Best Practices Course – Week 16 Part 8 – © copyright 2013 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 16 – Roof Modeling & Documentation

PART 8-A – Barrel-Vault Roofs in ArchiCAD 14

Hello, this is Eric Bobrow.  In this lesson, we’ll look at how you can create vaulted roofs in ArchiCAD 14 and earlier and connect them as well to other roofs.  The reason I’m doing this in ArchiCAD 14 is that the methods changed radically as we moved into ArchiCAD 15, so these methods here apply to ArchiCAD 14 and back through 10 and actually earlier.  I’m going to demonstrate here just drawing a box of walls. [0:00:30]

Let’s go to the Roof tool here and we’ll select the method for creating a vault. You are probably used to creating individual roofs this way or a series of roofs.  This is in the final section where you can do both domes and barrel-vaults.  As I zoom in on this area here, you can see that if I click now, it starts to draw something.  I’m creating a roof. I don’t know much about it, and going to be explaining that as I go.  The second click will determine the tangent line, basically how this curves.  So you can see that as I move around now, the tangent line was set.  You can just barely see a line there and that it’s following that curvature.  [0:01:20]

And perhaps I connect it to the other end here.  It’s not done yet, in fact, it’s waiting to see if I want to do another piece of roof.  And if I click again it will actually create another piece, you can see how that would continue.  So let me just actually click on this, and now I’ve got a second piece.  And I could go on multiple pieces if I wanted.  But I will click one extra time on this last point to finish it.  Now this has created a profile, and now it’s saying which way is this profile going to be extruded?  I’ll take it straight back in this case, just a little past where the building is.  [0:01:54]

And now it says, having done and gone in that direction, how far do you want to take it out?  I will take it back out this way. And we’ll understand what these clicks and directions are in context.  So hang in there with me.  So I click again to finish that extrusion and it asks, what height is this roof based on, how thick is it, and how are the ends dealt with? I would say OK, accepting the default.  You see that it’s created a number of pieces of roof.  If I go to 3D here, you’ll see that followed that general shape.  [0:02:27]

It went up and then came around in the other direction just like what I drew.  Now it did it with just a few pieces here and so it’s very crude looking.  Let me show you how you can control that.  Let me undo that and go to the Options menu, Magic Wand Settings.  In the magic wand settings, you can see that it says if you are doing an approximation, if you are tracing a curve with straight segments, how close should it get?  In other words, how much deviation can be allowed? If I do something where I cut this in half, then it’s going to basically make more straight segments to get closer to the curve.  [0:03:09]

And since roofs in ArchiCAD 14 and earlier are only made of straight segments, this will make more of the segments that match it better.  So now I’ll do something very similar here, but perhaps I’ll just click one more time on the end so I don’t actually extend it, and then take it back to the other end of the building and back again.  And I’ll click OK, and you can see how it made more segments within this.  When I go to 3D, you can see it’s actually smoother.  Now if I want to control this precisely in terms of how many segments, perhaps I want to have a certain number there, then I can go into the magic wand settings, and perhaps change it from deviation to segments and long arcs. So perhaps if I wanted to have fifteen segments, that would give me a very smooth curve with a flat top in the middle, because I would have an odd number, I can choose that. [0:04:01]

If I do this one more time, three clicks, the fourth click here, and then the fifth one back here, sixth one, and OK. And you can see now it has a lot of pieces. When I go to 3D you can see how they work.  Now these roofs here, if I wanted to adjust their height, of course I could set a different height to begin with, but let’s say I wanted to adjust them here. I can select any one of them like this, but you see I have to select all of them.  This gets a little bit awkward to do that one by one.  So in this case I have no other roofs, so I could go to the Edit menu and say Select All Roofs. And then I would be able to go and click on one of them and use the pet palette to say I’d like to raise it up to a new height or position.  [0:04:48]

I’m going to show you a way, and I’ll just undo back and get rid of these, that you can actually have the roofs be grouped automatically.  Under the Edit menu are the grouping commands.  And under grouping, there’s an option to auto group.  This is normally turned off in recent versions of ArchiCAD by default so that it doesn’t accidentally cause confusion.  But if I turn that on and now I do the same sort of thing – actually notice when I went back to the roof that it forgot that I was drawing the vaulted roof. It went back to this. So let me cancel that and tell it yes, I want a vaulted roof. [0:05:24]

So now I’m going to go do this, four clicks, the fifth one and the sixth one here. Now you see that when I select any one of the roofs it selects all of them.  If I go to 3D the same thing will happen.  If I select one, they are all grouped, and now I can of course raise them up easily here.  Now if we want to actually have this be a specific height, then we can do some additional work to specify that.  But before I do that, I want to go and select the two end walls here and make them higher.  So I’ll use the pet palette to raise them up to some height, at least high enough that it will reach the top of this.  [0:06:12]

And then I will use the Solid Element Operations, Design menu command, with these two walls selected I will make them targets and then I will select these roofs and make them the operator. Do subtraction with upward extrusion, execute, and you can see how we get a nice clean result.  So that’s the basics of how you would create these roofs and trim the walls to them.  But let’s go back now and be more specific about the heights of the roofs.  If I go to the south elevation here, we’re going to see the shape that we’ve got. And perhaps I want to work with it so that it reaches a certain peak.  [0:06:57]

In other words I may have a certain height limit or just some reason that I want to design it that way.  So I’ll go to the Line tool, this is one way that you can measure.  I will click in the center here. And it’s on a layer that’s turned off so I will say turn that on temporarily. And let’s say that I wanted it to go up to 14 feet. So any specific distance that you need.  Now if I would like this roof to go up to that height and start for example at the height of the walls here, the 10 feet, what I can do is actually draw the shape.  So let me go to the Arc tool and draw this series of points. [0:07:32]

And you can see it’s a slightly different curvature than what I did free hand.  Now what I’m going to do is actually select this arc and I will copy it.  And I’m going to go back to the floor plan and paste it in.  Now when I paste it in, you will notice how it kept its alignment in terms of its two ends are exactly in line with the wall.  And I will show you what happens if we use this as a tracing template.  I’ll get rid of the other roofs here and go to the Roof tool again and make sure that I am doing the vaulted roof. And now I’m going to use the magic wand.  So I’m going to use this guide to create a shape.  So I’ll go and magic wand this and then take this up towards the back and here. [0:08:20]

This will create a roof that will have exactly the right curvature.  However, if I go to 3D, we are going to see that this roof is upside down.  That’s because as you may recall-and if I go back and undo this-the curvature was going up.  And remember how I was doing it down.  So if I want this to have the right curvature in this context, I can go ahead and mirror it here, and then perhaps drag it into position there.  Now if I go to the Roof tool and have the vault selected and use the magic wand and create this, when I go to that elevation we are going to see that it’s exactly the right curvature.  And remember, since these are all grouped I can just drag them up.  [0:09:15]

You can see how precisely it’s fitted to that.  In fact, I can do the same thing with a more free form shape or with an asymmetrical shape.  So let me go ahead and delete these roofs here and perhaps just use the Spline tool to make a shape here.  So I’ll go to the Spline tool. And perhaps I still want to maintain this maximum height, so I will go and actually draw a line and use the eyedropper to pick up the Line tool. And I will draw a line across here and stretch it. And this line here, perhaps I’ll make it a dashed line so we can see that it’s intended to be sort of a limit. [0:09:57]

Now I’ll go to the Spline tool and I will start this. Of course I could measure it to the side any distance, but let’s say that I wanted it to peak on this side and come down a little lower on that side.  So this Spline here I might adjust using the pet palette to make sure that it’s not going above that point here.  I might need to take that down just a hair, or take this point over, something like that. So I make sure that it stays below that height, maximum height.  So I’ve now created an asymmetrical shape.  And of course I could play around with this until I got just the right design criteria or just the right aesthetics. [0:10:43]

But how would we make the roof exactly the shape that we want from this?  Well remember how I copied this information and pasted it?  I’m going to do the same thing.  I will go and actually draw a line up to here.  So I’m just drawing lines on the ends here. And I will select these lines and copy this information.  The reason why I’ve got the end ones drawn in is because when I go back to the floor plan-and we’ll just go back here to the floor plan-and I paste, I’m going to say keep the original location here.  Perhaps use this as a way of aligning it.  [0:11:30]

So I’m now going to be able to go and select these elements here and perhaps drag them into position.  Now remember I mirrored before, and I could do that again, but let me actually start that roof from the other side.  For example, I can go to the Roof tool here and magic wand this shape.  Actually I have to make sure I’m in the vaulted roof again, magic wand this shape, and now you can see there’s this extrusion vector, which I didn’t really explain. Basically I’m going to go and take this down, and I can use the Shift key and lock it so that as I move the mouse left to right it snaps.  [0:12:12]

I could just keep it in line and take it a little bit further here.  Now this determined the path of the roof, but I don’t have to take it way back to here. I can just take it back for example to the end of the building or a little bit beyond, let’s say like this.  Of course I can measure and draft that in precisely.  Let’s take a look, since I basically have the curvature away from the building and did the extrusion vector towards the building, this is going to have the proper curvature.  If I go to 3D, we are going to see that it looks quite similar to what I had in the south elevation that I drew.  [0:12:48]

And you can see there is that precise shape.  So if I just drag this down, say this point on top, you can see how it matches precisely.  So the idea is that you can draw your shape in an elevation and then copy it, align it nicely to the building, and use it as a guide for the magic wand.  And of course if I wanted to trim these walls, I can go select all the walls, go here and take them up higher, any arbitrary height as long as it’s high enough.  Make them targets, and then go to the roof here, make it the operator and execute.  And we now have a very beautifully clean model there.  [0:13:36]

So now that we’ve looked at the ways that we can create these shapes here just by themselves, let’s look at how we can connect a series of roofs to another roof.  So let me go and select these elements here, and we’ll drag them over to the side a little bit.  And now I will create another little shape, these walls like this.  And I’ll go to the Roof tool and we’ll create just a hip roof around it.  So I will just magic wand it here.  Now suppose that we had in this sort of conventional building a couple of columns in front of the building, say here.  [0:14:24]

And I’ll just drag a copy over there.  And let’s say we wanted a little curved piece of roof over the top of these two columns and extending back.  So what I’ll do is go to the Roof tool here and we’ll again go to the vault.  Now when I do this I just want to have a few pieces, I don’t want to have as many in part because it will be simpler to do the training.  But you can change the magic wand settings at any time.  Let me just say that I would like to have seven pieces along this arc.  And then I will go and draw with the Roof tool and say from here to there and take it back and out. [0:15:10]

So what I’ve done is I’ve just created a seven piece roof segment here.  We look at it.  It’s created a nice curved portico entry.  But what I want to do is make sure that these segments here actually connect and stop where the other roof is, that they actually meet it nicely instead of being buried.  It’s a little hard to see this, so I’m going to go to the View menu, 3D View Mode, and I’m going to go to 3D Window Settings, which is a command I don’t use very often.  But in this case, I want to go to the options here under open GL and turn off textures just to temporarily make it easier to see what going on.  [0:15:55]

Now these roofs here, you can see there actually buried inside there.  While I could work with that, I’m going to go and drag this out here, and that way all the pieces are visible, the end pieces.  And now I can start to extend them to meet this main roof.  Now how would I do that?  Well you recall if I select a roof and I use the Command or Ctrl key to click on the edge of another roof, that it will actually adjust that edge to meet it.  Now right now, these roofs are grouped together, and if I Command or Ctrl click on an edge here, it’s not going to do anything.  I’m actually clicking and nothing’s happening.  [0:16:38]

But if I suspend groups with this option here, then individual roofs can be selected or modified.  And when I Command+click or Ctrl+click on each one of these edges, and you can see I’m doing this one at a time, and I can also do it on the floor plan, I can select this roof and Command or Ctrl+click here. And you can see what it did; it actually created this curved shape.  Now if I go back to 3D, we are going to see how that curved shape precisely matches this roof to the other roof.  Now I took this out, I took this roof way out and we want to shorten it.  So what I’ll do is select these.  [0:17:22]

Now I can select them all using the Arrow tool like this, or of course I could turn groups back on, select one of them.  Now in order to trim it, I’m going to suspend groups again.  So even though they were picked in a single action, I can still edit them individually, just like I modify these individually.  And I will use the Split command.  This is one way that you can do it.  And perhaps I can split it across a line that I have figured out exactly where I want here.  You can see all of these pieces are now selected. And I can delete that.  For some other variations, let me just undo this.  [0:18:00]

If I wanted to have an odd shape I could split it for example along some odd angle here and end up with some design that I wanted there.  Another way that we can do this here is we can use the Marquee tool. And with the Marquee tool draw a box around the end and click on any one of these points and move it into wherever I want.  And what that did was it actually made the ends of the roofs to the new point.  Unfortunately, in terms of graphics, the pivot lines are still sticking out as long as they did.  I can turn off the pivot lines here, under the Onscreen View Options, but it’s a little bit annoying to have that.  [0:18:52]

Now if you can manually go and move the pivot line in here-and that doesn’t affect the roof. Basically the pivot line is just a theoretical line in space, and it can be as short or as long as it wants.  So perhaps in this case what I might want to do is instead of doing the marquee, again I will just use the Arrow tool and select all of these and we’ll split them and draw the line in space and trim this off.  And you can see that these roofs, their pivot lines were trimmed when that was done, which is a nice little benefit. [0:19:35]

Now you’ll notice that there’s a line across here.  If I go to 3D, if we select this roof, you can see how it’s going across.  And in fact if we orbit underneath it, you can see how it’s sticking in here.  Now in some cases that would be the perfect choice for the design, but in other cases we might want to trim it around.  So what we can do is select this roof and use the pet palette option to subtract out a shape. And actually before we do that, I can use the Solid Element Operations and that will work beautifully in 3D.  So let me go here in 3D, and I can select, with groups active, all of these roofs, make them the operator.  [0:20:21]

They are going to control the action because I really want to modify this roof or let’s say just the one roof. Let me suspend groups again and select just the one plane and make it the target.  And now often we are using subtraction with upward extrusion.  But in this case we might want to subtract where they intersect and everything below so that this target roof has a hole cut in it.  When I execute, you can see how it notched around here nicely.  And in fact as we select it we can see the shape that was created. It precisely matches the original or the little vault.  [0:20:57]

And when I go back to the floor plan we still see the line because as many of you know, Solid Element Operations, while it modifies the 3D view of something or the 3D model it doesn’t affect the floor plan.  So what we could do is, with the Solid Element Operations in effect or not, we can actually go here and use the boolean subtraction and cut out a shape.  So I’m actually just clicking on the series of points that matched the edge of roof, these little roofs here.  You can see now this roof has been cut around. And in fact the Solid Element Operations are no longer even needed. [0:21:38]

But they’re not going to get in the way. But now we can see it has a natural line here.  You can see the nice clean line there. And if I go underneath it of course you’ve got this working here.  Now this wall here, we but want to now make it a target again and go and select these roofs. Perhaps select them using the Group option.  Make them the operator and trim the top of this wall like that.  And now that wall you can see has been notched underneath here.  You can see the little green shape that’s been created.  [0:22:24]

So before we conclude, I’d like to go over a couple of variations on this theme.  I will just move over to the side a little bit and draw another box of walls.  And then I will create a new elevation view of this area here.  Then in the elevation view, I’m going to go draw a more complex shape with the Spline tool for what I’d like the barrel-vault to look like.  So we’ll create something with a little bit more complex curvature there.  Now I’m going to go and in order to work with this, I’m going to go and draw some lines so I can align this when I place it on the plan as I did before.  [0:23:21]

But in addition to the fact that this is more complicated let’s say, it’s also coming from a side elevation.  So when I select these elements and copy them and then go to the floor plan and paste, it’s not going to actually line up properly. I’m going to put it in the center of the current view and we’ll leave the current view alone, and you will see that it’s facing up and down on the screen like it did in the elevation rather than facing the direction that we need to, because it’s going to be a view from the right side elevation. [0:23:59]

So what I need to do is select these lines and splines and rotate them like this, and then drag them into position here.  Now the important thing is that the curvature, in this case the top, is away from the building.  If I were to put it on the underside then we would get an under scoop. It would actually not work properly.  So now that I’ve got it facing the correct direction, I can go back to the Roof tool here and make sure that it’s set up for the barrel-vault. And use the magic wand and then draw this down. [0:24:41]

Now I need to make sure that I’m going straight along this direction.  If I wanted to make sure that this was a certain specific distance beyond the edge, then what I could do is go to this corner and wait for the guideline to drop down, stroke along it. Now that gives me a lasting guideline. And I can go and snap to that intersection.  But instead of snapping directly to the face which would cut off the roof exactly in line with it, I’m going to make it a little bit further.  Let’s say I wanted it to be 2 feet longer.  I will type in 2, and then a +. And you’ll notice how it added the 2 to the original value, and now it’s exactly 2 feet longer than when it was along the face of the wall.  [0:25:21]

So now I hit Enter or Return on the keyboard and that concludes placing the furthest extent exactly where I want it.  Now as I come back here, I can also position my mouse over the edge of the wall or the corner of the wall. And again it’s saying that this is a certain distance horizontally or in the direction it’s going, and I want it to be a certain distance more than that.  So again I will type in whatever distance I want, say 2 and a +.  And it will figure out the mathematics. And when I hit Enter, it will be exactly that right distance.  [0:25:55]

Now in the vaulted roof settings here, I’ll just leave this alone, except that I was working with this vertically. And perhaps I may want to make it a perpendicular edge.  So that would actually give me a little different result. We’ll see what that does when I say OK.  So you can see all of the curves here that we’ve got. I will just open up that elevation. And we’ll see how this has created the curvature that we want. I’ll just select the roofs and drag the top down to this line. And you can see how beautifully this has matched up.  [0:26:32]

Now with multiple curves, it’s actually got a little bit too much of a difference here.  You can see how the straight segments are not quite matching this as well as maybe I’d like. Then what I can do is undo this back and perhaps change my magic wand settings here.  So instead of telling to have a certain number of segments along arcs and this one piece here was one arc, it made seven segments and that had a rather visible divergence in terms of segmentation.  Instead here with a more complex shape, I may want to do the deviation. And let’s say ½ inch or something like, so you can experiment.  That would be – a half inch would be a little over 1 cm.  [0:27:25]

So let’s just say OK and now it’s set to that.  I will use the magic wand, again making sure that the roof is set for the vault, magic wand here and just do this by eye right now and create this. And when we look here in the elevation, we’ll see that now it’s got more pieces where it needs to. In other words, to stay close to that. And if I drag this down here, you can see how beautifully close that approximates it. And again, I chose the perpendicular one rather than vertical. You can do either vertical, perpendicular or horizontal for that end piece.  [0:28:09]

If I look in 3D, you can see the shape that that created, a very nice, clean representation here.  And if I go back to that elevation view, you’ll see that there’s actually no line work across there. Even though each one of these is a separate little piece, ArchiCAD is merging all of those together.  Now one last thing.  Let me just undo back a couple steps and let’s look at what happens if you were to do this roof-and instead of going straight like this, what would happen if you were off the angle?  I just want to show you what that does.  [0:28:50]

If I take this off the angle like this, say, it will take this shape and extrude it in a different direction.  So this particular shape now is actually high on this end compared to this one and it’s going on this odd angle to the building.  If I go to 3D we’re going to see that it’s now, although the general shape is the same, it’s been reoriented in space. And as I move around you can see that obviously it’s not directly on top of the building.  So it does give a different effect.  So this shape can be extruded or cut through and moved along in any direction.  But of course the one that you would usually do would be making it perpendicular to the building and then drawing it in that direction. And then of course you’re going to get something more like what you expect where we’ve got a high point here and a low point down there and we do get that section. [0:29:51]

So this concludes our lesson on how to create vaulted roofs, barrel-vaults, in ArchiCAD 14 and earlier which are made with individual segments but they are made with the roof option that creates them in a sequence or in a group based on either a freehand sketch that you do or a magic wand of a shape.  And I also covered how once you’ve drawn these how you can connect them using that Command+click or Ctrl+click to basically have the main roof be the controller and each of the other little pieces be adjusted automatically to meet this main roof.  This has been Eric Bobrow; I look forward to reading your comments and questions on the page down below.  The next lesson will focus on how to do this in ArchiCAD 15 and later because it’s actually quite a bit simpler in many ways to do it using the newer tools.  As I said, this has been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 0:30:59]

Best Practices Course – Week 16 Part 8 – © copyright 2013 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 16 – Roof Modeling & Documentation

PART 8-B – Barrel-Vault Roofs in ArchiCAD 15 and Later

Hello, this is Eric Bobrow.  In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how you can create barrel-vaulted roofs in ArchiCAD 15 and later and how you can connect them to other roofs.  I’m going to start out by drawing a box of walls here. And we’ll go, instead of to the Roof tool where we no longer have any options for a vault shape; we’ll go to the Shell tool which was introduced in ArchiCAD 15.  Now the Shell tool has shapes such as extruded; then we also have shapes that are revolved or ruled. [0:00:41]

So we’re going to be looking at the extruded shape here which can be simple curve or a more complex and detailed shape.  For our purposes here today, all we need to do is click along the edge of this wall, that’s a second click, and then click again, and we’ll see that it has created something.  And we’ll see what it looks like in 3D.  So this shape that we just created is a half cylinder that went along the edge of the wall.  You can see there’s a line here that was created, that is the extrusion vector. And then it had a half circle along there.  [0:01:24]

Now, I’m going to go back and undo this and do it again, and then this time instead of clicking the third time on this point, I’m going to go over to the other end of the wall.  We don’t see anything here, but if I look in 3D we will see that it expanded it to the width of the building.  Now it’s still a half circle, and that might not be what we want in terms of a shape for a barrel-vault.  So I can go to the axis line here that is the control contour, press down on it, and you can see the pet palette offers the standard options for dealing with curves or polygons.  [0:02:08]

And I can actually just reshape it just like I’d like.  So it’s very quick to create the basic shape.  It’s a single element instead of a series of little roof pieces.  And if we go in fact to something like the south elevation here that would look straight on at this, I can also take this shape and edit it directly in this window.  So I can go and take it to whatever shape I want, drag it up in space perhaps so that it’s resting on top of the walls.  So it’s much easier to create this shape than it was in previous versions.  If I go back to 3D you can see how it’s starting to take a pleasing geometry.  [0:02:55]

I’m going to go to the Wall tool, select all the walls, and we’ll use the pet palette to make them taller.  And then select this barrel-vault, which is done with the Shell tool, and use the Connect, Trim Elements to Roof or Shell in the Context menu by right clicking.  And use the default that says to use the roofs or shells from the current selection and trim.  And you can see how quick and easy we can get this result.  So this is so much easier than what we had in earlier versions.  [0:03:32]

But there are some things that you need to be aware of that will give you more flexibility and control.  So for example, if we wanted this to extend beyond the building on the sides, what we can do is select this and go to the end of this curvature line here. When I go to the end of it, you’ll see that there’s an option just like what we would have if we were working with a curve on a plan to extend it to move it into a new position.  So you can see how I’ve changed that.  Now of course that sort of crude in the 3D window, let’s go to the elevation and you’ll see what it’s done.  And I can do the same thing.  I can just reposition this point here.  [0:04:13]

I can reposition it to the other side and perhaps even make it asymmetrical, like this.  Then, go to the arc and change its curvature.  So now we can get a very nice result just playing around with it as we wish.  Now you may notice that the edges here are – let me just extend this a little bit further – the edges here are perpendicular.  There’s no control that we have that will allow us to make it vertical or horizontal directly.  So what we need to do is use something to trim it.  And I will show you. There are two ways that you can do this.  [0:05:03]

So if I wanted to have a vertical fascia along this edge, one way that I could do it would be to actually create a cutting plane. So for example, if I use the Slab tool and draw a shape along here, go to 3D and take this slab and use the pet palette to make it much taller, like this, this slab could be used as a cutting tool.  It can be used with Solid Element Operations. [0:05:33]

Now in order to make this work, I’m going to take this slab and put it on a different layer for this purpose.  Say the one for Solid Element Operations that is often hidden. So this is in a layer that is in the standard U.S. template and there may be something similar in the international version. There is certainly a layer like this in MasterTemplate for Solid Element Operations elements.  Now that temporarily made it disappear, but what I’m going to do is go and turn that layer on and put it in a wire frame mode by clicking on this little icon.  [0:06:07]

And when that happens, you can see now that the element is visible but it’s now in wire frame.  And I will go open the Design menu, Solid Element Operations or if you were in ArchiCAD 15 it would be a sub item of the Connect menu; it would be over on the right here. Once I’ve opened that up, I can select this slab; make it an operator; so it’s going to control the action. Take the shell; make it the target, and just a simple subtraction will allow me to carve off the end.  I’m going to go back to that south elevation.  We’ll see that this element has been carved off, and this element here is showing, this is the slab.  I can hide it by turning off the layer.  And you can see we’ve got a nice clean result. [0:06:53]

So that’s certainly very possible to do, however there is a simpler way that we can actually trim this off vertically.  So that is by selecting that shell and right clicking on it and then saying that we like to define a shell contour.  So shell contour allows me to create any arbitrary shape and cut out basically perpendicular to its editing plane; we can cut out an extrusion shape.  And basically restrict the shell to be within it.  Let me show you something that we can do arbitrarily.  I will click on a series of points like this, and you can see the points that I drew have been intersected with this element.  [0:07:45]

And when I go to 3D, we’re going to see that the shell has this rather odd shape. And if I it, you can see it still has its original shape plus this extra contour line that I can adjust. I can make all sorts of complex changes to it just like any other polygon that we work with.  If I go back to the floor plan you’ll see that again, this is a polygon shape that cuts it, and the original element shape is intersected with that.  Let me just undo, and let’s do something more conventional here.  [0:08:24]

Instead of manually clicking on a series of points, perhaps I might want to carefully put in something like a fill just to quickly define a shape.  Let’s say like that.  Now this fill didn’t do anything by itself, but I can select the shell, right click on it and say define shell contour and use the magic wand to create that.  So you didn’t see the magic wand onscreen, but basically I was able to with the space bar held down, define the shell contour.  So now, we’ve got both the fill and the shell showing on plan.  I could go to the Fill tool and delete it or the fill elements and delete it, but you see the actual shell now has a dashed line around it but extends out further.  [0:09:19]

If I go to 3D, we will see how the shell now has vertical sides.  And with it selected, we can see how it’s been trimmed there.  So this shell contour is an easy way to get vertical sides.  So we don’t need that Solid Element Operation option for this type of a trim.  But we would need it if we wanted to trim to the underside.  Let’s see how that would work.  Before I do that, I just want to point out that if you do want to extend this shell beyond the surface of the building on the ends, not on the sides, then you can go and go to the edge here and there is an option just to extend the shell. So I can go and extend it here.  [0:10:06]

Now you notice that I extended it, but it didn’t actually extend in 3D because guess what? That shell contour, which is the dashed line here, did not extend. So I need to extend it – if I have a contour line that controls it – I need to extend then the contour line. So the abstract extension is out to here and the cutout is going to this point. So if we go to 3D we will see now how it’s extended. So there is this concept that there’s an extrusion vector and it’s going out in sort of general terms all the way out to the end, but then in this case is a contour that is cutting it out only as far as I wish, which can be a simple shape or a more complex one. [0:10:52]

Now let’s take a look at how we connect a shell like this to another roof of shell. So I will go and we will just create a simple little building shape here. Then go to the Roof tool and we will put in a hip just by magic wanding there. And let’s just make this have a dashed edge for the overhead line so we can see it better there. Now let’s assume that we have something in front of the building and we want to connect with it. I will put in a column and then drag a copy over there. And we’ll create now a shell, just a simple one again, going in this direction. And we’ll extrude it all the way over to the end of the columns. [0:11:48]

So now when I go to 3D, we’ll see this half circle. Now I don’t really want it to be as tall as that, I want it to be a shallower one. So again I will go back to the south elevation. And now I can go and select this and edit the shape down to whatever I like here. Perhaps I can drag this up to the top of the column so now it’s at the shape that I want. Now when I go to 3D, we’ll see that this shell is sort of buried inside the other one. So one question will be how do we connect these cleanly? [0:12:32]

Now in order to be able to see it better, I am going to go to the View menu, 3D View Options, 3D Window Settings and say that in the 3D window, I would like to turn off textures in the open GL. And that will make it a little bit easier to see.  Now I might want to make these two roofs have the same texture rather than a different one, but for now this will make it easy to see what’s going on. Now the simplest thing for me to do is to select these two elements, the main roof and the barrel-vault shell, right click, and say Connect, Trim Elements to Roof or Shell, which will then actually trim each one to the other. [0:13:14]

So you can see how this one has been trimmed back and the other one has also been trimmed. And if we go underneath, you can see how they relate. Now there is actually a little bit of a problem, or at least something that you may want to consider is that this element here is going to the surface of the wall. That may or may not be what you want. In fact, they are passing through each other in this relationship. So if we go to the floor plan, we will see some of what I am talking about. [0:13:51]

This shell here is trimmed and then goes across the face. The reason for this as I went through it in earlier training is that this main roof here, when I go into the settings, is set for trimming only out to the pivot lines, which is where the edge of the wall is. In this case, we might want to go to contours down. And then you will see how it interacts with the other roof all the way out because of the way that the other roof is sitting beyond the pivot line and out in this area. [0:14:28]

So when we go to 3D, we’ll see now this roof actually its green line extends neatly there. So we’ve not got these two roofs cleaning up nicely, and if we were to change the curvature, for example, just change the curvature a little bit, you’ll see how they just maintained that connection very naturally here. I will just undo that. Now the roof here has a perpendicular edge. And we know that we can get it vertical, but sometimes we might want to make it horizontal. We might want it to rest on top of this column and come straight back. [0:15:13]

So let’s take a look at how we might do that. So I am going to go and take this in the elevation. And let me take this a little bit steeper, just to make it more obvious what I am doing. So I am going to take it up like that there. And let’s say that we wanted to trim the underside here. Well, we can’t use that contour method, but we can use the solid element operations. So first of all, let me pull this out. And I could do this precisely using drafted controls, but I’ll just pull it out conceptually. And maybe drag this up. [0:15:54]

Actually, let me leave it back where it was. And I’m going to trim this off underneath here. So how would we do that? The same way I did earlier with the slab. This would be a convenient way to do it. I am just going to draw an arbitrarily-shaped slab here, put it on that layer here for the solid element operations, and let’s get that layer showing again. Remember I had used the Quick Layers palette to hide it. So I just undid the layer change here. So now if we go to 3D, we are going to see these cutting elements – the one that I no longer need over here, but the one that I am going to use definitely in this area. [0:16:40]

Now I am going to take this and stretch it up to the height of the column here. And I will make it the operator. And I will take this one and make it the target, the shell, and do subtraction and execute. And you can see how that got a nice, clean result there. I can get the same sort of thing by dragging this copy over, as long as it neatly overlaps, then making this copy the operator, and this shell again the target, and execute. And you can see how now we’ve got a nice, clean result in terms of the shell. [0:17:20]

Now we’ve got some issues here in terms of the way the two roofs are intersecting. So we might want to actually also do some type of a contour for this shell. This shell here right now is extending out further than the rest. So what I am going to do is with this shell selected, I will go and define a shell contour. So it just stays within the boundaries of the column here. And you can see this dashed line, what it’s done. Now by having a contour, basically saying it will never go beyond that. [0:18:06]

Now when I go to 3D, you can see how it’s cleaned up the way these two roofs are interacting. Now depending upon what you want to do, you can see that they’ve been connected. And so this one is now passing underneath that. There are different ways that you could approach it, but let’s just try one last thing and that is to remove its trim by the other shell. So they no longer relate to it. And let’s say for example that this one here is going to be trimmed out – first of all, let’s take this one and we’ll say connect to this shell and keep the upper part. [0:19:04]

So now, I didn’t modify the main one, I just was acting on this one. And you can see how it’s neatly trimmed out. Now having done that, if I select this one as the target and this one as the operator, and then do subtraction with downward extrusion and execute, we’ll see that it’s now neatly trimmed this underneath here. So we have some stuff that we would want to do with the walls to clean them up. Perhaps take this wall up higher, and then tell it to connect with or be trimmed. I don’t know, you could try it different ways. [0:19:52]

But let me make it the target, and then we’ll make this the operator. And we’ll say subtraction with upward extrusion, which would be the traditional one. That trimmed that off. And we can take this as the target and take this roof as the operator, and again do this. And now we’ve got the wall coming up neatly here. Of course, we could have a doorway or whatever, but all of this is basically being trimmed nicely. [0:20:20]

So there are different things you can experiment with using the Connect. Either selecting two elements together just to have them automatically do what ArchiCAD thinks is best, or selecting one and telling it to connect to another or using the Solid Element Operations. There are all different variations that we can do. And of course, these cutting elements here that I’ve got as slabs, if I hide them, you can see we’ve got now a nice, clean result.  [0:20:49]

So these are some of the variations that are useful and make it easier to do in ArchiCAD 15 and later than ever before, but some of the little wrinkles or things that you need to understand to get full control over how a barrel-vault shell will interact with walls and with other roofs. This has been Eric Bobrow; I look forward to getting your comments and questions on the page down below. Thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 0:21:19]