Each month there are one or more coaching calls; this is a recording of the session on August 15, 2012July – December 2012
ArchiCAD Training – Coaching Call – August 15, 2012
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ArchiCAD Training Session Notes
| QUESTION | ANSWER SUMMARY AND NOTES | START TIME |
| Question on the stair tool | An explanation on stair settings and how each parameter influences the finished stair. This explanation is particularly useful for people who have the measurements of a finished stair, and are struggling to input the measurements correctly into the stair tool. | 0:03:45 |
| Problem merging two roofs | The demonstration is done in ArchiCAD version 14. The questioner had a building with two roofs built at different levels that merged together. The lower of the roofs protruded into the higher roof, and the questioner was having problems making this roof clean up where the two roofs merged together. | 0:10:45 |
| Eric shows how to trim the roof. In this demonstration the higher roof was selected and used as the controlling element (this means it won’t be modified). And then with the controlling roof selected Eric pressed control/command and clicked on the edge of the lower roof. This operation will trim the lower roof where it protrudes into the higher roof. All that is left to do now is make the lower roof fit tightly against the wall, and you would do this in plan by adding nodes, and then reshaping the lower roof. | 0:19:33 | |
| How to make a railing guard on a ramp slope | The caller was American and therefore had the American version of ArchiCAD and in his version in objects he has something called “ada handrail”.Once selected Eric told him to go to parameters and in the general settings alter the vertical displacement. I am not sure but I don’t think the international version has an equivalent. | 0:24:30 |
| How to resize an image to a known dimension | The caller had a site drawing that he wanted to bring into ArchiCAD. Unfortunately this site drawing wasn’t very accurate and needed to be resized. | 0:26:45 |
| Eric brought in the pdf/jpeg using file>external content>place external drawing. He then looked on the drawing to find a known dimension, in this case he found a scale bar and he used the measurement tool to measure the scale bar. He had to use the measurement tool to see if what the scale bar was saying was accurate. Having found that it wasn’t accurate he knew he had to resize the scale bar and by definition the drawing. To resize go to edit>reshape>resize and from here you can resize by either percentage ratio or graphically, most people will probably choose graphically. To resize all you have to do is click on the start and end of the scale bar and then type in what the real distance of the scale bar should be. As the pdf/jpeg won’t have snap points on it, it is a good idea to zoom in as far as you can when marking your points for greater accuracy. | ||
| How to set up background images of a proposed site that you want to place the model in | Eric goes through some of the options for setting up the position of where you want to view the building from. | 0:32:05 |
| ArchiCAD tip: if you want to work with an image of your building in Photoshop, you should save the image with an alpha channel, so Photoshop will automatically know the space behind the building is empty. | ||
| Eric shows how to put an image or colour/color behind your building. This explanation is about creating a pretty background for presentation purposes, it is not about ligning up the building with the background to get a realistic affect (although with some tweaking it can be made to look fairly realistic). If you need to line up your view then you need to use the align view command (Eric has demonstrated the procedure to do this in previous coaching calls) | 0:36:00 | |
| Similar to the above discription, Eric creates a plain wall behind the building and then creates a new material (in this case a scene to use as a backdrop to the building) and applies the new material to the wall. When creating a new material remember to put an asterisk before the name of the new material, as this will make the new material pop up at the start of the list of materials, and thus, will make it easier to find. You may find that you have to reset the origin where the material starts, and you would do this by design>align 3d texture>set origin. It is also possible to curve the wall and create a cyclorama. | 0:40:52 | |
| Issue with lines showing where complex profile intersects other pieces. An example being a moulded complex profile bottom of a wall, with an ordainary wall put on top of it. | The caller says to Eric that he should postpone this tutorial for now, as he needs to email Eric a project he has where this problem occured. Eric agrees, but does go on to do a quick demonstration on why the problems are occuring at time 0:55:50. Please note: if you don’t want to see a line make sure that you use the same material and the same name; conversely if you want to use the same material in both pieces, and also want to see a line where they connect, all you have to do is make a copy of one of the materials and change the name (so in effect you have one material with its original name and the same material, but with its name changed). | 0:51:25 |
| How to change the colour/color of windows from the default colour/colors. | The caller has a window and he wants to paint the inside one colour/color and the outside a different colour/color. You would do this by selecting your window, then open up the window tool settings, under general settings find sash options and when you have selected this look to the right hand side of the dialog box and click on the image of a marker/pen this will open up the material settings. | 1:06:02 |
| Caller wasn’t happy with the ArchiCAD library for trees and shrubs and wanted some advice on what options he had | One option would be to have a look at Green Line botantical library for ArchiCAD at www.cadgarage.com. This product is very extensive and is several gigabytes in size and therefore comes on a disk. Eric says the product is very realistic. Another option would be to import objects from other sources, such as dwg, 3dstudio and sketchup. If you have ArchiCAD 16 it is also possible to use the morph tool to do some modeling. | 1:12:27 |
| Rotating objects in space | If you create something and find you want to rotate it, first isolate the item in 3d, go into 3d projection settings and rotate the object to the viewpoint you require, and then save it as a 3d object. Eric demonstrates the full procedure here. | 1:19:39 |
| The two options you have when deleting section markers that you have used as a temporary drawing aid and you no longer have a use for | When you click on a section marker and try to delete it, two options are given, “keep as independent” and “delete viewpoint”. Eric explains what both these mean and do. If you want to get rid of the section view completely, then select, “delete viewpoint”, as this removes it from everywhere including your clone folders. | 1:30:40 |
ArchiCAD Training – Coaching Call – August 15, 2012
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