside face. And now you can see that this is the reference line but the brick is on the other side of the wall. So it gives you some more flexibility.  And of course we still have the option of the center one there.  [0:12:35]

We also have the option in 17 to do core outside. So remember that the core is a structural thing in here and it automatically finds that. In previous versions, ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, what we would need to do is manually put in the offset.  I guess it’s not showing in the Info box by default, but we can put that in.  So if I know that offset to here, I will just guess it’s 4 inches and say that, then what’s going to happen is that reference line is embedded that particular distance. So we can look at that definition of this and figure out how far in it would need to meet the face of the framing or the core.  [0:13:21]

Now in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, if we wanted to edit this and change the definition of this composite, I would have to go to the Options menu, Element Attributes, Composites and go manually find which one it is. There’s no command like in 17 to say, “Edit the Selected Composite”. But as a shortcut, if you are in ArchiCAD 16 or earlier, you can eyedrop an element.  Of course when you eyedrop the element using the Option or Alt key shortcut, it will switch to that element type in the toolbox, for example the Wall tool, and set it to be using that particular cut  fill in this case.  [0:14:02]

Now in addition to the fact that you can now draw more walls like this, it also, as a side effect, under the Options, Element Attributes, Composites or actually for materials or fill types or for several different things it will basically look and say, “Alright, if we want to edit composites, let’s bring up the one that is the default setting for the wall,” for whatever tool is active.  So this is no longer necessary and probably still works the same in 17, but it would be a shortcut for saying I want to edit this particular composite that I’ve eyedropped that is the default setting for the currently active tool.  [0:14:48]

Now let’s say if this is the core here, then how much of a distance would we need in between?  We would have to manually total it up. 3 5/8 plus 1 inch is 4 5/8 plus 2 inches would be 6 5/8, which is what I would need to remember and tell it that the offset to the face of framing is 6 5/8 inches.  So now you can see that line there.  So while the option of placing the reference line at the face of framing has existed for a long time in ArchiCAD, you had to manually type in or remember what that distance is in order to do it. Whereas an ArchiCAD 17 of course it now has that direct option to choose the core outside, core center or core inside.  So that’s certainly a nice improvement.  [0:15:49]

Now let’s proceed on with some of the other basics here in terms of the composite definitions.  We’ve looked at the fact that for each one of these line separators we have some controls. and for each one of the skins we have some options here.  In versions before ArchiCAD 17, we had a priority for each skin and this would be manually set.  And the idea is to make intersections between different components or different assemblies to work properly.  Now before ArchiCAD 17, in order to get a clean intersection, we would always have one – first of all, it would only work between walls; one wall and another. It wouldn’t work between walls and slabs or walls and roofs. So it was limited to essentially plan cleanup.  [0:16:50]

Secondly, each particular wall would have – you would connect the end of one wall to the end of the other or the end of one wall to the reference line of the other. And then the skin priorities would affect how they cleanup.  So let’s just take a quick look at how that works.  In ArchiCAD 17 this is controlled not by individual priorities in a composite but by priorities of the building materials, saying brick in general has a certain priority compared to concrete, steel, drywall, stucco or things like that. So let’s take a look. I have this particular one here, and if I eyedrop this and then draw another piece – let’s see. If I eyedrop this, does is still have the 6 5/8? Yes, it does. And this is here. I’m going to connect up here. Okay, now it’s clean because obviously these two wall reference lines are connecting. [0:18:02]

If I were to connect this going across, you can see ArchiCAD is doing its best to do some cleanup but this doesn’t make sense. We have the exterior walls passing through each other.  If I want to trim off the end that’s sticking out – let’s say this is the interior here – I can use that trim. The Command key or the Ctrl key brings up the scissors, and then go to the edge of piece that I want to trim off and click on it.  So now it’s a little better but obviously it’s still an exterior that’s in an interior position.  So let’s switch this to a different one and we’ll look at an interior wall here.  [0:18:50]

So now with the interior wall, I did switch it in its wall type, but the offset here was retained because remember I switched something I had already drawn. And here’s the 6 5/8. The offset is taking it outside of the body of the wall. So that’s crazy. Let’s put it back to zero now, just saying at the skin face. Now we can see that the cleanup here in between the components is opening up the framing space and it’s having what would be drywall or gypsum board not cleaning up to each other but stopping short at that point.  And if we look at the priorities of these elements, if I again eyedrop this one and go into the composite definition, we’ll see that this skin is 2x steel framing.  [0:19:51]

It has a priority of 10 and the skin below it is the “09 Gypsum Board” which has a priority of 8. Now the lower priority will give way to the higher one, and ultimately you can see the brick face has the highest priority here. That’s why this wall is stopping short; it’s not penetrating into there.  Now why is this not wrapping here?  If we eyedrop this one and go into the composite definition, we can see this says “2x Steel Framing 10,” which is fine. But this is “09 Gypsum Fire Code”; it’s actually a different type of gypsum board. This is a 1 hour fire rated wall.  [0:20:42]

So if I were to take this and change it from fire rated to just a regular gypsum board here that is not fire rated, then you can see now the drywall is wrapping around. But of course we have a different – this particular one I just picked – for some reason it’s an insulated wall. If it’s an interior doesn’t make sense for it to be insulated. So in fact let’s see if I were to edit that composite how that works. If I eyedrop this then I can go quickly and edit the composite and say I want a simple 2×4 wall. An interior wall should not have insulation. Let’s change this to, instead of insulation; we’ll change it to the 2x steel framing or 2x wood framing. [0:21:38]

If we were in a project working with steel framed buildings, then we would want to make these all consistent. If I made it 2x wood framing for now, we’re going to see that it stops at this point. Whereas if I go in here and make this 2x steel framing then it opens up. So the rule here, and this is true in ArchiCAD 17 as well, is that if the skins have the same definition or the same building material or the same fill reference and they’re reaching each other – in other words, they’re not being stopped by a harder surface – then it will open up the line in between them. And you can see what’s happened there.  But if I go back to the other type of walls here, then you can see that this has the 2x steel framing but it has a different type of drywall, and that’s why it’s not cleaning up.  [0:22:44]

So this is the same in ArchiCAD 17 except that it’s based on the building materials rather than the definition of the individual priorities of the composite.  So it becomes a more consistent system. So let me just eyedrop this and draw another piece there. Now I will pick an interior wall like this and draw that. So with this one you can see that the drywall is wrapping. This is clearly a different skin here. So remember with ArchiCAD 17 we can just right click on and say “Edit Selected Composite”, and this says “Wood Framing” here. And if we were to look at this one and edit this composite, we’ll see that this is steel framing.  [0:23:45]

So if I decided that I wanted these to match and I was doing the wood framing then I could change that definition, and all the walls that reference it would then slightly redraw and connect up cleanly.  So those are a few subtle differences between the composite definitions and how the cleanups happen.  Let me go back into the composite definition here and we’ll see a few other things related to this.  So for certain types of skins, there’s some options here that I haven’t explored very much that have to do with whether the end lines are showing; the skin end lines.  So if I turn off the end line, you can see how the visual display changes here.  And if I say OK then was that the composite that I was just working with here? Yes it is. The end lines are turned off. [0:24:55]

I’m trying to see where that actually shows up, the end lines. I’ve not really been clear on when end lines show up. I think maybe it does happen when you’re putting in doors or windows in terms of the end lines. But if you do need to control the end lines, they’re done in – it’s the end of any particular skin that you are possibly turning on or off here in this bottom area. For the longest time with ArchiCAD 17 I wasn’t sure where that was then someone pointed out that there is a little check box here. So the equivalent would be this end line. You can see this choice. You can see a slight difference here as I uncheck this, then I check it.  So that’s the end lines here. [0:26:01]

So if you do want to control that then you can use this option here.  So this dialog box has gotten more condensed for a couple of reasons.  They have visually condensed some of the controls.  I think one of the things that is nice is that when we are wanting to switch potentially what building material, we can press down here and immediately get access in the other dialog box. In the older ones if we press down on this, we don’t have a popup. We have to go down here and then use the popup.  So I’ve always found that sort of awkward that you couldn’t just a switch it up here.  Now on the other hand in 17, when I go to – say and let me look at this and I press down on it, it immediately brings up the popup menu which maybe I don’t want. [0:26:57]

Maybe I just want to change the thickness of this, and clicking on it actually brings up the popup menu.  So what I’ve found is that if you click over here, you can highlight whichever one of these you want and then go in and change the thickness.  So that’s a little tip that you may find helpful, just clicking on the right side as opposed to in this list.  Now in ArchiCAD 17, you’ll see that each one of these building materials has two color chips or two chips. One refers to the fill and the other refers to the surface.  So as you will recall from the previous lesson on building materials, each building material is defined in part by its fill or hatch when you cut through it and its default surface appearance which previously would be called the material for it.  [0:27:52]

So this just gives you a preview of that. And if you switch between these, you’ll see it gives you a quick glimpse. For example this has a surface appearance that is a tan or brown color, but it has a cut fill that is a honeycomb or crosshatch pattern there. Now let’s look at how we create new composites.  I’ve spent a lot of time showing what’s in the composite. And by the way here if you want to turn off the separator lines you can do that here. And again this is the end lines and this is the separator lines. The visual representation here is not really immediately obvious, but if you think about it, this is a horizontal line just like these. And these are vertical lines hatch which would be the end lines.  So that is a little clue there.  [0:28:54]

Of course as you look at different pens – and we’re going to be spending some time on pens and pen sets on the next lesson – this determines your default setting for how thick that line is. So in the U.S. settings pen 1 is one of the thick cut lines commonly used for the outside of walls. Pen 2 is a fairly thin line often used for hatching.  Pen 3 here is a medium line used for a variety of things. So this is used for separators. So in ArchiCAD 17 in the U.S. version they have standardized this 1, 2, 3 system where one is on the outside, the thick lines. And then we have thinner lines for the hatch, and a medium divider line. And that would be in the case for most of the ones that we find within the standard U.S. template. [0:29:59]

Now in the international version, the pen sets are quite different but still there’s going to be the idea of having a heavier line on the outside of these walls and some type of common divider setting. And then a thinner line for the hatch that we would see if we do have a hatch rather than an empty space there. Now if we want to create a new composite, there is a choice of clicking on new and starting from scratch or duplicating.  So in general if you have something that you want to create a variation on an existing one, then ‘Duplicate’ would be good.  If I do that and say ‘Duplicate’, it will copy here. [0:30:46]

And of course we can edit the name, and then we start out with a new one in the list. You can see they are side by side and we can edit these.  On the other hand if we say ‘New’ here, then it starts out with a blank one essentially.  When we have a composite and we want to add or work with it, basically remember we are starting from the outside and we’re going to define it. So let’s say we wanted this outside to be brick or something like that.  So I will choose the brick and give it a 4 inch thickness. And you can see how the distance shows up here, the thickness.  In order to add more components to it, I need to insert a skin. By default it will duplicate the previous one or the one just above it so that it has the same component and the same thickness. [0:31:43]

And that’s why on the right you can see what it looks like.  If I’m going to say – let’s say this is wood framing here and this is going to be 3 1/2, then you can see how it adjusts visually and it calculates in here. If we say insert another skin it duplicates temporarily the same components and the same thickness. Then of course I can go in and say I want to do gypsum board. And we’ll make this ¾ inch or something like that.  So now we have the thickness all defined.  [0:32:20]

So to create a new composite from scratch is as simple as that, however I have forgotten to set up the pens. So all of this would be rather thick. All of the hatching would be rather thick.  It is good to remember – I think the we are using Pen 2 for a fairly thin hatch line. And Pen 3 for the dividers. And then I can go back and quickly get this set up.  So because I did this manually, I started from scratch, I am having to go through this.  If I were duplicating an existing one of course it would have certain system there and then I’d be changing the thickness or adding skins to it.  [0:33:07]

Now if we did want to add a new skin, there’s the ‘Insert Skin’, which I was using. It will add it below whatever is currently highlighted.  So if I click on the brick here, it highlights this. Then say ‘Insert a Skin’, and it will put it below that.  So that’s how you can add a skin in the middle in here. And let’s say that we’re going to have an extra space, or maybe it’s going to be some extra insulation. Some type of foam board here like this.  So we can define that.  The other thing we need to do course is define the function: Core, Finish or Other.  This is not a finish, it’s other. And in fact actually that’s interesting. Because this was set up as ‘Core’ here, and I changed the one in the middle, it left this one as a priority. [0:34:10]

Let me now change this one from the outside and make this a ‘Finish’. Then I will make this a ‘Other’. So you can see again the sequence from outer to middle to the core. And of course this one would be a ‘Finish’ here. So if you’re starting from scratch you need to create whatever skins. Make sure that you go through the pens and also make sure that you get the core and finish and possibly other set up.  The other thing is that each one of these composites has a use for walls, floors, roofs, or in ArchiCAD 15 or later, shells. So if we don’t want it to show up, this composite here is really only for walls, then we want to uncheck it or take off the highlight here. Otherwise this one will show up in all of those lists. [0:35:03]

So this simplifies the dialog boxes for slabs. It will not show that. I said ‘New Composite’. Of course I can rename this and say “Wall Type A’. So you can name it based on just a sort of listing: A, B, C. Or you can name it based on what its name is, what it’s made of: brick, insulating brick, wall, things like that.  One advantage to naming a composite in a generic way like ‘Wall Type A’ is that I could – let’s say I will go to the Wall tool. I will say I’m going to be drawing with ‘Wall Type A’ here. And now I’m going to go at some point later and say all of the walls that I drew with the Wall Type A here, we’ve decided we don’t need this insulation. Or we need more thickness. Let me add more thickness to this insulation. I want to super insulate it here. [0:36:07]

Say OK, and you can see all of these update.  So one of the advantages to using composites, even in the early stages – for example, if I were to go to the Options, Element Attributes, Composite and create a New Composite, we’ll just call it ‘Exterior’ here, and we’ll call it, instead of air space, we may want to use a generic exterior material to start out with and give it some thickness. This is an exterior wall that is a composite. It’s only one composition here. And I’m going to go choose this new exterior one that I just did. [0:36:52]

Now I have some walls that I’ve drawn that are very simple. But if later on I go to the composite and say the exterior walls are going to be made of CMU here.  It’s going to be 8 inches thick, and we’re going to have a skin here that’s the gypsum board. And we’ll call this “5/8”.  This is going to be Finish. So I’ve now defined that my exterior wall is a certain type and everything that I’ve drawn will update to that.  So that’s something you may want to consider.  If you just selected these walls and drawn them with a plain building material, not a composite, then it wouldn’t have automatically updated. [0:37:48]

I could have selected them and changed them to a different wall type, but by changing the definition of exterior to a somewhat different choice, it will automatically update.  This is true for all versions of ArchiCAD that have composites. This goes back a great many generations.

There was a question from a few minutes ago by Dave Norman, “In ArchiCAD 17, can we change the surface or cut fill appearance of a composite material? I.e. can we change the line weight of a surface fill as it appears in an elevation?” [0:38:25]

Okay, that’s a good question, and a little side diversion here. If I go to the elevation here, you can see that this wall was made out CMU and it has a certain pattern.  If I turn on true line weight, we’re going to see a particular line weight.  If I select this wall and look at its settings, you can see that the surfaces are based on the building materials, because these are gray. So this is something that was added into ArchiCAD 17 saying the surface of any element can be determined by the building material. So right now we’re saying it’s CMU, and it has a certain appearance. We’re not painting it, we’re not overriding it, we’re not making it a special version of CMU. We’re just saying it’s raw.  [0:39:29]

On the other hand we could go in and say, no I want to change it so that this uses something else. So this would – here’s CMU, we have another version of it. I’ll just say that maybe it’s going to be a beige concrete so it’s been covered with concrete there.  Now if I do that, you can see that it immediately overrides the surface there.  I’m going to undo that, because the question then is, if this as a native surface and we can override the surface, how did the surfaces play a role in the line weights of what we see in an elevation here?  [0:40:15]

So this is going back to something that perhaps I didn’t cover fully in the previous lesson, Options Element Attributes, Surfaces. And this would be similar for before ArchiCAD 17 for the materials, because surfaces are the same essentially as materials in previous versions. And what you’ll see is that the ‘Vectorial Hatching 4’ – and let’s go to the concrete masonry unit here – is done with pen 2.  So this is where it’s controlled. There’s also an option for it to look at the element pen.  So this would be one that says, anytime we are using this CMU, we’re using this pen. And let’s just make this a red, and see what happens. And you can see that this CMU – in fact, I guess this was the one that was CMU. I was looking at the wrong one, those were brick here. But this is the CMU and it changed to that red and whatever particular weight. [0:41:16]

If I go back to again that surfaces here and get the CMU and say let’s make it a very thin – where is the 0.1… there’s a 0.1 somewhere I know. There it is, okay. This hairline is a very thin one. And if we wanted this here and say OK, you can see it’s just barely there. It’s visible on the screen but very faint. So that is how that is controlled. And essentially it’s the control for the surface that says that a particular surface has a hatch and it has a particular pen.  Now here is our Pen 2 which is the default in the U.S. version. If I go here and say that this will be controlled by the element pen, then it actually can change depending on what the overall setting for the element was. So let’s just do this. [0:42:30]

You’ll notice it’s much darker here. Because of this wall or all of these walls that I just drew have a particular pen that is controlling that. You can see it’s this ‘uncut line’ pen. Let me change that to this red here and we’ll see this uncut line – remember we are not cutting through this, we’re seeing this as an elevation – is now going to show up as that color.  So that particular control, if you make the surface flexible, then you can control these elements individually. On the other hand, if you want CMU to look the same in every context then you would define the surface or the material to use that. And just to verify, if I go into ArchiCAD 16 or earlier into the materials dialog, we will see the same control for this element pen or a fixed pen. So even though it’s called material settings it’s exactly the same as the surface settings.  [0:43:40]

Dave Norman says, “Got it, thanks, perfect.”

Alright, let’s see. Where have I gotten to. We are in 16 now and I want to verify that in 16 we didn’t have the option to start from scratch. If I say we don’t have new, we just have duplicate.  So essentially what you had to do was start from whatever might be the most useful reference, create a new one, and then go and edit it. So aside from that slight difference here, where there is a new button, the process would be the same. Because if I go back here we have the ‘Insert a Skin’. ‘Clear Skin’ would allow me to remove a skin if I had some extraneous ones. [0:44:39]

So perhaps we want to remove this extra air space from a copy of it. We can click on clear skin and it will remove that there.  So it’s pretty intuitive here. I don’t think I need to go through every single little choice here. But just in general, in 16 and earlier, you would select it up here and edit it down below. In 17, we would have the controls a little bit more integrated where all of these choices are edited in a single area.  So I think that covers the basic idea of creating and editing the composites.  I think probably it’s worth spending a little time on how the priorities of walls relate to composite skins, because in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, there was this elaborate set of options for how these would clean up.  [0:45:46]

In 17 this has been simplified.  So let me go and turn off the true line weights so we can see this little bit more crisply and say, whenever we were in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, we had the option of making the – actually you know what? We’re in 17, sorry. Let’s go back to ArchiCAD 16 here. We had the option the floor plan and section to override potentially the ways that the fill pens would be used. So in versions before 17, each wall could be rather uniquely set up. This potentially allowed you to make a priority for certain wall higher. If I take this up higher as a whole and turn off the skin priorities, you can see how this wall cuts through the other one. [0:46:52]

I’ve basically said, “Ignore the fact that the drywall is a lower priority and just make the entire wall a higher value.” Or potentially go the reverse, make the entire wall a lower value and have it trim back. So by turning off the skin priorities, then we can control the wall as a whole and potentially get some differences.  You’ll notice here I have a clean result. If I bring it up higher it will start to push through.  So these options certainly gave some significant control in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier. But was a rather ad-hoc system and you could end up with quite a few inconsistencies. So some walls might’ve been drawn with – let’s just take this one and put it into true line weight. And with this selected we could potentially say I want to apply the structure settings to some things. [0:47:53]

What this does is it’s now saying whatever the definition is of the composites complies to all the ways that all these fills are being done.  On the other hand if we don’t have that turned on, then let’s say for the cut fill pen, I could go in here and say I’d like to make this red. And you can see all of this is red. Or the cut fill background, I could say I want to make this a particular color. So again it’s a rather flexible system that you could do in ArchiCAD 16 and earlier, but prone to inconsistency and also rather confusing because whether you had this turned on or off would affect the way your drawings would come out. So you would have to essentially understand it well enough to make some choices and try to follow manually some certain settings to make everything work cleanly. [0:48:55]

Whereas in ArchiCAD 17 here, you will notice this dialog box is much simpler. We don’t have anything about the priorities.  Now it does have the option to override cut fill pens, so we can do this. And this does allow for example this to make the background a different color.  So if we wanted to color code, we could select one or more walls and make them have a particular background just to stand out and indicate something graphically.  So you have some basic controls over that. You could also say for the foreground, let’s forget about that one and go to this because his one has hatching and the other one doesn’t have any hatching.  [0:49:55]

So if we were to change the foreground we could make them all a particular color. Here’s the red; and we will put it back to the true line weight so we can see that.  So we could override this and make all of the cut fills a particular color for some graphic communication purposes.  So obviously they would all have the same weight and would have a unified appearance. And possibly we would say foreground, background or both, and maybe color code this with some look.  So the difference here is that the graphic overrides for the cut views – and this would affect sections as well as in plan – are simpler in 17 but give you the basic controls to make the whole wall stand out in a certain way.  [0:50:59]

In 16 and earlier, these controls, there were a lot more of them. And I guess Graphisoft decided that they were more confusing and caused inconsistencies.  So when revamping the building material system it simplified the whole process of control.  So I think that probably addresses most of the areas of composites that are needed overall.  If we were to look in another tool like the Slab tool, remember that the Slab tool – this is in 16 here – we have a choice a certain – actually I have that wall selected. Let me deselect this. Now the slab tool, if we go in here, the composite structures are only the ones that are designated for use with slabs.  [0:52:04]

Similarly if I go to 17 and switch to the Slab tool, the composite structures again are only the ones designated for floors.  Remember this exterior one that I created here, you can see how it’s set up to be used in all of them. And really I didn’t mean that. Let me go and go into the composites and take that one that I defined as an exterior wall and uncheck these guys. And now in the Slab tool, if I go in here, you can see that exterior does not show up.  So the same thing with roofs, we’re only going to be seeing – the roofs here, certainly “shingles” and “standing seam”, these are roofs. It looks like some flooring ones are set up to be available for roofs. [0:53:02]

I guess that makes sense because sometimes you might want to use the roof tool to create something that you would call a floor. There are some occasions where, for modeling purposes, that might be useful.  So that would be common to designate a composite for flooring, but also make it available with the Roof tool.  Now the Shell tool, which was added into ArchiCAD 15, has a way to do things like vaulted roofs and other more complex shapes. The Shell tool also has the option of either single fills, building materials or composites, so that it basically would have multiple skins as it creates some particular geometry.  [0:53:54]

So the Shell tool essentially is a variation of the Roof tool with different geometry options.  So in terms of composites, that’s I think the end of my presentation for today.  I’m open to your questions if there’s something that you wanted me to cover and I didn’t include it, please write a question and I will wait for a minute to see if there are any questions that come up.  I’m also interested in your feedback.  Did this clarify your understanding of composites? Hopefully I made things clearer rather than more confusing. [0:54:37]

Okay, so I see Craig Bischke says, “It’s worth noting that composite and building material interactions are also impacted by the layer intersection settings.” Okay, let’s take a look at that. I agree that is something well that interacts with that.
Dave Norman says, “All clear.” Great.

Tom Downer, “Can composites be shown showed simpler at different scales?” That’s an excellent question.

Todd Hotchkiss says, “Can parts of composites have renovation statuses?” Okay, glad for all these questions. We will continue on for a few minutes. [0:55:15]

Joe Archibald writes, “The tip on changing pen line weights for different surfaces and elevations was great.” I’m glad that was something that you found useful.

Louise Broadman, “Very clear, thank you. Seamless presentation of 16 and 17.” I appreciate the feedback.

Okay so feel free to keep on adding more comments and questions here, but let me go through the ones that just came up. So Craig Bischke writes, “It’s worth noting that composites and building material interactions are also impacted by the layer intersection settings.”  Okay, so let’s go in here.  If I take this and we’ll say, don’t override this. This one I think we don’t have override. So now these are cleaning up to each other.  This interior wall, I’m going to put it on the interior wall layer as opposed to the exterior wall layer. And of course it’s cleaning up as we see here.  Now if we were to take this and put it a on a layer that had a different intersection priority, it’s possible that this could be isolated. It would basically cut it dead or short, not intersect it. [0:56:32]

So this is something not related to composites, but it does play into this whole understanding of how things clean up to each other.  If I go to the layer dialog box, we’ll see that there’s this number here called the ‘Layer Intersection Priority’ or the ‘Layer Intersection Group’. Because it’s really not a priority in terms of higher or lower, it’s more in terms of which ones are grouped together.  And right now all of these have the number “1”, but it is possible to designate at any time that one of these might be a different one.  So I will put in a number “2”.  By doing this, at least temporarily, we are going to see that the interior walls stop intersecting or cleaning up to the exterior walls.  You can see now this is not cleaning up at all.  It obviously didn’t stop dead; it actually connected to the reference line.  If I wanted it to stop short, then I could shorten it here. And you can see what it’s doing in this point. [0:57:40]

That would not be a conventional thing for how the interior and exterior would connect, but it might be appropriate when this wall is an exterior non-structural wall like for a balcony or for a garden or retaining wall or something like that. So you might create one or more layers that are on a different priority group than these ones here.  So by simply designating those layers to have a different number, they will not clean up.  Now this layer priority here is something that is recalled in the layer combination.  So as I switch to the drafting one or the floor plan or whatever, and you can see that this wall interior is back to the number one.  [0:58:34]

So that means that each layer combination potentially could have some different options.  The main place where we used this a lot in the past was for remodel context because we would say when we want to show on existing building without the new ones, we would hide the new stuff, putting them on certain layers. And we’d make sure that those layers that were hidden would be on a different number. And in fact you can see here the reverse, which is if you wanted to use a demo layer for certain information or certain elements that are going be removed, putting those elements on a different intersection priority will mean that they won’t connect to each other. They won’t open up holes from one to the other.  [0:59:19]

So if this is hidden – and let’s just say OK – I’m going to take this. In fact let me undo it back so it’s now connected in through here.  I’m going to select this and say maybe this is going to be a demo element.  Now in here as a demo element, for a moment it left an opening there because it hadn’t refreshed or rebuilt.  But because I zoomed in or out, it cleaned it up.  If I turn back on that layer here manually, then we can see it either not cleaning up or if we turn it on and make the demo have a consistent number here, then it will clean up as you would expect.  So this is what we did routinely in ArchiCAD 14 and earlier for demo projects. Having one or more layers that were hidden and put on a different priority so they wouldn’t interact.  [1:00:27]

We don’t need to do that as much in ArchiCAD 15 and later with the renovation tools because essentially when something is hidden, saying it’s a demo element that’s not being shown in the final design, it doesn’t interact with the main ones. There are some controls that say whether to interact, they are part of the renovation settings. Which brings up the question then, and I want to thank Craig for encouraging me to look at that layer intersection priority in this context.

Now Todd Hotchkiss asked, “Can parts of composites have renovation statuses?” And the answer is no.  Unfortunately, if we go to the Window Palettes, Renovation, we can designate an element like this. And let’s just put it back into the interior, normal, simple context.  I can designate this element as a demo element if I wish and then switch to say I’d like to look at the planned status. And now you can see it hides because it’s being demolished whereas in the existing plan it’s there.  But this setting is for an entire element. You can’t say that perhaps the core is the same but it has a different cladding. And this might be a common thing for certain types of building refurbishment where you’re taking off the outside skin and putting on something else. Or you’re adding some new skin on top of the wall.  [1:02:05]

So this is a limitation in the renovation system that Graphisoft provides. The elements as a whole are either existing, demo, or new. And you can’t designate part of an element or part of a composite as one of those categories. I’m guessing at some point that may be improved, but as of now through version 17 that is not available.  So the solution and work around for that is in some cases to create – if you were to add some extra skin to the wall – is to possibly draw that as a new wall, sitting on the outside, and designate that as new. The issue with that primarily is that you have to manually create holes for the doors or windows and make the door and window symbols stick into the exterior additional skin, which is a nuisance. [1:03:04]

Another way that may be a little bit simpler but still has some issues is that you can designate the entire wall as demo even though it’s essentially going to stay there. And then have a new wall with the new conditions.  So then you are swapping between the old condition and the new one and calling the original condition “Demo” even though it’s really just going to be changed.  So that’s the work around and probably the preferable one, but still not quite ideal.  [1:03:33]

Alright Tom Downer wrote a question, “Can composites be shown simpler at different scales?” That’s a very important question that again there’s no perfect or elegant solution. But let’s just take a look.  Right now we’re at a 1/4 inch scale, roughly 1 to 50 in the metric system.  If I change this to half of that, so 1/8 inch scale or close to 1 to 100, we’ll see that these line weights start to – particularly for the drywall here – start to blend in. And if we were to take this at say a smaller scale, 1/16 or close to 1 to 200, then these are all really bleeding in. So unfortunately, just by changing scales and having the composite the way they are defined, they won’t redraw to have some other version.  [1:04:32]

And by the way, this is at five times real scale. If I say give me 100% scale, you can see that the detail is hard to make out for that.  What you can do is you can designate that, at a particular scale like this, which might be appropriate for a large overall building plan for a large building or for a site plan, we are reducing it down here. We might want to change our model view options to something like the site or context. You’ll notice here that this is showing this much simpler. How was that done? Under the Document menu, Model View Options, Set Model View Options, in Site Context, it’s overriding the fills by putting in just a solid color. [1:05:37]

Now if we look at the one this says “Detailing No Fill” – or let’s say “Reflected Ceiling”. Here is another variation where it has no fill at all and it’s looking a certain way.  This could be good for a site plan, but it will show if we have a door here. It will show the door without the swing, whereas in the normal construction documents we’ll see that door in a certain way.  So when you change scales and you’re creating a drawing for a particular purpose like the site plan or a reduced overall building plan, you may want to change your model view options to simplify the way the walls look.  [1:06:30]

The other possibility instead of simplifying is we can go in and in the model view options say let’s override this and put in a solid fill without separators. So this is just a custom change.  The other possibility would be to change the pen weights.  If we go to the construction documents here and potentially I would go to the pen sets. Now the pens and colors right now are set up based on a certain standard that’s used in ArchiCAD in the U.S. from 10 on to 17 at least.  If I change this to “Arch Pens Black”, you can see how it makes the first 20 pens black. Now this has a somewhat different look.  I could have, in terms of the pen sets here, even if I leave the colors, I could select all of these pens. [1:07:34]

I am going to select them all and change the weight to millimeters and let’s make them 0.10. So I’ll make it a really thin pen. This is a custom pen set just for testing, although I could store it and use it again and again. Now having done that, I say OK and you can see how the line work is now showing up legibly. Although frankly if we put it back to normal scale, it’s going to be pretty tiny.  But what that means is that when we change our scale to a smaller scale, we can either override the fills in the model view options or if we wish we can override the pen sets.  So one thing might be to make most pens very thin and only a select few of them have some thickness to add some punch to this.  [1:08:25]

So those would be some workarounds for getting more legibility at smaller scales given that we can’t make the composite smart and say, at a certain scale it should display one way and then another scale it should display a different way.

Okay, so let’s see. Ken Brooks writes, “What are the instances where one would choose between true line weight and not? True line weight seems quite crude visually at times.”

So this is a question from a few minutes ago. I would say that in general when you’re doing final output, true line weight is going to give you drawings that read better.  They’re going to have differentiation between thicker and thinner lines.  If you do it intelligently you can end up with a drawing that just is easier to understand. On the other hand, putting it into hairline with everything as thin as possible, will give you a drawing that you can look at and all the lines are as clear as possible.  You just can’t see using weights, the thickness and the relative strengths or prominence or importance of different edges.  So of course that’s the reason why traditionally different thicknesses are used is to help communicate the construction elements.  [1:10:01]

Now when you say that true line weight seems quite crude visually at times, essentially because you have to work with it intelligently.  I’m not saying you’re unintelligent, I’m just saying you need to make sure you’re using the controls properly. That means that composites need to be set up so that the line weights are intelligent so that certain pens are thicker and certain are thinner as I showed you the system the 1, 2, 3 system that Graphisoft seems to have standardized in ArchiCAD 17 in the U.S. where the outside pens were thick and the inner pens were set to thin for the fills and medium for the dividers. [1:10:52]

If you are using a different pen set than what Graphisoft set up, then you have potentially a lot of coordination issues and that’s why in general I recommend using the Graphisoft pen sets in the U.S. or international use and getting used to it. Because essentially, if you want to go out on your own, you’re going to have a lot of customization to do. And it’s a little bit easier for beginners and intermediate level people to use what Graphisoft supplies and use it smart as opposed to trying to customize it and potentially making it messy.  [1:11:31]

We’ll be looking at that in a later section of the course. I’m going to try to spend time talking about the legibility of construction documents and give you some tips as well as being very open to learning from those of you who are experts and really have fined tuned your controls. I’d like to see maybe what variations or tricks you’ve come up with that help you get that clearest drawings possible.

Joe Archibald, “Alright.”

Todd Hotchkiss gives me a checkmark for the explanation.

Joe Archibald says, “Having different pen sets at different scale views works nicely, even going to larger scales.”  Yes definitely. We’re going to be talking about pen sets in the next lesson. That’s one of the remaining ones for the Attributes that we’ve been going over this past couple of weeks.  We’ll be looking at a little more detail of how you set up pen sets and some of the ways that you might find them useful.  So I think we’ve gone through all of the questions that were added. We’ve gone an hour and a quarter. This is a good point to finish up.  Ken Andrews writes, “Great lesson.” Thank you Ken, I appreciate it.  So we’ll finish up for now. Please add your comments and questions to the page down below.  This has been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

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BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-F – Element Attributes: Pen Colors and Pen Sets

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices Course lesson.  Today we’ll be focusing on Options, Element Attributes.  We’ll be finishing out the basic Element Attributes. Previous lessons covered line types and fills, and we went on to surfaces or the old word was materials.  We looked at building materials and composites.  Today we are going to be looking at pens and colors or pen sets. and we’ll be looking I guess also at zone categories, which is brief because there’s not a whole lot in terms of attribute management that you can do. And we’ll look briefly at operation profiles. These are the remaining ones that are part of the attribute manager that you can define for any particular project and move from project to project using attribute manager. [0:00:59]

As with all of the other attributes, these are not things like 3D elements; like walls and roofs. And they’re not 2D elements like annotation, text, dimension and labels. They are the definitions of how these things look or appear or work when you’re doing your project.  So we’re going to be focusing on pens and colors at first.  So if I open up the Pens and Colors dialog box, we’ll see that in the standard U.S. version there are a number of pen sets.  In the international version there are some different ones, and in fact I will open up the international version of ArchiCAD, the international English one, because I’d like to point out that some of the systems that they have built in there. [0:01:52]

Of course the basic concept is going to be the same regardless of where you are in the world, and that is that you have at any given time an active pen set that determines how things appear.  So if we have this current one here, ‘U.S. ArchiCAD 10 default’ active, then depending upon what pen things are drawn with, they will have a certain color and a certain line weight.  So what’s common between all of these is the grid, which it looks like it just has the first half filled in, but actually as we switch between it, you’ll see that it goes up to 255 pens. So there are 255 pens from 1 to 255, and in some dialog boxes you’ll see an extra pen or two at the end. One being transparent and another one being opaque or screened background.  [0:02:47]

The U.S. ArchiCAD 10 default was established of course with ArchiCAD 10, and it was noticeably different than previous versions with ArchiCAD 9.  Unless you are migrating an old project in the U.S. from ArchiCAD 9 or earlier, you wouldn’t want to use this.  This is available simply to provide compatibility for older projects that had different standards.  The ArchiCAD 10 default has not been changed in the last few years.  Here we are in ArchiCAD 17 and we still have that default. And I don’t know if there are any current plans to change that for the U.S. people.  [0:03:29]

Now if you’re in the U.S. there is a CAD standard which some firms will either prefer or be required to submit drawings in. It’s called the ‘National CAD Standard’ or ‘NCS’. It has a rather different set here and you can see it’s extremely different with no color gradations, just simple rows of colors.  It is based on let’s say standards that were appropriate for 2D CAD and not nearly ideal for working with BIM or Building Information Modeling or virtual building projects. And certainly don’t provide a range of color choices for graphic controls, at least not as subtle ones.  [0:04:18]

And you will see some other ones here in the U.S. defaults such as ‘Electrical Plans’. And what this is intended to be is a variation where the first row of pens or first elements that are placed, such as walls and objects and beams etc, in general are going to become gray. but this “Pen 10” here is going to standout, and it’s intended that you might put your electrical elements using that particular pen, so that your electrical plan on the plans fade away or fade into the background and electrical elements stand out.  Now if you are bringing in AutoCAD drawings, then you may want to use this. This is based on the standard DWG pen settings. [0:05:09]

AutoDesk, with AutoCAD over the years, I guess has maintained a consistent pen definition. So basically all of these colors here are their standard colors.  What will be different, depending on whether you bring in drawings, is that different firms will have different pen weights. So actually the pen weights here you’ll notice are all the same. And as I click on then you can see the weight not changing.  So we’ll be looking at that a little bit more in terms of the definitions there. But this is a variation, and it’s specifically the same as the AutoCAD pen set except for pen 7. Pen 7 being the one that in AutoCAD is commonly white against the black background that AutoCAD users generally use. So this variation makes this one black.  [0:06:05]

And here you can see another variation of ‘Arch pens black’, which actually closely resembles the standard U.S. default but has the first row all black.  So this is intended to be a quick way of making your drawings look different, where most of the structural elements, the actual building geometry itself, gets made a crisp, black color. This is an overview of the standard setup in ArchiCAD in the U.S.  I’m going to go and open up the ArchiCAD – I’m going to get the international version of ArchiCAD if I can here. And we’ll start it up.  So I have a version of ArchiCAD 17 international, and I will start up that one.  That will come up as a separate application on my screen.  [0:07:07]

In the international version, there is a much more complex organization of – ArchiCAD 17; I think this probably will be alright. I’ll go here. Let’s just go in to our library manager here and go find where that international library is. Because I have renamed it here for clarity, it’s going to use that and take away the original reference there.  That will bring up the ArchiCAD 17 international version.  Now all of this stuff with the pens is sort of hard to understand. This is a little hard to understand when we’re not looking at any drawings.  So we will spend a little time looking at the project file and seeing the effects of it.  [0:08:22]

So right now I just wanted to go through the basics theoretical overview. If we go to Options, Element Attributes, Pen and Colors, here in the international version we’ll see that they have a rather different set of concepts.  So the standard architectural one is intended for 1:100 scale – which for those of you who are in the U.S. that would be roughly 1/8 inch scale – you can see the colors are organized in a different way than the U.S. version.  I’m going to point out something that I didn’t indicate earlier and that is that whenever you click on one of these, you’ll see some information, a description here.  So as I click on it, you can see that it tells me 2D elements general or 2D elements cut structural, 2D elements cut non structural. So you can see that these related colors, they grays in this case, are all 2D elements as opposed to the orange, which are for openings like door and window openings. [0:09:27]

Or these green ones for objects. So basically if you’re looking at a drawing using this pen set using the ArchiCAD standards for the international version, then you will end up with being able to quickly see that green elements are objects, whereas gray elements are 2D. Blue elements are for text or annotation, etc.  So each one of these has a general purpose.  This provides an organizational structure. There is also a little bit of logic here that with the pens, the first row is thicker and then as it goes down it will tend to get a little less saturated in color. So a little bit lighter looking on screen, and a little bit thinner to ultimately the thinnest one that they work with here.  [0:10:29]

And if we look at “Building Plans 50” it looks very similar, however I believe that the pen weights have been adjusted in some cases.  I’m not an expert on this, so these all say 0.35. And the same – this is 0.25 here for the 1:100.  So in terms of the pen weights, you can switch if you wish or look at the pen weights in either millimeters or points.  So the standard in the international version is millimeters whereas in the U.S. version – if I go back to this – we’ll see that the standard with the default is in points.  I personally prefer thinking about it in millimeters.  It’s up to you how you do it, but obviously when you switch this it doesn’t change the weight of pen, it just gives you a different readout, so you can understand it conceptually better.  [0:11:31]

So you’ll see in the U.S. that there are these descriptions here that give you some idea of what they are intended for, like “Pen 3” is for slate or for door and window. Here “Pen 4” for brown is used for objects. “Pen 5” is a thin line here and “Pen 6” in very thin line for door swings. You can use it for anything you like, but this description helps you decide if you’re trying to decide what to use. In some cases you’ll be able to choose that based on the description. These are just names here, medium and a color like magenta or teal. Here is uncut line, or gray overhead. So you can see this is intended to be a thin line that is not too prominent for things that are over the floor plan cut plane.  [0:12:26]

These descriptions are definitely useful.  Now in order to understand the references for this, I’m going to open up or switch to the MasterTemplate sample project.  I have a little problem with the library right now, so we’re getting some duplications with the zone stamp. But aside from that, this should give us a good example for viewing the pens and the effect of the pens.  Right now, if I zoom in on let’s say this area here, we are seeing this in a hairline. So no matter how close I zoom in, all these lines will remain a thin hairline onscreen.  [0:13:15]

If I go to the View menu, I can switch at any time to turn on the Onscreen View Options and True Line Weight.  When I do that, you can see that we’re starting to see quite heavy line for the walls, sort of moderate lines for these objects and the outlines of the windows and then thinner lines for the edges of the wall here below the window for some annotation and for the door swing.  Now if I want to switch the pen set to see the differences, I can switch it right on the fly. In other words, I can go to the Document menu, Pen Sets, and switch for example to the “Electrical Plan”. And you’ll see how everything becomes gray at this point.  [0:14:06]

This particular layer combination does not have an electrical element showing, so it’s not popping out. In general, you’re going to want to coordinate the pen set with the layers so that you can take advantage of these things.  Now I went to the Document menu, Pen Sets and manually changed it.  I can also use the Quick Options here.  I like having this stuff below the navigator in the corner. The Quick Options can be turned on or off using this little button here in the bottom, third from the left. Any drafting window will have this Quick Options here.  You can move these around if you want. You’ll see that in the Quick Options there is the pen set here, “Electrical Plan”, so I will switch this around. [0:14:58]

And we’ll see, for example, here’s where we started with the ArchiCAD 10 default. And here’s another one where the first 20 pens are made of all black.  This is similar to the one that is in the standard ArchiCAD that is the first 20 black here. So you can see everything is nice and crisp black, but it has retained the same thickness. So in other words, the objects are sort of strong but not as strong as the walls. And the hatch dots in this case are thin; they are certainly less prominent.  If I go to another one here like all gray, you can see how this really is a light gray. So these are ones in the MasterTemplate.  There are some additional ones. Why would you want to make everything light gray?  [0:15:52]

Perhaps you want to put this drawing on a sheet as a background and put some other things on top of it.  By switching the pen set for entire drawing to all gray, you can end up making it fade into the background.  Or you can see sometimes you might want to have a simple background in just a simple color like blue.  So these are some pen sets that are available in MasterTemplate.  If I go to the Document, Pen Sets, Pens and Colors, you’ll see that there are more choices here in MasterTemplate.  Let’s just take a look at how you would create a new pen set. [0:16:39]

Here’s our standard ArchiCAD U.S. version and we’ll go to the pens and colors. and in order to create a new one and all I have to do is make any change here.  If I take this black and I edit the color and make it gray, something like that, you’ll see how it changes the gray here, and all the sudden it says “Custom”.  So as soon as I make any change it becomes custom. And of course I can change many of them. For example I can select multiple pens like this and edit the color and make them some particular color.  That will affect all of them at once.  Now each one of them has a distinct weight, and I put it into millimeters. As soon as I click on that, you can see that even though they are all now made into this particular shade they’ve retained their individual weights.  [0:17:36]

That’s how we have the one for – say there’s “Arch pens black”, that was done at the first row, was made of black but retained the fact that this “Pen 1” in the U.S. version is a heavy cutline whereas “Pen 2” is a thin line.  So essentially by taking this and selecting the whole row and making this black, that created a custom set and it was renamed to “Arch pens black”.  So after you have done some work on it we can see the results. We can work with a custom one to see that. And if you decide this is what you would like to use again and again, you can store a give it a name. And initially it will copy the name that it came from, but you can also overwrite a pen set if you want to update it here.  [0:18:34]

So the basics of manipulating pen sets are that you can switch between them at anytime. You can modify the settings and create a custom pen set. And then you can store and give a name to whatever changes you’ve made in that pen set.  Now the use of this, when I was showing the sample project here, let me go back to the one that is the standard here. When you have it in the standard pens, it gives you some visual clarity in terms of seeing the color. In this case in the U.S. version, the browns are the objects. And we have blue for text and things like that. So it just makes it a little easier to read. And of course in the international version there are different standards, but the idea is that you have columns in one color and objects in another; lamps in different ones.  [0:19:37]

Now when we place this onto a sheet, if I go to a plan sheet here to the first level plan, we’re going to see that same drawing that we were just looking at here. But you’ll notice that everything is black – well not everything. Most of the stuff is black except some things stand out, because in this case it’s indicating the new elements with a particular poché color.  How is that done?  Basically, this is the same drawing. If I say ‘Open Source View’, we’re going to see that this is the view we were just looking at with all of these colors. but here on the sheet it’s got a different pen set.  So drawings, when we open up the drawing settings, each drawing has the option of either using the original pen set that was in the view or overwriting it. In this case you can see the first row of pens were all made black so this is a variation. [0:20:45]

They still have thick and thin pens, but it will plot a little bit more cleanly.  If you’re plotting on a plotter or printer that allows you to easily switch everything to black then you can use that without this. But the advantage of this one is that we can selectively make most things black. And then if we want perhaps print in color and have only certain things get in color.  So all these different colors that we’re seeing that we saw on the plan while we were working really aren’t necessarily helpful for the printout. But we may want colors for certain types of annotation or graphic effect. And then if we’re printing in color we can have the best of both worlds.  Simple, clear representation of most of the drawing, and then colors and shades for some of the other things. [0:21:42]

So that’s why we might set that up in terms of having the drawing with a different pen set.  Now this drawing, as you saw when I opened this up, has a setting for the pen set that is different than the view.  This reminds me that I should clarify that each view – if I go back to the view here – each view has settings associated with it including what pen set.  So in other words, whenever you switch views, you can not only change the layers, which would be very common, so either were you doing a furniture plan or doing a site plan that’s going to have very different objects and different elements showing based on the layers, but you can if you want to switch the pen sets. For example, if I go to say a fire separation plan here, this one actually still uses the U.S. ArchiCAD 10. [0:22:41]

Here’s a simple background plan. This view setting changes of bunch of things. It changes the layers to make it a background and not have all the furniture and fixtures and things like that. But it can change other things. And in this case it’s actually still using the same pen set but it has a different model view option so that the walls are showing pochéd. I’m not sure in MasterTemplate whether we have something. Oh, here’s the electrical plan, it probably has that.  No, that’s interesting. The electrical plan – OK. This is something that I think might be good. Let’s go to MEP for Mechanical Electrical Plumbing. And this one, no, all of these are using the same pen sets. So that’s interesting that that is not – let’s go to Reflected Ceiling here. These all are using the same pen set. So in the sample project we’re not taking advantage of that. [0:23:48]

But what we might want to do here in the electrical plan one is we might want to switch this settings to let’s say the electrical plan. And now you can see how the settings for the building are gray, but the electrical elements are standing out. So that actually would be a common thing to do is to change for a particular view. If you want to do that of course it’s very simple to go to the view settings and either in this case get the current window settings or just manually change the pen set to say, “I want to use the electrical plan pen set”. So then every time you go – I’ll just go back and forth between the first floor plan where you can see different pens and colors and electrical plan, and we’ll see how it switches the appearance.  [0:24:43]

So you could also potentially make the walls thinner, the line work thinner if you wanted to. You could change settings to show the wall composition differently, more like in a site plan. We have a site plan here. you can see how in the site plan we are changing a lot of things about that.  We can manipulate the pen set as part of creating a more legible drawing or output.  So let’s see, in the international version here, just returning to some of the settings that are in the international version. Graphisoft has set up – of course you can see slightly different versions for plans at medium scale and a slightly smaller scale here. And when we go to site plan, you can see how that changes as well.  In general, they have some thinner weights here. [0:25:50]

If we go to this one, let’s look at “Walls General”, it’s .35 here. This is 0.35. What I’m noticing here – this is cut structure here – is that when we’re at a slightly larger scale, they have some tweaks to make the walls stand out a little more here. When we are at a smaller scale it actually gets much thinner. So you can see this is .2, this is 0.35 and this is 0.5.  So there is some tweaking. It looks like they have common color scheme, but generally they are adjusting certain pens to get the result that they want.  If we go to mechanical, we’ll see that they are simplifying some of the colors or electrical, so the same idea as what I was showing here.  This color one clearly would be intended for construction documents.  It might be the type of pen set that you use for creating a graphic presentation. [0:27:03]

Here you have a whole rainbow of colors that makes it easy to make something that might be a diagram read properly. And a different type for shades of gray scale. And some legacy compatibility for previous versions of ArchiCAD.  So these different pen sets – I don’t have a detailed understanding of their use, but it’s clear that there are some nice things that Graphisoft has put in for specific purposes that you could use for those special drawings that you might create.  So again the basic idea with all of these is that each view in the view map, when you go to a particular view, it’s going to switch potentially to a – let’s go to our quick views here – it’s going to switch to perhaps a different model view option, perhaps a different pen set. [0:28:14]

If we go to the structural plan here, we can see it has a structural pen set. So each view will have its own options. And then of course when you’re placing drawings on the sheet you can override that. Generally you want to coordinate that. You don’t want to have something totally different. You’ll want to either use the same as the view you are working with or a variation that maybe simplifies some of the colors and makes them black. [0:28:39]

So let’s see if there are some questions about this. Dorothy Howard asked an off-topic question about room finished legends that I would be happy to help you with offline rather than doing that in the middle of this lesson.

Iain Dykes asked about the Australian pen sets. That brings up how the pen sets coordinate with objects. Iain, in reference to your particular question, I have not gone into that in detail, but I’m going to go over the concept for everyone’s benefit here.

Dave Norman, “Kindly clarify how to plot with all lines in black but some select annotations or fills in color.” I will explain that Dave, and then go into the relationship with pen sets and library parts which is very important to understand. [0:29:47]

So if I go back to MasterTemplate here – let me go back to our first floor plan. You can see that there is blue in certain places and brown for these objects. And when I go to the particular sheet here, everything is black. However, it’s not all black because some things have a color. How is that done? Again, this particular view had certain settings. It was the view that was using the ArchiCAD 10 default which had many colors. Here is the variation of the pen set that makes all of the first row of 20 black. So again, if I go to the Document, Pen Sets, Pens and Colors, we will see that the – and let’s made this wider so we can read it better. Unfortunately, it still didn’t show the name completely in this dialog box but you can see the name down here. The standard one that this was drawn with was this one. And here is the variation here. [0:31:13]

I believe in the standard one, if we go back to the standard U.S. one here and go to the pen sets, you will see that they have one that is identical concept that we did in MasterTemplate, they just call it “Arch Pens Black”.  So essentially if I draw something – and let’s just draw a wall – we’ll pick a more complex one here and pop in a window and a door. And we’ll put in an object here and we zoom in on it. Let’s make sure that we are set to do true line weight. You can see the different weights. We can see blues and browns and gray tones here. If I look at the sheet for the plans and we now update, look at it. You can see that this is all looking black, because again, the standard default or the standard in the ArchiCAD template in the U.S. is that drawings are placed with a different pen set.  [0:32:33]

“Arch pens black” remember only changed the first 20 pens. So if I go back to the floor plan here and I go and say create a fill, and let’s give this a simple poché pattern. Then choose, instead of this first row of 20 pens, pick something else. Maybe just a nice tone like that. Now if I go back to the sheet we’re going to see that is in color.  So these have all been swapped out. This is in color because it’s using a pen above the first 20, which is left in the same style as the working view.  Now again, this is a drawing on a sheet. When you place drawings, the settings that are in the drawing tool are going to be used.  So whenever you drag a view onto a sheet it uses the settings that are the default.  That’s the same for anything. When you draw a new wall or put in a new object or anything, when you start to click, it starts putting it in based on whatever is the default.  [0:33:47]

Of course you can change it later. So the drawing default settings in this template are – well actually, here it says “Pen set is missing”, so that’s interesting. This is a brand new file from the ArchiCAD default in the U.S. and it actually says “missing” here. So the default could be that whenever you put a new view on as a drawing, it uses the original pen set. And that would be fine. Then you can manually change it. But it’s common to say that the default for whenever you are putting in a new drawing on should use this variation where some of the pens have been swapped out to be black.  Then every time you drag a view, it will automatically do that.  Then we can say OK. [0:34:37]

Now that I have changed the default, the next time I drag a drawing on it will have this setting.  Hopefully that clarifies that for Dave Norman and for everyone else.

Dorothy Howard asks, “Why would you use a different color for various types of things? Walls are obviously walls, columns are columns. Why not link colors to layers so you can tell if something is on a wrong layer?” [0:34:57]

That’s an interesting philosophical question. We could also just call it a workflow question. In AutoCAD I know it is very common for layers to be a designated with colors.  So the electrical layer or the object layer or the wall layer, each one of these will have a certain color. So that makes it a little easier for if you’re zoomed in on things to see what’s going on.  That’s somewhat limiting, I would say, because objects often will have multiple things.  So if I go to this, you can see that this as a wall that has different parts of it. It has different cutlines; some of them are thicker or thinner. It has some hatches. So if we were to color this wall based simply on the fact that it’s on a particular layer, then all the pens might be the same. So this gives us flexibility. And in addition, I don’t know about this object, but if we were to take certain objects, we will find that -I’m not sure what would be a good example here. [0:36:15]

We could do something more complicated. I don’t have anything really that I can remember offhand. Let’s take some equipment here. Does this have some parameters for the 2D representation? There’s a contour pen, there’s a fill pen, etc. I’m not quite sure where exactly we would see this in these elements. But certainly there’s the possibility that any of these could have a different pen weight for different components.  In the standard ArchiCAD library in the U.S. there’s the detailer library which has 2D symbols. I know we’ve got wood moldings here. You can see that it is a 2D symbol and it has different colors in here and there are different controls. If I place this and look at it, the view is intended at a different scale. [0:37:48]

If we were to temporarily switch this to a detail scale like this, you can see that the different colors allow for different thicknesses.  So just categorically I would say that making everything have the same weight or pen color based on the layer is very limiting. ArchiCAD gives much more flexibility there.  Now in terms of why do you need colors to identify whether it’s a wall or something else? Walls are very clear. Sometimes when you are zoomed in on things it’s a little bit harder to tell what’s going on. So let’s just put it back to its normal scale here. Sometimes just being able to see the colors here can give you a clue on things. And also if you turn off true line weight then you may be used to the fact that, oh, that’s a light blue, that’s going to be a thin line. And you just know visually that different colors have different thicknesses. [0:39:06]

So overall I would say that not everybody agrees with the use of pens and the differentiation. Certainly there are many different styles and I’ve seen there. Some people even would wager that making everything hairline is not a bad idea. Just making it all very clean and crisp is sometimes simpler to manage; and printing in hairline is an option you can do.  But I think to provide more legibility, having differences in weight will make it possible depending on when you’re looking at things just to have things jump out that these are structural elements etc. [0:39:55]

So let’s see other questions. Steve asked, “What is so ‘true’ about true line weight?” Good question. And let’s talk about how pens coordinate with the ArchiCAD library because that’s something I haven’t touched on.  So in terms of true, well, when I’m going to be printing at a certain scale, 1/4″ to 1′, or roughly 1 to 50, this is approximately the size that it would print out on paper. It depends on the resolution I have on the screen.  Right now I’m at a certain resolution on my screen, but it’s roughly 100%. And if we put in some text here, this text has a certain relationship to the building.  Now I’m 1/4″ scale. That means this is what size that it would print.  If I reduce this to let’s say 1/8″ scale, what’s going to happen is that the building will get half as large. [0:40:59]

But annotation, like the size of the text, will still remain the same size because annotation is defined by its paper size.  So in the U.S. that is in points and in international versions it would be millimeters. But it’s how big it will print out. And you’ll get used to the fact that the text at 9 points is quite readable, at 7 points it’s still good, but if you get it down to 2 or 3 points it’s going to be very hard to make out. So you get used to those sizes and it becomes relatively easy to just pick a size based on what you know it’s going to look like. If I switch this to a smaller scale like this, the text will still be legible. But of course the building has gotten smaller or tighter on the page. [0:41:46]

And if I go back to that 1/4 inch we’ll see how it’s spread out.  In the same way, if I zoom in on this at 1/4 inch, when we’re at a larger scale these pens separate. We can see some differentiation.  If I go to a smaller scale like 1/8 inch then you can see how things are starting to bleed together.  In fact if I go to something like what we might do, a site plan in 1/16, that would be roughly 1 to 200, then we’re seeing how the thicknesses are looking very different. Why? Because if I go to 100% percent, you can see that everything on the site plan is going to be really pushed together. There’s not much differentiation. [0:42:31]

So true line weight means that ArchiCAD is doing its best to represent the relative thickness of things and the relative size of annotations like text. And we of course have dimensions. Let’s just do a dimension here, not that I have much to dimension. Each of the dimensions has a certain thickness for the tick marks and the lines here. As I switch between the small scale to slightly bigger scale, you can see that these weights, at 100%, there’s a certain weight. This may be a little hard to tell, but there’s a little more weight on the tick mark then on the line that shows along the axis. If I go to 1/4″, it’s going to be very similar. There’s still just a little bit more weight on that tick mark than here. Why? Because the cross line here is Pen 7 which is 0.3 mm. [0:43:43]

And the axis line here is Pen 6, which is 0.18 mm.  So in other words this is definitely thicker. So that thickness is intended to represent onscreen as close as possible how this would print. So true representation of how it would print.  Now when you zoom in on things, at certain scales everything will look good, but at other scales in might not look as clean.  This gives you an idea of what you’re going to end up with and how these lines, are they separated or not? Certainly if we go to an even larger scale like this, we’re going to see more differentiation because the pen weight is not – these two lines are not joining together. [0:44:32]

There is a little gap there because that particular space now can be seen, whereas if I go to the smaller scale here, you can see how they essentially bleed together because pen pens are touching each other there.

So let’s see, Dave Norman writes, “It’s great the way international pen sets allow for different line weights for different drawing scales.” I agree there is some sophistication there. I would say overall if I was Graphisoft and starting from scratch, I would say the international pen sets are probably better thought out than the U.S. ones. But I believe that the U.S. customization of ArchiCAD, they have decided that the difference is relatively small in terms of how many controls you have. Users who are sophisticated can create their own pen sets and get the same controls. The bulk of the users are happy enough, and if they made a big change like this, they would get so many people requiring tech support and confused about it that it just isn’t worth it. [0:45:44]

So it’s not a perfect world. Every time they come out with a new version of ArchiCAD perhaps they consider should we change this over? And they decide, no let’s not do it now. I am going to be talking about how it coordinates with the library now, because that is just another reason why compatibility from version to version and compatibility between pen sets and library parts makes this a little bit more complicated as well. [0:46:16]

Dave Norman goes on, “I assume we could do the same with the U.S. version, I am making some custom pen sets for these different scales and putting them into the appropriate view settings.” Absolutely. If you have ever felt like a site plan, your walls, the lines were too thick because you are going down to a really small scale, you can just create a different pen set with thinner lines for those walls. And of course when it’s reduced you’re probably not putting in much of the interior structure or fit out for the building. So you are using fewer pens in any event. But you may just want to use a pen set that allows you to have the same walls show up thinner to read better in a small-scale site plan. [0:47:05]

Conversely for a detail drawing, when you are at an enlarged scale, you may possibly want to create some variations.

Rick Skorick says, “Can line weights be controlled in 3D using pens and colors?” Good question. I don’t believe that we have much control in 3D. If I look in 3D, it’s just this little building here. First of all, we are looking at this in Open GL. You can see some colors for this. Let’s change the door. The door has pen settings here and you can see “wall contour pen”, “plan symbol”. This is the plan symbol. Let’s go to door frame. You can see here is the contour. So “Pen in 3D”, here is a control separately. If we were to change this to black which would be thicker and stronger and then look at it, there we have it.  [0:48:15]

So there are some controls for some elements.  In this case I changed this in 3D. And if I go back to the floor plan it still has the original teal color there. So you can do that.  It did have a line weight? I don’t think it’s really a line weights, it’s just a color here, at least in the Open GL version.  If I look at the elevation here you can see here are thick black lines there. Let me undo the change and go back to that elevation.  And you can see yes, in an elevation some elements like the doors have controls for their edge contours and that changes the color and the weight. Whereas in the 3D view in Open GL, it just changes the color I guess. [0:49:11]

Now let’s look at the door and see how it’s set up in the library.  Right now we’re in the U.S. version and were looking at the door. If we look at the settings for pens will see that the plan symbol uses Pen 3. However if we go down to the door frame, go down to door panel, I know there’s a Pen 6 in the opening here. Here is 2D and 3D line pen, that’s gray, that isn’t allowing us to control that. Let’s see – “Override model view options”. Okay, somewhere around ArchiCAD 13 Graphisoft introduced the idea that you could potentially in the model view options change certain attributes of elements like doors globally. Doors or windows or objects. so was the concept of model view options controlling it.  If I manually say I’d like to control this, you can see that the line pen for the opening, which would be the swing line here, is set at Pen 6. [0:50:44]

Now Pen 6 you will notice is this light aqua color which is 0.18 mm. So it’s a fairly thin line, not the thinnest that we see. The thinnest we might see is 0.10 or .12 mm, but this is certainly thin. And this is the default. And of course as we look back here at the general settings, the plan symbol is Pen 3. The reason why point this out is that if I were to use a different pen set where Pen 3 was really thin or super thick, then when I place the door – let’s just switch to a door here – you’ll see that they all use a certain default.  So if I use the pen set that was radically different than I probably, before I even put in a door or when I’m cleaning up my drawing, I would have to go and change the settings. And this is true for virtually all elements in the library.  [0:51:50]

So if I go to the Object tool and we look at this, the default for the appearance has a certain pen, Pen 4. So what that means is that the pen four was not just a different color but perhaps a very different thickness. All the objects would look bad, and we would have to correct or change the objects in order for it to look good.  So the idea here is that there are some pens that are built into objects and doors and windows as the default. And that is set in the library. So the ArchiCAD library for your particular version of ArchiCAD. In the U.S. obviously it’s one and in international use there’s another standard. And I guess in Australia there are some differences in the Australian library compared to other English speaking countries.  [0:52:55]

What this means is that the pen sets need to be coordinated with this. At least some of the pens. There are not a lot of pens that are used. In other words, each door or window or object only uses a handful of pens.  It might be two or three or as many as five or six pens. But those pens, if they were radically different, would mean that every time you placed an element you would have to go and tweak it. You would have to have different settings and change the defaults. So for speed, I would wager that you don’t want to mess around with your pen sets for those particular pens. And I don’t have a summary of all the pens that are in use, but they generally tend to be in the first 10, at least in the U.S. version. [0:53:47]

In other words, Pen 1 is used for wall outlines and Pen 2 is used for thin fills. You can see the name next to it that pops up. Pen 3 is used for door and window symbols, Pen 4 for objects.  So these ones that are in the first 10 here generally have a certain weight that I wouldn’t mess around with, at least not for your general drawings because it’s going to affect anything you place. And you’re going to have to do a lot of extra work to make sure things look good if you change these. So if you create your own pen sets, I would be very wary about changing the weights of the first 10 pens. And in fact the first 20 probably there are some things that might use this. [0:54:38]

So I would leave those alone or tweak them very carefully and look at what happens when you place objects and place doors and windows; and if you don’t change the defaults does it look good? So Iain’s question related to this, because we supply MasterTemplate and international versions that is set up in metric of course. It’s set up using the international pen sets, but it relies on the local library.  So in other words in Australia their loading the library provided by the Australian division or subsidiary of Graphisoft. And the question has come up that perhaps the pen sets that we distribute with MasterTemplate don’t match the Australian libraries well enough. So this is something that I have been meaning over the last several years to look at and study, but have not actually dug into it.  [0:55:41]

I will say that only a handful of people like Iain have actually brought this up, so a few people have said, “Hey this doesn’t look good with MasterTemplate,” or “I’m not sure this looks as good as it should.” We have dozens of Australian users of MasterTemplate and others have not mentioned it. I don’t know whether that’s because they are just okay with the changes or not, but that is something that I still intend to look at and at least come up with a good response I apologize for Iain and anyone else from Australia who maybe has asked me up to this point. I intend to look it that.  [0:56:24]

Let’s see. We are at the hour mark, and we’ve focused on pen sets here, pens and colors. I have one other part that I just realized I haven’t talked about and that is the fact that pens and colors are set separately for the model views and the layout book.  Actually, I’m sorry; this is the Element Attributes, Pens and Colors that defines this, which we’ve looked at. But if we were to look at the Document menu, Pen Sets, basically if I change this either in a view or just manually, it affects what we’re looking at onscreen in the model. Right now if I were to switch this to AutoCAD pens, we’ll see how everything looks totally different. [0:57:25]

Let me go to the layout book here. And of course this doesn’t look different. Why? Because the drawing is set to use a particular pen set. And in fact I think we can to scroll over here and do we have that? I think there here is – you can actually change it quickly here. The same thing, I went into the dialog box you can change. So this ignores the fact that I temporarily had switched it to the AutoCAD pens, it’s still looking the way it did. But also notice that the layout master and the titles didn’t change. If I were to do a fill here and select this and go in here, you’ll see that these are the standard. Actually this is the one with the first 20 are black and then we have the other color.  [0:58:30]

So this element that I’m drawing now is put manually on the layout book. and if I go into the masters – so I guess let’s go into this one here – you can see that when I select any line and go to the pens, you can see that this is a certain pen set that it’s using. So which pen set is it using? It’s in the Document menu, Pen Sets, and it’s the Layout Book. You’ll notice that it says “Layout Book” here. If you changed the layout book settings for pens and colors, it affects all layouts.  You may say, Wait a second; didn’t I change the pens for a particular drawing? Don’t I have some flexibility there for the drawing? And the answer is yes. Individual drawings can have their own pen set. But the elements on the master, basically the title block and background and anything that you place manually in the layout book just on the sheets, will use whatever is the active pens and colors in the layout book.  [0:59:46]

So that’s independent of whatever you have in the views in your model.  So just to prove this, if I go to let’s say the AutoCAD pens, you’ll see how this looks. It’s all green, etc. Let me go back to that sheet, and you can see this now has changed, the little fill that I did, because it’s using this AutoCAD pen set, the one that I just changed. So in the Document menu, Pen Sets, we can change the layout book setting once or any time we want, but it will affect all sheets and all masters in terms of the way they are interpreted.  So just be aware that. Each view that you have in the view map in the model can be different if you like and each drawing can have its own choice. But that the layout book as a whole will have a single choice, whatever is the active pen set. [1:00:48]

One last thing relative to placing drawings on here and the AutoCAD pen set. We’re generally placing views of the model onto sheets or views of detail drawings or worksheets, things that we create from within ArchiCAD. Sometimes you’ll place detail drawings from a manufacturer or a site plan or a consultant’s drawings that were created in another cad program, perhaps AutoCAD. When you place that site plan or that detail from the manufacturer, if you place it onto a layout directly, you can of course choose that drawing and say, you know what? I want this particular drawing to use the AutoCAD pens.  [1:01:46]

You can always override it to specify that a particular drawing should have a different pen set.  Essentially if it was created by someone not using ArchiCAD, and using AutoCAD or any other pen set that you like. One other thing about the AutoCAD pen set as I mentioned, if I go to the pen sets here, if I go into the definition for the AutoCAD pens, the colors are fixed in AutoCAD. But the pen weights will be different depending upon what company or individual is working with it. So you can see how these all say 0.18 so they’re all thin. Essentially this is the safest thing to do is just to say, we are going to make all of these lines thin so that everything is readable. But of course some of them would benefit by being thicker.  [1:02:36]

So you can easily go and modify this. I can say that I’d like to make the pen 7, which is their main default pen. I want to make this 0.35 or something like that. And that of course will create a custom pen set. We can go through and tweak this based on the pen table from an AutoCAD user, if you’re getting a drawing from structural consultants and you want to be able to place it in onto a layout sheet. You can find out what pens they are using. They typically will be using a small number, like 5 or 10 or 15 pens actively. And you just have to go through those pens and set up the weights to match. And then of course you can store it and instead of calling it “AutoCAD pens”, you can call it “Consultant 1.dwg Pen Set” pr whatever you want to name it. And now this is in the list.  [1:03:34]

And for any particular drawing you can set that up.  So we’re going to be talking in a later lesson about how to move pen sets as well as other things from one project to another.  So if you do create a pen set for a particular consultant then you can of course leverage that or use it in multiple different project files, just like you can pick different materials or composites or other things from one project to another.  Let’s see if there are any final questions for pen sets before we finish up for today. [1:04:09]

Steve Nichol says, “It sounds good. See you next time.”  Alright. Let me know if there are any other questions. Did you guys learn anything? Were there any surprising things or any things that you found will be useful to handle some of the challenges that you have for creating good documentation?

Dave Norman says, “Thanks, good lesson.”

Rick Skorick, “Always learning something new.” Alright.

Joe Archibald writes, “Nothing surprising. It is a challenge to set up pens if you don’t like standard set.” That is true.

Tom downer says, “Sounded pretty familiar.” Okay. And a bunch of thank yous from a few others.

I think if you have been using ArchiCAD for a while you probably understand pen sets fairly well, but I know that this does come up both sometimes from beginning users not understanding how it all works and then sometimes from more advanced users saying, Well I want to tweak it, and how do I manage this?  So if you’re in between the beginning and the more advanced ones with a very particular sense of graphics then you probably work pretty well with the pen sets that exist. And just knowing you can switch the pen set for the drawings on the sheet I think is probably the key thing that I would remember. And you can also have pen sets for electrical or backgrounds that might help.  [1:05:51]

Dave Norman, “One clarification if we create custom pen sets changing the first line of pens, as long as we change the weights to thinner lines, this will not mess up the objects, windows, etc.?” Yeah, I think you’ll just want to see how a project looks when you switch that pen set. Certainly getting things thinner generally doesn’t make things look messy; it just makes them look less differentiated.  In other words, less punch for certain elements.  That’s probably a good, safe thing to do, particularly if you’re printing things at smaller scale than having it thinner is a good safe thing to do.

Alright, so we’ll finish up for now.  And please and any follow-up questions or comments on the page down below.  This has been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 1:06:51]

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BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 20 Managing Attributes, Project Preferences, Work Environment – Part 1-G – Element Attributes: Zone Categories

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices Course training lesson.  Today we’ll be focusing again on Element Attributes under the Options menu.  We’ve gone through most of the ones that are in this list that are Element Attributes.  Again, the general principle is that Element Attributes are definitions that actual elements like walls or text use. Of course, we place them on layers unless there are things like windows and doors that are part of a wall. We use line types and fills to do graphics. We use composites to do more complex graphics and essentially define assemblies for walls, floors and roofs. [0:00:47]

We use pens and colors to define the appearance of things in terms of their color and pen weight. We use building materials to define the visual appearance of the things we’re building with and in the cut through, their hatch or fill patterns as well as their surface appearance. And surfaces are the appearance in a 3D view or in a rendering; formerly called materials. There are a few other things we haven’t looked at. Zone Categories we’ll look at today as well as operations, profiles. We will not focus – I will bring up briefly the markup styles, profile manager, and the renovation override styles. But we won’t focus on those. Let me just let those out of the way. [0:01:37]

The renovation override styles, if I bring that up, may look familiar to you. Perhaps you have used renovations a lot. The other way you can bring this up here is if you have the Window, Palettes Renovation palette up and you are working with renovations. You choose ‘Renovation Filter Options’, and you’ll have the main renovation controls. And then here are the renovation override styles.  This is how I usually get there.  You can get there through that Options, Element Attributes.  So this is the style when you’re saying, for example, showing the elements to be demolished in a special way, not in their original, natural way. But say you want to override and make them dashed with red lines and things like that.  [0:02:26]

So although these are technically part of the Element Attributes menu, they are really controlled under the renovation filters. And the renovation override styles I don’t believe get controlled by the Attribute Manager.  So they are a little odd ball part. But we’ve covered renovations in another section of the course, so I explained how to work with this.  So I won’t go any further today on it. [0:02:59]

Another one that is covered separately under the Options, Element Attributes is Profile Manager.  So profile manager should look familiar because in an earlier section of the course I went to the Design menu, Complex Profiles. And you can see profile manager listed here. This is the exact same palette.  It allows you to choose different profiles and edit them in this dialog box here to make various changes, etc.  So these are attributes of walls.  Of course you can assign a wall or column or a beam to use a particular profile or essentially a section view of what you want to be extruded or moved along in a straight line or curve. But these profiles here, let’s say since we’ve already covered them, we’re not going to spend time today. We just brought up the renovation override and the profile manager since we’ve already covered them.  [0:04:00]

Now Markup Styles is something that I will be covering later on in the course.  This is really a sub-menu or sub-part of the Document menu, Markup tools.  It’s right here at the beginning.  We’ll be spending some time on that later.  This is a tool that allows you to put markups on your model, so you can put a cloud around things. You can put some text describing some change that was made or needs to be made.  You can x out things, those sort of markups that you might do on paper can be done digitally and can be organized into groups.  You can have several markups that are related to a particular revision or particular area of the building, like the kitchen or entry or something like that.  [0:05:01]

And you can hide and show these markup entries as well.  So it’s a very powerful system, and we’ll be looking at that in a later lesson.  It does have some options in terms of the – I’m not sure if I can get to it from here – it does have some options for how things are drawn.  When you put a markup, what color pen is it, will it change color if you say that this is already been approved or is a closed comment. Is it something that has already been handled versus something that needs to be worked on? So these are things that are controlled under Markup styles where you can say this is a revision that needs to be done and its’ going to be in a certain color; this has been approved, it’s another color, etc.  [0:05:48]

So at least this gives you an idea of what this is about.  It really needs to be explained in the context of how the markup system works.  So that leaves, under the element attributes, the only other ones here are zone categories and operation profiles.  Operation Profiles is again a sub-part of the energy analysis of the building.  So if you have ArchiCAD 16 or 17, you have built-in Eco Designer as a tool.  Eco Designer allows you to do basic energy calculations on your model. So you can say if we faced the building this way, it’s going to use up a certain amount of energy. If we rotate it to face the sun in a different way, then it may be able to take less. Possibly if we add overhangs or more insulation, etc. Those things will affect the energy usage.  [0:06:53]

Separately, the energy usage is dependent upon how the space is used.  For example, a classroom is going to be used certain days of the year, and you can of course set that up. And maybe you don’t need to heat it or maintain the temperature outside of the class hours, or a certain buffering. People get in at 8:00 AM and you want at 6:00 AM for it to reach a certain threshold level of temperature.  Then you can set that sort of thing.  So if it’s a classroom, it’s going to be different than a garage or a hospital.  Hospitals, obviously, every day all the time has to be within certain bounds there.  So these operations profiles make tremendous sense and are essential to getting energy numbers out. And each one of these here can be created. We are not going to go into the details of creating them because again that will make much more sense when we are looking at Eco Designer in another separate lesson. [0:08:03]

But the basic thing is that you can put in a new profile by either duplicating an existing one or starting from scratch.  And when you create that, it then allows you to set up certain criteria.  And then you can assign that profile to zones in your building.  So the idea is possibly that some zones require more tight climate control and other zones, like storage for example, maybe don’t need as much.  Or a garage.  So you can assign different parts of your structure to different operation profiles.  That is the basics of the operation here.  We’ll go into detail when we do the Eco Designer section of the course.  [0:08:50]

Now under the Element Attributes the other one we will look at here before we get into the attribute manager itself is Zone Categories.  Zones are a tool within ArchiCAD that not everyone uses.  They certainly are not essential for creating a basic model and basic working drawings, but they are very useful for doing certain additional or extended documentation such as finished schedules. If you want to have room finishes tabulated in a table that goes on your sheets and you want to do it within ArchiCAD as opposed to a separate exercise using a spreadsheet, then you can use the Zone tool for that.  Zones can also report area for each room or zone as well as for – they can be tabulated together. [0:09:49]

So all of the general area, things that are living space, can be tabulated separately from utility or garage or mechanical space, things like that.  The can be used for graphic purposes, for bubble diagrams, to show different areas of the building. And in fact one type of workflow for designing complex buildings is to lay out a bunch of zones to indicate room usage.  You need 28 offices of a certain size and 12 meeting rooms and a cafeteria and this or that.  See you can lay these out and make sure that you’re putting the building blocks together for massing, stacking and blocking purposes. So then after you’ve done some work to make sure your building meets the program requirements, that you are covering the right number of spaces and the adjacency issues and the areas and all of that, then in that particular workflow you might start to define the walls and the actual building envelope more closely.  [0:11:00]

Zones can be used for documenting and putting graphic information on a plan. It can be used as part of the design process. And I have shown some of the preliminary concept design ideas of zones in a previous lesson, I think in section 11 if I’m not mistaken.  Right now I just want to talk about the zone categories and how they work relative to this area of attributes.  So in order to understand this better, I’m going to actually draw just a simple little building here, and I will put in some interior walls.  So I’m creating a number of spaces. The zone tool’s basic usage is that you activate the zone tool, choose your geometry which is either a manually traced shape or automatically having the zone seek out the inner edge of the walls. And you can also, in some cases, use other boundaries such as a line to define where an area finishes even if there was no wall there.  [0:12:31]

Then there’s a possibility of it seeking out the reference line for the walls, in which case the zone can extend to for example the center line of a wall if that’s where the references is. This can be useful for tabulating areas of occupancy in a commercial building where you are doing rental calculations and tenant improvements and things like that.  If you’re doing a manual placement, in versions of ArchiCAD up until recently, you had to click all of the points. In other words, you could click, even in a rectangular space you’d have to put all four corners. But there is now an option in 17, and I can’t remember, it might have started in 16 where you can do a rectangle directly or a rotated rectangle.  These things just were omitted until recently.  [0:13:22]

But let’s just take the simplest case which is that the zone is going to go out to the wall face. And I click and click again, and you can see how it’s put in this color.  And I will click on another one and do it. Now they both look the same because the default is for the zones to be a particular category like ‘living space’.  And let’s say that this area down here is not going to be living space, it’s going to be storage – or let’s see, we have the ‘utility space’.  No, that’s the same color. Let’s just call it ‘mechanical space’ or something like that.  So I will click and put that in.  So each one of these has a category here. it has a name for that category and possibly a number.  In the U.S. template there are these numbers from 0 through 4 with different sub-numbering, and each one has a color.  [0:14:20]

In addition to the name, the possible number, and color, there’s also the concept of the zone stamp.  If I zoom in on this, you can see that this zone stamp has something that refers to a name and a number and then it shows an area.  If I select it, and I can select that here, the name is something that we can fill in before or after we place it.  So I will call this “Room 1”, and then we’ll say the room number is 1.  So we have a descriptive name and then we have potentially a number. And right now it’s showing the area of the zone.  Now if I open up the settings for it, you’ll see that the zone stamp has some options for display.  For example, if this #1 here is redundant, then I can choose, for example, to show the room number. Let’s see, “show room number” is off here – show zone number. [0:15:33]

So I want to maybe say turn off the zone numbering.  So now it hides that there, and you can see the change.  There are controls you can do for any particular zone stamp that will customize it to some extent; what it shows. maybe you don’t want to show the area or you want possibly the area to be a different size.  In other words, we can say that the area here is – font type, text style, text pen, that’s the color. And let me see if they have some controls for the details.  In this particular case, it’s hard to understand the first time you look at it. There is a main size for text for this upper text. And then details, which would be the things below it, I can adjust the size and possibly the font. So I will make it five points so it’s going to be a little bigger. And you can see it there.  [0:16:25]

So all of those controls that I just accessed were based on that particular zone stamp that I’m using for this particular category, which is the living space.  If I go back to the Options, Element Attributes, Zone Categories, and we look at ‘Living Space’, for example, there is a color.  So I could say that I want the living space in a different color.  Let me make this a blue green, sort of a turquoise color perhaps.  Something in there.  I will say OK, and when I’ve done that, it will show up here and show up in the popup menu.  If I say OK, you can see how it changes.  And anything else that was done with the same category will also change.  [0:17:20]

Now in addition, when I go to the Options, Element Attributes, Zone Categories and I go back to his ‘Living Space’ here, I can choose which zone stamp to use.  The zone stamps have different styles and abilities.  So if I say I’d like to use the basic zone stamp, you can see that it’s very simple.  It will show the zone name number and area, but it will not have any graphic formatting.  It doesn’t have any choices.  So if I say OK, you can see how it looks very simple there.  So that’s the basic zone stamp.  And it probably doesn’t allow you to turn off parts of it; it will only allow you to show the name, number and the area. [0:18:06]

If I go back to this here and we take a different zone stamp like the ‘Room Identifier NCS’ – so this is the National CAD Standard in the U.S., then this is a variation that has some more options.  It’s a little hard to see in this small version, but if I choose that, you’ll see that it actually puts some line work around here.  Again it’s a little bit hard to see.  Let me try ‘True Line Weight’ and see if that’s a little bit easier to see.  You can see that now there’s this outline here.  And what is it showing below?  It’s not showing the area.  In this case, it’s showing some codes that are intended to be for finishes.  So if again I select this, now that it’s a different zone stamp, I can go in and ‘Show Finish Code’ is on.  And let’s make sure ‘Show the Frame’ is on. And let’s make the frame pen black just so it stands out at least for training, to be able to see that.  [0:19:16]

Here is the ‘Show Finish Code’, that’s on. And here’s the ‘Finish Information’.  So this particular stamp allows us to put in finish information, which we probably did not have the option in the previous zone stamp or the one that we were using before which was the “Zone Identifier 2”. So now that I’ve shown you the basics of how you have controls of the zone categories, you can pick color, you can pick the zone stamp, and possibly you can rename this or create a new one similarly like that.  Then there’s the question of how do you use this?  What is this for, what are the attributes, how does it relate to the whole concept of attributes?  [0:20:13]

So let’s step out a little bit to this tiny project and say, the zone categories are defining how you break up your building into usage or at least tabulation of usage and the graphic appearance of each style.  In other words, you might say that if it’s rooms that are either living space or other certain types of interior spaces, you’d want certain information.  But you might use the zone tool to sort of do calculations of outside areas.  So hardscape, the patio or irrigated area, something that’s going to have landscaping.  You want to say you have so much that’s going to be irrigated.  So in those cases, maybe there is not the finish information or there are some other types of display that we want.  So we are able to control by category the color and which type of zone stamp is going to be used. And with certain types of usage you may want to use a different zone stamp to make it simpler or more complex.  [0:21:30]

So as you think about what you want to get out of ArchiCAD in terms of graphics – the appearance of certain drawings – and tabulations such as a finished schedule or other things, you’ll want to go into your zone categories and make sure that, first of all, you have a number of categories that you need.  In other words, this may be way more than you need in most cases, but it covers most of the common things in the U.S. for building types. That’s what Graphisoft put in there, but you may have specialized ones particularly if you are doing things like hospitals where there may be some very special requirements for operating rooms vs. patient rooms vs. hallways or things like that.  [0:22:23]

So you will want to customize the zone categories to use of course colors just to make it easy to see in an overview diagram as well as particular zone stamps.  Now to finish out the section here, I will say that there are some basic stamps that are loaded into the ArchiCAD library. In the U.S., these are the ones that we see. In international use, it’s probably a little bit different, but generally you have a few choices.  There are some options to customize zone stamps that, as the user, you can take advantage of. And you can potentially buy commercial resources.  So in terms of a user, I’ve gone in on behalf of clients and made a zone stamp that was a variation of one of the existing Graphisoft ones that had more information in it, more parameters to work with.  [0:23:25]

So that is possible to create a variation of that. I’ve covered some of the things that you would do related to this in the section on object creation; I think that’s currently Week 21.  You would basically select one of the zone stamps and duplicate it and then add some more parameters; this list of parameters here could be extended.  Now if you want to get something more sophisticated and it’s beyond what you can do in-house, then you might want to consider purchasing.  The best one I know on the market is called “Total Zone”.  It’s from Masterscript, which is a GDL developer in the Netherlands.  And we actually have licensed Masterscript, their Total Zone for MasterTemplate, and it gives some more options there.  [0:24:26]

So if you have purchased it or gotten MasterTemplate 17 then you have this. And you would then say, for certain cases, I want to use the ‘Total Zone’.  And just to give you a sense of what options it provides that aren’t in the standard ones, if your room name or a zone name would be better broken up into multiple lines, it can do that automatically. The standard ones, everything fits on one line, which can get awkward for small spaces like closets in certain contexts.  Another thing is that you can have the zone – right now it either shows or doesn’t show. But with Total Zone you can say when I’m doing a floor plan I only want to show the room name. But when I’m doing a room finished plan, I want to show the finished codes.  [0:25:15]

When I’m doing a different type of plan like the ceiling plan or the area calculation plan, I want to have some other variations.  So with Total Zone, you can place a single zone in each area and specify the style of how it will look on different plan drawings, which is very powerful.  So that’s just a few of the things it can do.  It will also calculate automatically the size of the room.  Right now we can get the area but none of the standard zones will say that this room is 12×19’6″ or 4×6.2 m, things like that.  So Total Zone will give you some additional options.  And if you do buy it or get it in MasterTemplate it just gets added to your library and becomes available in the Zone Categories.  [0:26:05]

The other thing I want to point out is, I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but I believe that what you’re controlling here is the names and colors of the categories and which stamp they are using. But the default values here may not actually be used when you place a zone.  To test that out, let’s just say that we want to say that the living space here is going to use ‘Zone Identifier 17’, which you can see this is a very simple one here.  And let’s just see if we have some options.  Text pen, this is red. Let’s just say I wanted to make it blue.  So now you can see it is blue here.  And let’s just see, if I do that, does it make it blue? No, you can see these are still red.  So even though I set up the default – and we’ll just put this into the living space here and we click – you can see it’s not blue.  [0:27:12]

So I could switch this to whatever parameters.  Here we have the text pen. It was red. I could make it to be blue, but that’s an instance. so that is just a little bit misleading, because when we are looking at the zone categories here, it shows it as blue, but it’s not going to go in his blue. it’s going to go in as the default.  This allows you to see some other variations that are possible. And you can say, well I don’t want to show the room name in general.  You can see some of the options here.  The controls you do here do not affect the default values.  So that is an odd limitation.  I would call it a bug. If they’re going to show you these things, it really should allow you to say whenever I place in a zone, I want it to have a certain style.  So that’s a limitation that I’ve heard of.  [0:28:18]

Now I see a couple of comments from earlier in the session. Iain wrote, “Carbonate is a problem.” I’m not quite sure what you mean by that.  Maybe you can explain that in further comment.

Bob George writes from just a few minutes ago, “If a partition is moved, does the zone color and zones stamp data adjust to the new location?”  So in terms of zones, I believe I covered this in section 11, but I will certainly help you out here. If I go and let’s just say take this wall and drag it over to the right. And take this wall here select it and we intersect; now this room has gotten bigger.  The zone did not automatically change. Even though when I placed the zone, it was told to go seek out the boundaries of the walls.  So the zone will not update by itself. However, you can ask for it to update by going to the Design menu.  There is ‘Update Zones’ is a command. So with ‘Update Zones’, it will allow you to see – after it updates, it will show you a list of zones and information about it. [0:29:41]

If I say ‘Update All Zones’, then you can see how this moved over or let’s say it filled in the area and moved the stamp and kept it centered. By the way, you can move the stamp manually, but if you don’t move it, it will just remember and I think set it to be centered. I’m not quite sure about that. But obviously it moved a little bit.  If we look here at the square feet, you can see here is a report of the areas, here is the 144. And here is the option of added square feet, which says after the last zone update, this one had some more area.  So one of the reasons why Graphisoft does not have the zones automatically update when you move walls around is that you can do a bunch of changes for the building and then update the zones and see the results in terms of some of the changes.  [0:30:35]

So you can get more information and more control by updating the zones separately.  I think it would be a good idea if they provided an option or a setting to say ‘Update this zone all the time’ or ‘update all zones automatically’, just like auto update for drawings on a sheet.  But they don’t provide that. So you need to use the ‘Update Zones’ command to do it.  If the zone was put in with a manual boundary here – that means that you are manually clicking a series of points to define the shape of it – then it will not update. Although you can of course readjust the zone.  [0:31:15]

So if I just click to say I want to place this manually and draw a series of points, this is a boundary which has no relationship to the walls, even if I manually traced the interior of a room, it would not know to follow the outside.  If you do have a zone that you drew manually and you decide that you made a mistake or a changed your mind and you want it to find the boundaries here, you can switch it to seek out the boundaries.  It then gives me a warning, because you don’t want to do that casually, you want to think about it. We can update this. And here you can see how it did automatically fill in that area.  But that was the same as saying update an individual zone. And in fact you can – let’s just undo this – I can select this. [0:32:11]

And you’ll notice that this zone, when I have one selected, it shows up in the list. Or if I select this – one let’s see here. Each one of these, this is the result of the last update. But I can go and say ‘Update Selected Zones’ here. and you can see that you can select individual zones.  I can select something and then update selected is available. When nothing is selected, then it will get me to update all zones.  And the reason this did not update is because remember I undid the change. It still says ‘Manual’.  If I make it this way, I can either ‘Update Now’ or do it later.  If I say ‘Later’, then I can select it and ‘Update Selected Zones’ or have nothing selected and say ‘Update All Zones’.  And you can see how that works.  [0:33:03]

So that’s the basics of how the updates work. Manual updates using the update zones and the ability to draw a zone manually, which will ignore the walls if you wish.

So Buzz Brian asked, “How is this adjusted to give us net rentable area computed to center line of the interior wall and outside of the exterior wall?” Okay, good question.  This zone is set to go to the face of the walls.  I could set it to go to the reference line. And again it’s going to say, “Do you want to update this now or later?” I’ll say update now. And now if I select it, this still appears to be in this area here.  The walls, this is the reference line here. I’m going to delete this and start from scratch and make sure it isn’t an issue with updating.  Let’s say that these walls here, I’m going to change the reference line from the face to the center.  [0:34:17]

I know that actually repositioned these walls. In this particular case, I may not have wanted that. but right now we are defining the wall.  And let me just update this one here. so I will select this and update this.  So this now is at the face here.  But I haven’t put in a zone in here.  If I say I’d like it to find the boundary of this, and I then click on this here, this says that it’s going to the reference line.  Now the boundary is indicating this, but is it measuring that?  I’m not quite sure. Frankly I’m a little surprised, because I was expecting that this would go to the measurement.  It’s not showing it here. Here is the thing: “Zone polygon is net or gross.” Let’s try the ‘gross’ option here. There we go. So now gross, you can see if I zoom in on this, that it’s going out to the outside face of these two walls, because those walls have the reference line on the outside.  Of course they could be to the face of framing; whatever the reference line is. [0:35:55]

Then it’s going to the center line of this and the center line of that.  So you need to set that to the option that says ‘Find the reference lines and do the gross area.’  That will fill that in.  Visually it’s only filling in the center; it’s behind the walls in terms of the color. But it is measuring out to there.  If I undo this and say ‘Update Selected Zones’, and let’s put it back and go to the gross. It changed this but it didn’t change the number. Let’s update this. That didn’t change the number. Let’s look at the number though, because the area says that show area is on. So model – so that is a question right now that I’m a little unclear about.  Obviously the boundary is showing the extent that we want, but the area is being calculated based on – it’s not changing as we changed that.  [0:37:14]

So I know there are some other preferences under the Options, Project Preferences, Calculation Units and Rules that may affect this.  This has to do with working in square feet or square meters.  There are also calculation rules here which have to do with areas.  These are for calculations of physical elements. But let’s see if we go to construction elements here. this is an area that I will need to study a little bit more.  It’s a good question and I know that ArchiCAD should be able to give a reliable report on areas of the building based on either the face of the walls or the reference line.  And of course, if we wanted the reference line with this particular wall, we would probably want to have something that was an interior wall like that. And you can see now the wall is symmetrical. [0:38:18]

Let’s switch our onscreen to ‘Hairline’ so now this is at the center line of that wall, etc.  So I’m not quite sure why the area is not updating here.  That’s something that I will need to look into.  My guess is that this particular zone stamp is hardwired to show usable area as opposed to the gross area. Another zone stamp might have more options.  Let’s switch as a quick check, if I go to the zone categories for living space, let’s go to the “Zone Identifier 2” here.  That rounds that to the 82. Let’s go to the zone categories and change this to the NCS one. And then there should be an option to show – no, we’re not even showing the area on this. So listing parameters – I apologize. I don’t have a complete answer there, but I’ve shown the main thing that you need to focus on which is the settings for what the zone is bounded in a certain way and whether it’s going to use the gross polygon or not there.  [0:39:51]

Here’s “Area Calc”. Let’s see. So this is measured area is 102. The reduced area is this, so it’s reduced to the net area. It’s showing the net area but the measured area is this. So my guess is that it’s going to show, in this case, the net area. But if you did a listing of it, it would show the larger area.  So one more piece of the puzzle is this. We can force it to reduce some things. We can put in some extra criteria saying some of this is unusable or doesn’t count, because it’s structural columns beyond a certain size or there are just some other rules. And then it will actually calculate that.  So if I said, can I change this to – no, I can’t.  This is actually what its calculating here, how much it’s reduced there. I could say reduce it by 20%, and then it will take effect after the zone is updated.  If I say “Update this”, then this one, you can see the calculated area was reduced by that 20%.  So there are several areas that the zone is calculating, whether this is the overall one, gross or net, and here is the area reduced possibly by some things that are inside the room. And then you can actually force a reduction here if you want to.  [0:41:40]

So that covers most of the calculations.  I will need to have a separate section on schedules including zone finished schedules and area calc schedules. And I will definitely have the full answer at that point.

So I have a comment from Steve Nichol, “Good stuff on zones. Need to think about it, but one initial thought is that on a site plan impervious surfaces could be shown calculated which is often needed by the planning departments.” Yes, absolutely.  You can do impervious surfaces or overall site area, all of those things.

Buzz Bryan says, “Impressive.” So I guess seeing some of the options there at least show you the power, even if I didn’t quite get the very last thing, which is the listing there.  So backing up just a little bit under Element Attributes, Zone Categories, we’ve spent most of today’s session looking at how you can choose different zone stamps or different uses. And these will then allow you, when we cover the section on schedules, to get reports of areas and finishes and things like that.  But in the meantime, this allows you to choose what style the graphic is going to show up, in terms of color and type of stamp.  In addition, whether you show the colors and stamps is controlled – just as a little side note – under the Document menu, Model Views, Set Model View. [0:43:18]

For example, on a site plan you might change the walls.  Let’s go try these model views. Reflected ceiling plan, you’ll notice that we have the stamps showing but no colors. If we go to model view and presentation solid, that’s a different style here. Let’s go detailing no fill. So you can see there are some different options that we’re looking at, construction documents.        And in fact in construction documents here, it’s not showing the zone stamp. So these controls for the model view options here are also available from the quick options, and they are built into the views.  So for example, on a drafting view here, we are seeing the colors. But when we go to different styles of view, they control whether the colors are showing. [0:44:12]

The zones themselves are on a layer. This is on a layer called “Area Identifiers”.  You can turn that layer on and off in any layer combination. Therefore, certain drawings may not have this zone visible. or all zones may be turned off.  But separately under the Model View Options, we can choose – for any particular style or just temporarily by manually overriding it – we can choose for example that under the fill display we can choose whether to override the zone fills or not. If we see don’t override this then it will show up with its color and stamp.  If we say override it, it says, “What you want to do?”  Do you want to hide the fill so it no longer has a color or do you want to hide the background, because some fills might have a hatch pattern? [0:45:09]

Or do we want to hide the pattern and just have a color? Various options for the fills. and then there’s the possibility of hiding the stamp itself.  So we could actually not override the fill but hide the stamp. that would be an odd one but it would allow you to get colors without having zone stamps there.  So those are all variations that are controlled under the Model View Options.  And these can be linked or associated with particular views, which means that you can create drawings with possibly different variations of color or zone stamp.  [0:45:52]

So I think we’ve gone through the full hour here today. The next section we’ll be looking at will be Attribute Manager, which is the overall tool that allows you to manage attributes and move them from one project to another and pare them down when necessary.  So Attribute Manager is going to be our topic for the next lesson.  I think this is a good place to finish up rather than trying to start into Attribute Manager.  Let’s see if there are any final questions on zones today and then we can finish our session.  So please add your comments as well if you enjoyed the lesson. I always appreciate knowing that. And if you have any remaining questions other than the one of just how do you get an area calc schedule or finished schedule, because I will need to do that in a separate training lesson.  [0:46:54]

Comment from Buzz Bryan, “Good lesson.” Thanks.

Comment from Magdalena, “Very helpful.”

Please add your comments and questions on the page down below this recording. This has been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

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