Thank you for visiting the Best Practices Course website. The video lessons are available for members only. If you are an active member and would like to watch the ArchiCAD training video on this page, please login to the website. If you are not currently a member, please visit the following pages for more information and to sign up for the Best Practices Course, the QuickStart Course or for the Best Practices ArchiCAD Coaching Program. Eric Bobrow, Creator of the Best Practices Course

 ArchiCAD Training Session Notes

Wrapping wall finishes at doors and windows.Look at the general settings for the door tool and then look at “Wall Closure” and choose a stud wall with siding so AC understands there there are two skins for your composite wall. There are also options for how many skins to turn and reveal type. You can choose to turn on or off casings here. To get your drywall to wrap you need to define your composite materials as “core” or “finish”. You can also turn off line types if there are lines in plan or section that you do not want.0:00:46

Cleaning up walls and soffitsTo use Solid Element Operations your operator needs to have a higher priority than your target. Walls and slabs to not clean up to eachother automatically. You may need to delete duplicated building materials if you have migrated in elements from previous projects. This will help you manage your Solid Element Operations and cleaner intersections. Look at AC Project Migration video on my web site, or my YouTube channel “How to clean up AC 17 Building Materials.”0:20:10

QUESTION	ANSWER SUMMARY AND NOTES	START TIME
Is it possible to quantify a skin? How to keep the same wall ID when adding new walls.	Go to the wall tool and look at tags and catagories AC incrementing your walls. You can turn that function off if you to to Options>Work Environment>More Options and uncheck “Assign New Element ID to Each New Element” and click OK. For skins, to get area of skins, select a wall, go to Window>Element Information and you can get a palette with more information that shows area, heigth, and surface area information for each wall but not totals for groups of walls. You can also go to your navigator>Schedules>Lists you will be able to see different tabulations. Go to Scheme Settings in your Schedule by Elements to figure your square footage. Use gross area not net. You will have to experiment here to get what you want. Use the AC Help Reference Guide and search for what you need.	0:36:32
Clone folder settings – story markers	View your elevation, right click on your story marker and look at elevations settings, look at story levels, make changes here to display options for the marker including font, color, size, etc. Now if you go to another elevation it has not changed there, but is only in the one elevation you’ve edited. If you go to the clone folder, right click on it and go to view settings, you are now looking at setting for layers, scale, and actual building elements. If you want to change all your markers, select them all in plan then change their settings. The eyedropper would not work best because it would also change the name too which you would not want.	0:50:58
Window settings applying to an entire folder	If you go to view settings and make a change in the clone folder it will effect all the views within the clone folder. These would be things like scale and model view options. If you have a window and you have different views of it and you want them to be the same, go to the view you want, then highlight the view in the Navigator that you want to change and select view settings, then choose “get current window settings”. You can highlight the clone folder and do this and it will change all the views within the folder. Always think if it is a marker setting or a view setting.	0:58:00
If you wanted to remove one elevation out of the clone folder how do you do that without removing it from the whole folder?	If you delete an elevation in the clone folder it will be deleted there and in the project map. A clone folder says give me the same style settings for all the items in a particular viewpoint set.	1:09:40
Using AutoText for master sheets	Use worksheets to have different areas on a worksheet to have different formatted text. You have to be careful that your file size does not get too large if you are using only a small part of a detail that has more data with it that you are not showing. For text purposes only, this should be fine. Having a worksheet that you place on mulitple layouts is a powerful time saver.	1:12:15
Can the level tool be activated instead of being grayed out?	The level tool is specifcally for plan drawings, so you can not use it in elevations, but if you want to use the level tool to measure heights of slabs, you need to change it to “gravitate to slab” then it will measure the height of your slabs. Then click on the heights you want to dimension with markers.	1:16:48
Curved walls – how to show the facet lines in the 3D view like they show in elevation view	One way is to pick a material that has linework on it like vertical siding. If you want to change the width of the siding hatch lines you can edit your surface in Element Attributes and look at the hatch and change it to one that you prefer. You can then rename your new surface. You would also need to change the 3D texture so that they both matched. You could also do an arc then use the wall tool, hold down the space bar and click on the curve and it fills in a single wall to the curve. Before you place the wall, you go to Magic Wand settings and choose linear segments and set the length. This then makes the curved wall from a group of small separate walls.	1:23:45

ArchiCAD Training – Coaching Call – June 4, 2014