Best Practices Course – Week 17 Part 2 – © copyright 2013 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 17 – Complex Modeling PART 2A- Intro to Complex Profiles

Hello, this is Eric Bobrow.  In this lesson we’ll take a look at complex profiles and see how you can work with them and set up your own as needed.

I will draw a box of walls to begin with and we will explore how we can at anytime select these elements here.  Let’s go and move around where we can see them.  I will select all of these walls, and I can switch them from just simple straight up and down walls or tilted walls to a complex profile.  When I do that, it allows me to choose which profile I’d like.  Now in the standard U.S. template, there are three wall complex shapes that are available. In the international one it’s probably somewhat similar.  I’m going to pick the one that says brick wall with moldings and footings rather than foundation or this precast concrete here.  [0:00:52]

Having selected that, you can see that the walls instantly change and have now a material brick on one side or painted on the other side and have the molding top and bottom there. Let’s go to the floor plan and we’ll draw a section just to see what this looks like.  When we open the section, we’ll see that it’s giving a very nice, clean representation.  When I select this wall, you can see it actually includes the hot spots that extend out to where the moldings are.  Let’s go look at how this is defined under the Design menu, Complex Profiles, Profile Manager. [0:01:36]

It will bring up a small palette here that will expand as we work with it.  I choose which profile I’d like to look at. And I’m going to select that brick wall with molding and footing.  Before I do so, I will point out that there are other profiles that we weren’t seeing that were designed or designated for beams and columns.  The only ones we were seeing were the ones that were designated for walls.  Let’s go to the brick wall with molding and footing and say we’d like to edit it, and then we can study what we’ve got.  [0:02:08]

So this is a separate editing window called the Profile Editor.  As we zoom in on it, we can see that there is one fill that represents the main body of the wall; it’s actually a fill.  Here is another one that, in this case, has no line work in it but it’s still considered a fill.  This fill here, if we look at it, it says that its side material is this white paint.  Whereas when I select the main wall, it says that there are custom edges for this one.  As you recall, if we go to 3D, we’ve got one side being brick and the other side being painted. [0:02:48]

Let me go and press down on the edge of this fill that’s selected and we’ll see the usual options for changing fills or that you can use for fills or polygons; plus this extra one that only available in certain cases when you’re able to edit one edge individually.  So for the custom edge settings, it says that this is set for brick.  Now if I wanted to, I could switch it and decide whether that would affect only that one surface or edge or all of them.  Let me cancel this and let’s go to the other side and do the same command; and you can see that it’s set for a paint color.  That’s how this is working the way we saw it. [0:03:30]

Now let’s look at the base here. This molding down here, I’m going to change its shape to demonstrate that any changes that I do in this dialog box and the definition for the profile are then immediately seen in the 3D window and section.  So if I go and click on this point and stretch it up by typing in a value, that made the base molding taller. Then let me go ahead and store the profile. And as soon as I go back to 3D, you will see that this gets color, it updates here.  Let’s go back to that section and we will see there it is.  So let me go back and say edit that profile and we will fix it, I will put it back down the same distance that I did here, and then store that. And again that will update in 3D and in section as soon as I go back to those windows. [0:04:24]

These new elements here, in addition to having the fills and the materials that we’re looking at, also have a structural designation.  So this element here is core, and that makes sense.  If we were to say show the core only of this wall then that’s what we would want to see.  If I select this one, a molding, it says core as well, that is incorrect.  Let me demonstrate that this is setup improperly by going to that 3D window and then switching in our Quick Options here to instead of entire model let’s say core only.  We don’t see a change.  [0:05:03]

So let me go and correct that. I will go and edit that chosen profile, and I will have this selected as well as the lower one, and change them from core to finish and then store the change.  Now in 3D, we’ll see that the moldings disappear unless I go back and say show the entire model, and then of course they do return.  [0:05:26]

So we can make whatever corrections or changes we want to this definition and any elements that are drawn with this will update. Let’s go and create a new profile.  So I’ll go here and say new, and we will see that in the dialog box initially there’s just a little hot spot for the reference point.  That’s actually where the reference line will take place when we are drawing with this wall.  Now to create a new solid, we use the Fill tool. And we can set it up for whatever fill we want.  This is what we would see in a section. So I’m going to say that is going to be a stone base wall, and that it’s going to go up. Let’s say go 1 foot across and 3 feet up. So that will be its original shape there. [0:06:20]

And then I’ll switch to a simple fill here, and we’ll take this a little thinner. And so now we have a wall with a stone base and an upper area. Now I didn’t pay attention to the material, so let me go ahead and select this one and change it from brick here to one of the stone types. And then I will select this one.  And for now, let me just change it to one of the paint colors there. Now I’ll go ahead and store this. Before I do that, I’ll point out that it is now setup to be used with walls rather than beams or columns.  We can turn this off or on as we wish.  [0:07:03]

I will just say store it. It’ll ask me for a name. I will call this “Wall with Stone Base”.  And we go back to the floor plan.  And I could select these walls to change them, but let me just draw some new walls.  So I’ll go to the Wall tool, and we’ll go ahead and – let me just move this back into position here.  So I will go ahead and say that I would like to draw a profile wall and select this new wall, which now is added to the list. [0:07:34]

Then I will go and create a sequence of walls. And we’ll just draw this down like this here.  You can see how it cleans all of that up nicely. If I look in 3D and we zoom out a little bit, and you can see how everything is being drawn very nicely here.  Now we are actually looking at the inside face of the wall because when I was drawing this, the reference line was on this point here.  If I select the wall you can see the heavy blue line, which we see in ArchiCAD 15 and later representing the axis. In earlier versions, you would just see it’s a heavier reference line.  [0:08:24]

Now let me show you what happens if we adjust this.  So I’ll go ahead and edit this profile.  Let’s say we wanted to draw it with the reference line being on the outside here.  Let me just move these over.  So now I’ve defined it so that when I’m drawing this is going to be the reference line.  And the store this.  You’ll see that it actually updates this here; the reference line is now over at this point.  And when I draw on the floor plan that will be the point in space.  [0:08:53]

Now I actually might prefer to have it in line with the face of the wall.  So I may prefer that the reference line being along this line here of the upper wall, that might be a good guide. So let’s go and edit this profile again and perhaps move it.  So I’ll just drag it so that this point is above the origin and store it.  And again having made that change, this will update.  And if I select it you can see where the reference line is.  Let me just draw a few more walls like this to show how they clean up as we come around. [0:09:33]

We’ll go back to 3D. So having done that, I want to point out that the edge here does not have multiple surfaces.  It has only one material.  Now we can select this element here and change the material of a profile using the material choice here.  But you’ll notice that the other sides are gray because it’s controlled by the profile definition.  So here I will just switch this let’s say to a different color just to make it red so we see what happens. We will see that the entire surface changed there.  [0:10:13]

So if we wanted to make this actually have the stone here and different color up there, the best solution that we can do – and by the way I just undid the change – is to return the wall.  So in other words if I’m drawing the wall, instead of drawing the wall for a whole long piece, I can just draw it just a short little piece that will create this little return shape.  And when I go back to 3D, you can see that this is the stone.  So let me go and move our sun around in our 3D projection settings so we can see that a little better here like this. [0:10:53]

And now you can see that we’ve got the stone on the side.  Now having done that, we’ll see that this piece now has an issue. And of course we actually haven’t even addressed the fact that the interior we’d like to have that to be maybe painted all one color.  So let’s go and edit this profile, and let’s select this fill, go to the edge and use this option that I showed you earlier to set the material to the interior paint color that I’d like.  Do the same thing with this surface here, and now when I store this and I go back, you’ll see how this updates and now it looks quite clean like it’s all one surface material.  [0:11:40]

However this little piece, if I move my viewpoint around, you can see there’s a little return piece. Now I need to update that, and let’s say go to the edge and change it to that same material, and then it will blend in very nicely here.  Now what happens when we put in doors or windows, and what happens when we want to stretch the wall?  Let’s take a look at some of the options there.  [0:12:10]

So if we go back to that section here and we select this wall and I go to the top, with normal walls you can use the stretch option to make it taller.  And there is a similar but slightly different pet palette option here to make it taller, but what you’ll notice is that when I make it taller, the molding didn’t change its shape.  That is because – and I will just undo this back – that is because in this wall when I look at the profile here, there is a stretch zone defined. So you can see these little pair of lines here, these define the vertical stretch zone. So when we make it taller, the area between these two lines is deformed or stretched, whereas the area outside, top and bottom, is left alone which of course gives us a nice, clean result. [0:13:06]

In the same way we have horizontal stretch zones available.  By the way, if you’re not sure which is which, you can always turn off using these layer eyeballs to see what is controlled there.  Now let’s take a look at that section and see that you can actually make the wall thicker. If I select this and use the option here for making it thicker, then we could make it as thick as we like, keeping the moldings the same profile.  So let me just undo that.  [0:13:43]

Now be aware that if I go here to make it taller, I can make it taller, but I can’t make any shorter than it originally was.  This is considered the minimum size.  So if you are creating your own profile, then you would want to make it the shortest and thinnest that you would ever want to use it and then you can always draw it on the fly to make it taller are thicker if you wish.  Now in addition when we’re working on this profile, you’ll see if we turn off these stretch zones here – actually this is the visibility. If we turn the check boxes off, then the element will not be able to be stretched, it will be a fixed size. Whatever is defined here, it will not be able to be made any taller or thicker.  Of course you can make a longer piece of wall but not make the wall change its profile.  [0:14:35]

If we hide the construction layer, we will see that the actual volumes representing the solid parts of the wall disappear and we have these two lines remaining.  These are the opening reference lines.  I’ll just turn it off so you can see that that’s what they are referred to.  And basically these define where windows and doors will be placed.  So if you place a window or door and you say face it one way or face it the other way for that element, this defines where the face of that window or door will be.  [0:15:10]

So in general what we want it to be is the surface that makes sense as opposed to of course sticking out beyond that.  If we didn’t have the opening reference activated, then it might inadvertently place the window if you set it faced this way, it might actually stick it out in empty space there.  So you’ll want to avoid that.  [0:15:31]

There’s one more layer here called the drafting layer, which we can turn off or on, but actually there’s nothing currently drawn on here.  When we activate the Fill tool, you can see that fills are construction elements whereas lines and arcs are drafting elements.  So you can draw or paste in 2D elements such as lines, arcs, or poly lines into the profile editor to use as guides for drafting; but they will not actually show up in the 3D model in your section or defining something that you see in the 3D window, but you can use them for alignment purposes.  [0:16:11]

So this completes our basic introduction to the concept of complex profiles. We’ll return with another lesson, looking at some more of the advanced, interesting and innovative ways that you can use complex profiles.  This has been Eric Bobrow; please add your comments and questions to the page down below. Thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 0:16:37]

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 17 – Complex Modeling PART 2B- Complex Profiles (Advanced)

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices course training lesson on complex profiles, updates for ArchiCAD 17 and advanced usage.  We had a lesson for complex profiles that I did last year that is week 17 number 2, and it’s a relatively short lesson; 16 minutes. I went through all the basics.  Now there are some changes in ArchiCAD 17 that I have been covering in the last few months just in coaching calls and various other locations. But I wanted to collect them here in this recording and also show you some more advanced usage of the complex profile tools. [0:00:49]

So we’ll look very briefly at complex profiles in ArchiCAD 16 and then contrast them with 17, and we’ll spend a few minutes on that and then go on into some more advanced usage.  So let me draw some walls in ArchiCAD 16.  We’ll take a look in 3D, and take this into axo view for convenience. If I select all of these walls, I can change them from a straight wall to a tilted or double slanted wall or a complex profile.  This is how it was in ArchiCAD 10 through 16. This is how you would change to a profile.  When you first do this you will make this a profile that is custom.  You can see here it says, “Custom”.  We can switch from custom to any other one.  [0:01:46]

So I’ll take this brick wall with molding and footing, and you can see how that changed the wall height and everything about it. It put in these extra pieces that are the molding.  So I went through this in the basic training and showed how you can do the editing.  Let’s take a look in ArchiCAD 17 at the same operation here.  So I will draw a box of walls, like this, and go to 3D. Take our 3D to an axo, and we’ll select all the walls by doing Command+A or Ctrl+A with the wall tool active.  Now to switch between straight walls and other types of walls, we need to use this little popup here.  This switches us to simple walls. [0:02:38]

Simple walls are made of a single type of element like concrete or something. Typically you wouldn’t make walls out of these other ones like roof tiles.  But we could do generic exterior material, things like that.  Now this is the simple one.  This is the composites, and then here is where we would change to complex profiles.  So there’s a different place to do that. Again it comes up as custom, and you can switch to say a similar brick wall like we had in the other view.  So that’s one change there.  If I wanted to edit this particular complex profile in ArchiCAD 16, what I would have to do is go to the Options menu, Element Attributes, Profile Manager or Design menu, Complex Profiles, Profile Manager.  [0:03:32]

They both go to exactly the same places, two different ways to get there.  And then I would have to go and figure out which one I want to work on.  And you can see the list here. For example, we can say this is the one we want. We could select this beforehand so we could see the name.  Once we have that, say ‘Edit chosen profile’. And now we’re in editing mode.  Let’s see if I can get this moved down so we can edit it.  In ArchiCAD 17, while you can still do something similar, what I can do is select a wall and right click on it. And there is a command that says ‘Edit selected complex profile’.  This goes directly into the editing area for that.  [0:04:17]

It picks the direct one, and goes in to edit it. So that’s definitely simpler and less confusing, you don’t have to go figure out where that profile manager is. You don’t have to figure out which one it is.  Now in addition, if I go back to ArchiCAD 16 and make a change – so if I go and edit this, I’m going to draw a marquee here and drag this up 6 inches. I’m going to make the baseboard much taller here. If I go and store this – and let’s see, I think this is the one in ArchiCAD 16. This is the one from 17 lingering. If I say store this, you can see how it’s updated here. And if I go back to the 3D view, we’ll see this has gotten taller there.  [0:05:10]

So that’s one way that you can do that.  And if I wanted to edit this and perhaps make it a new profile, I can go in and say ‘Duplicate it’.  If I duplicated it, now I have a new one that is custom. And perhaps I’ll go in and make something noticeably different.  Let’s make it bulbous here.  We’ll take that as a change.  If I say ‘Store this’, it’s going to give me a name here.  I will just leave it with the “1” as a suffix. Now that does not apply to any of the elements that are in that 3D view, even if I had selected them, I would have to go in manually select this one and then apply the change here to this one.  And you can see how that went down there.  [0:06:12]

Now a subtle change in ArchiCAD 17 is that I can take this one that I have selected and make it little more dramatic.  I am going to select all of these walls and make them straight.  So this will put it back to a simple composite here.  Maybe with siding and 2×6’s, things like that. So now it’s a composite with some siding.  If I select this here, and I’ll just select one of them and I right click and go to Design menu Complex Profiles, Capture Profile of Selection.  This is something that has been available in earlier versions, but one of the things it does is it now creates this here. Let’s just say that I’m going to add a stone exterior to it.  [0:07:14]

So I’ll go to the fill tool here and choose something. I want limestone on the outside, something quick here. And I’ll just draw this up say 4 inches wide by 2 feet high.  Now this is a piece here.  You’ll notice there’s a button here that says ‘Apply’.  I don’t think that existed before.  That allows me to apply this to the particular element.  I can say apply, and you can see I accidentally put this on the wrong side here, but you can see how it applied.  It’s still a custom profile.  One difference is that before ArchiCAD 17, a custom profile was something that wouldn’t be remembered.  Now essentially there’s one custom profile at any given time, and you can edit and rework it, and if you want to you can store it.  [0:08:20]

Previously, that custom profile wouldn’t remember. If you said go and edit the custom profile it would just are from scratch I think.  So there is a subtle difference here.  Here’s the capture. So that’s the other thing is we have this dialog box up. We can capture this.  Right now, we’re editing one, so I’ll go ahead and store it. So I am capturing this. And let’s say if I click on ‘Store Profile’, I can give it a name. So let’s just call this “Wall with stone face”. And let me go ahead and change this to the other side, drag this over there and maybe round that corner, something like that.  [0:09:12]

So now if I say ‘Store this profile’, this has a name.  If I click on ‘Apply’, it will actually apply it to this element.  In fact, I can select multiple ones here and this Apply button is available.  So that was not something that you could do before in 16.  In 16 there’s ‘Apply to Selection’. Let’s take a look now in 16 at how the dialog box looks, because it has changed as we move forward.  So you can see there’s ‘Edit Chosen Profile’, ‘Capture Elements Profile’, and ‘Apply to Selection’.  In 17, we have ‘Capture and Apply’, so much smaller and more compact. And here’s the ‘Edit Profile’.  The reason they can move the ‘Edit Profile’ up here is because these icons are much smaller. [0:10:09]

Let’s go back to the other one here and compare them. Since this is floating I can see both of them at the same time. And you can see there are Delete, Rename, New and Duplicate. And here is the Delete. The “A” with the little bar would be rename, and this would be create a new one, the one with the little asterisk or star at the corner, and this would be duplicate.  So these are much more compact. And this whole dialog box, if I bring this over, we can see that it has shrunk down a little bit.  Other changes here, say if I am editing this profile and I’m working on it, you can see that there are these design layers. I think they are pretty much the same. Let’s say edit this here, and we’ll have these side by side so we can see them.  [0:11:12]

The design layers are probably pretty much the same. We’ll move them so you can see here.  But the components, these are rather different; these are the changes in ArchiCAD 17.  So in ArchiCAD 16, remember this is the one with the more expanded space here.  In ArchiCAD 16, each component that you might select would have a priority for intersection that would be manually set. And you would tell it to be core, finish, or other. And if it had a fill that was important to fit into the skin, you could change the way the fill would be oriented.  For example, insulation and things like that.  Then we have what were called ‘Materials’ for the side, which would be its appearance.  [0:12:02]

In ArchiCAD 17, we don’t have the priority anymore, because the priority is built into what building material it is.  So if I select this one here, what is this? This is no longer a fill, this is a building material.  So a building material as you know has a lot of attributes, including what it looks like in section and what it appearance it has in 3D with its surface. And it also has priority for essentially which elements are harder or will penetrate other elements.  So in 17, we have the fact that this, even though it’s a fill, it’s associated directly with a building material. In 16, if I select the fill, this is purely just a fill. And we have these separate controls for what it’s going to look like in 3D, the materials, which we now call surfaces, as well as these other controls.  [0:13:09]

So without going into every single detail, these are the key ones that have changed, because we’re now dealing with building materials instead of fills.  Instead of having fills with extended attributes manually placed such as what it would look like in 3D.  Now we have building materials, and like all building materials here, if we choose, we can say that this element is going to have an appearance based on the building material. We can also override that and say we want to make it a certain color or texture in 3D.  So this is similar to the standard walls.  So those are the main changes that we have for 17.  Generally I haven’t found it too confusing to figure out, but it definitely is a little different if you’re looking at previous lessons that I’ve given for coaching program calls.  [0:14:07]

This is going to be a little quick guide.  So let’s move on now to some of the advanced uses of complex profiles. In the Best Practices course, we have this lesson here. On my Bobrow.com website, I have a reproduction of an article that I wrote over 5 1/2 years ago about complex profiles.  This can be a good reference; the concepts are still certainly all there. And I basically explain these. So if you’d like to actually look at the description you can go here.  Of course dialog boxes, some of them have changed here.  I describe some things about other types of profiles that are available in the detailer section of the ArchiCAD library, so let’s take a look it that.  [0:15:14]

I will also take a look at some other applications like how you can put a profile around an edge like this.  This is intended to be a free form tabletop.  So we’ll take a look at some of those and some other advanced areas.  So let’s go to ArchiCAD 17 here, go back to the floor plan. Now in terms of profiles, we’ve been working today with complex profiles.  There are ways that you can bring in different types of shapes for that purpose.  One thing is under the Options menu, there’s an option to import a standard steel profile.  So what is that?  That means you can go into particular country’s code. I’ll go into U.S. Imperial. You can see the standards for many countries around the world here. And then you can see different profiles that are available.  [0:16:13]

These are standard ones from the U.S. tables of standard steel.  If I click on any one of them, it will show me some of the basic dimensions here. And then I can say I’d like to add this to the project.  So if I know – from talking to a structural engineer or doing my own engineering – particular profiles that I would like to use, I can pick these up.  Let me just pick a different shape up here and I will add it. There’s a long tabular list here, but we’re going to bring in a small number of shapes. And you can actually choose different types of shape. Let’s do a “T” shape here, and just bring in one.  So I’ve brought in three different profiles. And when I say ‘Import’, it will add it to the profile manager.  So if I go back to the Design, Complex Profiles, Profile Manager, we’re going to see now there are these three shapes that I just imported.  [0:17:08]

So if I select this, you can see that I can edit it.  Why would we want to edit it? It is already the exact dimensions that this has specified, but perhaps I want to change what material it is. Right now it’s steel, maybe I want to change that. In this case, even though it’s steel, I want to go and have it painted. So it’s not going to be used as a building material. I’m going to give it a surface appearance so it’s going to be painted green or something like that.  So that then becomes available here.  If I store that, then this particular instance of it will be set up to be a piece with this profile and that particular surface appearance.  That is the way that you import these profiles. Again, it’s under the Options menu. You have to be on the floor plan rather than already editing. Options menu, Import Standards, Steel Profile. Pick what country, pick what shape, browse through this, select one or more of these, and add them to the project. Whatever you selected here will be brought into the profile manager after you click import.  So that’s very useful for steel shapes.  [0:18:24]

Now if I go to the Object tool, we’re going to see another way that you can bring in some profiles that you might find useful.  This is in the U.S. library, and I am not sure whether it’s in the standard international library.  I believe the last time I checked, it was not available there. And for MasterTemplate users, we actually included a copy of these elements in MasterTemplate for international users, because they are useful here. For example, if I go to the general section detailer library and go down to something like wood casing, you can see that these are some profiles. I will select one of them.  Here’s what it looks like.  It’s purely a 2D shape.  If I go to 3D, there’s nothing in here, so it’s only a 2D shape. [0:19:17]

It has some attributes, such as how many contour lines it has. If I pick one, you can see now the entire outside has this red color. And if I pick two, it’s going to have red and brown. So we can actually have some different things.  There are some controls, and you can pick which pen you’d like to use. If I pick bold contour line, if I wanted it really thick, I would pick pen one to be a thicker pen here. And when I select that and say OK, I’m now able to place it.  I will go and place this on the plan and you can see it is now a shape on the plan.  Now this is an object. I can’t do much with it other than place it in a drawing.  So we could of course place it in a section, rotated around to whatever orientation.  [0:20:08]

We can use these as 2D graphics. But we can also use this as the basis of a profile.  What you’d need to do with that is explode it.  If I go to the Edit menu, Reshape, Explode into Current View, or use the keyboard shortcut Command and equal sign or Ctrl and equal sign.  I don’t need to keep the original elements. I just want the line work that’s going to be there. So I say OK, keep drawing this only.  And if I select this, here’s a line, here’s another line.  And don’t need the interior stuff, so I’m going to delete those. And now if I zoom in on this, this is a series of lines.  Now I can copy this information to the profile window to work with, but I may just want to copy the shape, not all the line work.  What do I mean by that?  [0:21:04]

I need to have a fill in the profile window. So right now, there’s nothing inside here, so I’m going to go to the fill tool and magic wand.  You’ll see when I magic wand and click inside; it found part of this boundary.  I’m not sure why it stopped over here.  It looks like they must’ve been some line. Let me just undo this and say is there anything there? No there is not. Let me just go to the fill tool and magic wand from an edge, and now you can see it actually traced the entire boundary there.  There’s a line across here because this particular fill that I had selected was set for cross hatch.  And I changed it to a simple poché.  Regardless of what the fill is, I’m going to copy this or cut it. I’ll copy it right now, and go into the Options, Element Attributes, Profile Manager, and create a new profile using this button here.  [0:22:03]

Let’s just call this “Casing 1”. And now I can go and say Paste. So I will do Command+V or Ctrl+V. I paste it in and I will make sure that it’s positioned in a good location.  The x is the origin of the profile, so that probably isn’t very good because I imagine that’s the outside and this is against the wall. So we want to drag this up.  It could be that we want to be able to put it in by this corner or we might want to put it in by a different corner.  I’m not sure and I’m not going to worry about that, I’m not going to change it. I’ll just leave it up here. But whatever point this is, when you draw it, this is where this profile will show up.  So whatever one is going to be the most convenient. Any of these points might be appropriate for your needs or a specific offset in. [0:23:01]

So I’ve now placed this. This particular fill came in and it says ‘Missing’. So it actually, because I just pasted in a fill, I need to go and specify what it’s made of.  So let’s say that it is made of wood, wood trim. So now that’s going to have a basic appearance.  If I say use the building material, it will be some appearance here.  Of course I could override it.  I will store the profile.  Do I want to use it with walls?  Well we could use the wall tool to place it, but maybe I’ll just restrict it.  I will put it in with just beams and see what that does, that Casing 1, and say ‘Store this’.  So this now is a new profile that I have created using the object that I placed in on the floor plan.  [0:24:00]

If I go to the beam tool in this case, we’ll see that when I select a profile beam, and this is the way you choose it in the beam tool, I can then go and select one of these.  And here is our Casing 1.  So I can go and draw this.  The height of this was set at – I’m not sure where the height was set.  Let me just undo here. Where it is the height?  It’s offset, here’s our thickness. The height for some reason is set in this. When I open the beam tool it says ‘Not available here.’ Let’s just put this in and say its 7 feet. It was not available?  Let’s go in and edit this. I’ve never seen “N/A” there. Now it is showing something here. So I’ll say OK, and let’s go in here and take it up to 7 feet here. I don’t know why that’s showing that there. Relative to current story, that is rather odd.  Let’s see if we can draw this.  [0:25:35]

Alright, now it shows up. I don’t know why this is showing up funny here. But if I look in 3D, now are going to see this particular shape.  It’s facing the wrong way; it’s definitely the wrong use of that particular profile.  If I wanted to update that, let’s just go in and edit this. Let’s say maybe I wanted it to be vertical, so we’ll select this and rotate this around here and store it. If I go back, you can see how this is now facing the wall.  Maybe it’s backwards and I need to reverse. So if we wanted to do that then I would go in and edit this again and perhaps mirror this across here, store this, and now it’s facing this way.  So obviously we can rotate it whatever orientation it needs to be.  This is one way that you can put in baseboard, crown, or other types of molding around here.  [0:26:41]

In ArchiCAD 10, when profiles were first introduced, they were only straight.  In ArchiCAD 11 and later, you could use the wall tool and curve a profile. The beam tool could not be curved.  Now the beam tool actually can be curved. This is something new in 17.  Let me get this to curve out a little bit. You can see this is something that is new in 17, the ability to take a beam profile and curve it around.  So that introduces some more flexibility in terms of geometry.  Now let’s see, Carol Wiley wrote, “There’s a small line at the bottom.” I’m not sure what you mean by a small line at the bottom. Maybe you were talking about why it was tracing, why the magic wand and didn’t work quite right.  So that might be the case, but I did the magic wand for the outline, and then it was able to figure that out.  We can also manually trace it, but obviously I like doing the magic wand. [0:27:53]

So I’ve just shown another way to approach getting complex profiles in there using the object tool. Place in what is a profile, just as a 2D object and use that as the basis for creating profiles here.  Now one of the issues that we have is if we did want to have a casing that went around three sides of a door or four sides of a window or something like that, then I’m using the beam tool. And it won’t actually clean up if I use it with the column tool. Let’s take a look here at an option that we might find useful. So here is our curved beam here.  Let me eyedrop this. If I were to go to the beam tool, let’s go here to this profile. We’re going to say that we want to have it also for columns, which means that it would be able to go vertically up. [0:29:01]

So I will go in and draw a horizontal piece. And I’m going to draw a vertical piece using the same thing. So again, we have our complex profile for the column, which probably more commonly would be some type of structural steel. Let’s take a look at this – “Casing 1” here that I made. It should be stored, so that should be available. I don’t see “Casing 1” in there, that’s interesting.  So if I edit profile here, maybe U have to hit “Store profile”. And now if I go to the column tool, here’s the casing. I just want to show you an odd situation here.  This is not really a column of course. Let me change the settings so it doesn’t have – I’m looking for these little marks that go off to the side.  [0:30:21]

I know we can turn them on or off somewhere. Floor plan symbol has the crosshair, we can just say ‘Plain’. So that would remove the crosshair thing. Now if I go to 3D at this point, we’re going to see that I have a rather tall piece.  If I take this down to meet that point – regardless of how I turn these, right now they’re obviously not facing the right way, they are going to clean up to each other. I am not going to bother moving them into position.  They will not clean up, because columns and beams do not know how to clean up in a mitered corner.  So if you do want have a casing that goes around a door or a window, the best way to do that that I have found is to use – whether it’s the beam tool, I think beams will cleanup. [0:31:19]

I’ve also done it with the wall tool.  Let’s just make sure that I can do it with the wall tool. Let’s make it available for the wall tool and store it.  Now I go to the wall tool and draw a complex profile, pick that casing, and draw this general shape. If I look at this in 3D, you can see how it is cleaning that up.  Now it’s looking like a skylight box, but you can see how that’s actually mitering the corners. If you had this facing at the right orientation, it would obviously clean up for doing a casing on three or four sides.  Now if we wanted to have this vertical, here is the simplest way to do it.  In ArchiCAD 17, you can select this once you have it the way you want. [0:32:16]

You can go to the Design menu, Convert Selection to Morphs.  If you do that, it will convert them to morphs, and then if I select this we can select all four of these morph elements. Then I can go to an edge and use the rotate.  Now we can rotate around on the floor plan like this, but that’s not what I want to do.  I want to use the rotate option in the pet palette and then go to an edge, which then says “I would like to rotate perpendicular to this edge.”  I can then get a snap along the X, and if I do it correctly, it would consider Y, but that that would be vertical.  You can see how that’s rotated up into position.  So that is a morph. It’s no longer a complex profile, so we can’t actually select a different profile to modify it. But it’s very quick to create that and you can move it on top of a window or a door to get a nice shape there. [0:33:17]

If you were doing this before we had morphs in ArchiCAD 16, say in ArchiCAD 15 or earlier, we would save that as an object. So if I go back a couple of steps, here is the object here.  I will go and say “Show only what is selected in 3D”.  So I can do it on the floor plan or in 3D to isolate this. Then go to our View menu, 3D View Options, 3D Projection Settings, and say I’d like to look in a parallel projection from the side, move our camera to the 90° azimuth, which means from the top of the screen.  Now we’re looking at it from the side but what will be the down position. With it selected go to the File menu, Libraries and Objects, Save Selection as Object.  And it tells us that it’s going to make this current view the floor plan view. And give it a name; let’s say “Casing vertical”.  [0:34:16]

And after confirming all of that, now if I go to the object tool, I can place this object.  If I look in 3D and say ‘Show All in 3D’, we’ll see it, here it is.  You can see the new object that I just created.  So this is an object here that I just created, and of course these are the profiled walls.  So those are some other ways to deal with profiled shapes and you may find useful.  Of course we could rotate it to any orientation in the morph tool.  The object actually has some options that I don’t want to get into, but you could tilt it as well.  I did cover that I believe in week 21 of the course.  So let’s see, Mark Phillips says, “Just use an empty door and add the casing to it.”  [0:35:17]

The issue Mark is that you can’t choose a casing with a profile.  So if we go to a door element and go in here, there’s an option for the casing. But if we go in here to casing settings, there are just simple rectangular shapes that we’re dealing with.  So it has a certain dimension, but it is not actually going to have a profile.  So if you wanted to have a profile for a real door, what you would want to do is turn off this casing and use an object like what I just created or a morph element.  It’s unfortunate; it would be nice if you could actually choose a complex profile as the casing.  Maybe at some point Graphisoft will add that, but we don’t have that right now.  [0:36:07]

There’s a question from Steve Nichol, “Why can’t Graphisoft offer casing options in the door tool?” I agree, it would be very useful.  Okay so moving on to some other ideas and applications.  Moldings and Edges.  This is something that you can do that you might find useful from time to time.  I’ll do an example similar to what I did in that little diagram.  Suppose you wanted to do a designer table, and this designer table I am going to represent with a simple marble or something like that.  Here’s marble top, and instead of this being a regular shape, I’m going to draw a spline. I am going to make this sort of complicated by drawing the spline. If you haven’t worked with the spline tool, it’s under the ‘More’ section of the toolbox. It allows you to create a series of points and then you can close it or leave it open.  This series of points can be pulled and pushed and adjusted. You can add more points to it using the pet palette to get more finesse. [0:37:17]

There are some other options, including switching to having this be a Bezier base curve. And now you can go in and adjust the actual curvature using these control points.  However you do this, it basically is going to create a 2D shape.  If I wanted to make it 3D, then what I will do is go to the slab tool and use the magic wand and trace it.  So now I’ve created a slab here, and this slab has a certain thickness.  I made it marble I believe. Let’s say it’s going to be up off the floor 2 feet, and it’s going to be 2 inches thick. So I will say 1’10”. And let’s take a look in here in 3D.  We now have this. Alright, that’s sort of an odd shape. Let’s make it a little thinner, only 1 inch thick.  Okay, it’s now floating in space. [0:38:24]

And let’s say we wanted to have an edge on it instead of being straight. Let’s actually do it on a straight piece.  So let’s put in a cabinet as an example. We’ll go to the object tool; we’ll go in here and pick cabinet. We’ll pick a standard cabinet. When we do the cabinet, we have something for the counter that allows us to pick let’s say a choice of either straight edge or this curve. And we can choose some distances. But let’s just place this and we’ll take a look.  No wonder that thing looked rather small. Here is an interesting thing. If you like the general portions of something, but it’s really out of scale, select it go to the Edit menu and say Reshape, Resize or Command or Ctrl+K. This allows you to say, “Do I want to do this graphically or do I just want to type in a percentage to make it to 200% bigger?” or something like that. [0:39:49]

Doing it graphically, there are some options here if you have multiple elements selected like text, whether the text is going to resize, etc. But here, pick a point that is going to stay constant, pick any other point or just click anywhere, and then you can choose how far this is going to end up being.  So now I will have something a little bigger.  This is the slab; the original spline was not selected, so it did not change size.  Let’s take a look in 3D.  We have now this cabinet, and it does have the edge here.  If you wanted to have an edge that was a bull nose that went and wrapped underneath, you can’t do that with this option here.  [0:40:30]

So let’s say that I wanted this to be bull nose. I will go and take this as a straight piece and maybe make the overhang less, like this.  So you can see it’s now straight. And what I’ll do is apply a piece to the end of it and also apply a similar piece to the face of this element.  Let me zoom out and rotate the view so I can do that.  So what I’m going to do is create a profile.  I will create a new profile and call it “Edging” here.  And we’ll draw a simple fill, I will leave it set at the marble here. And this fill, I will draw first as a rectangle. So I will make this 1″x1″, just a little tiny piece. And then I will go and take this – I’m not quite sure. Let’s see how will I do this. I will drag this back here and curve this out.  [0:41:55]

So I’m just doing it as a quick sketch concept.  This element here I will go and use the building material, marble. We could also give it a uniform appearance, marble white, or whatever we want it to be.  We can use it with the wall and the beam tool.  You may find that useful. Store the profile, editing, there it is. And now if I wanted to apply it, let’s just go here back to the floor plan. And I will go to the beam tool and pick the edging here. Draw this across to there maybe take that back that way. And let’s see what this looks like.  [0:42:49]

Show all in 3D.  You know what?  It’s up in the air because I didn’t specify the height. So let’s drag this down there. It’s obviously not matching the color, and it’s not as thick as it needs to be, but you get the idea.  If I go back and say ‘Edit this’ and let’s just take this and maybe use the marquee tool. And we’ll take this up an extra inch here.  Store it, and go back and see how that updates.  So we can drag this down to there.  It looks like I didn’t drag this one, so let’s drag this. So that will provide the straight edge, but how would we do it for this one if we wanted something similar?  This needs to be 2 inches thick. [0:44:07]

I’ll go to the wall tool and do this, because the walls in all versions of ArchiCAD since version 11 can do curves. In version 17 we can use the beam tool as well.  I’ll just magic wand this, and you can see what it has done here.  It has created this shape. Let’s take a look in 3D, and it looks like those elements here are just lying on the ground because I didn’t pay attention.  Let me undo and then redo. This is a little trick that many of you know, that if you undo something that you’ve drawn or pasted and then redo it, it’s all selected. It allows you to then change some attribute about it. In this case I want to change its base up to let’s say 1’10”.  Now it’s up at that height. [0:45:08]

And let’s take a look in 3D, and you can see now we have an edging on this.  Now we are seeing a line here, because it’s recognizing that this is a separate piece from the other one. This one has a sharp edge and we’re not seeing the line between the surfaces, we’re only seeing the sharp edge.  So if I were to take this and say edit this, and I take this point back here. So now it is just purely a curve and there’s no -let’s actually take this edge and we want it to be perpendicular. So I’m using the pet palette option here. This is one that I don’t use frequently but if you want to make it a tangent, I take it down to be tangent, now this is a true half circle. [0:46:14]

I’ll say ‘Store this profile’, and when I update you can see what it has done here.  So now we’re not seeing the line across this, we’re only seeing the line where the original element and this one are meeting.  In a rendering, this actually might smooth out; we might not see that, because renderings actually don’t show edges.  And this one actually now looks smoother as well.  So if we were to take this and tell the countertop material – let’s see the counter, we had ‘Marble 1’, where was it? Marble white maybe, that’s it, there we go. So now that looks pretty nice.  [0:47:11]

So that’s another alternate usage of the profile tool.  Let’s look at another one here for quick concepts.  You can see what this looks like. It looks like a kitchen cabinet with no doors and it has an extrusion.  So to communicate in terms of the kitchen design.  We’ll put cabinets here and cabinets over there.  You can basically create something like this very quickly without having to put in all the individual cabinets. And then later you can come back and figure out what size each piece is.  So it’s a very quick design study.  Let’s take a look at how that works.  I have MasterTemplate’s sample project open here because I’m going to look at a couple things.  If we go to the Complex Profiles, Profile Manager, will see that there is one I believe, AMT Profile, do I have this? I thought we had it in here. [0:48:31]

I had it open specifically for this purpose. We have some interesting profiles in here but I’m not seeing the kitchen one. So let’s just create it then. We’ll use this file in a minute, because I want to show you some other things. So if I take a section through this cabinet, just draw a temporary section through here and open it up, we are going to see the body of the cabinet here. What I am going to do now is select this stuff, copy it. And when I paste it, it’s not going to paste in another cabinet; it’s going to paste in linework. And in fact, I don’t want to paste it in here, I want to go and create a new profile. So I will create a new profile here. [0:49:29]

We’ll call it “Cabinet Massing Profile”. And I will paste that in. It says, “Center of current view?” Yes, that’s fine. And let’s take this down to there. Now what do I have here? I have a fill, another fill, and another fill. All of these are fills. I don’t want to have this solid, so I am going to delete that fill and that one. So now I will have the rest of it solid. Let’s merge these two, because I don’t want a division here. So I will get rid of the line. I selected the line here. And now I will take this fill and add to it with the magic wand this fill. That’s a poly line. Let’s delete the poly line – I guess I accidentally deleted the fill. So I want to delete these lines. [0:50:47]

Now this is just a fill. It has a series of segments here that we may want to clean up. If you wanted to be finicky about it to make it cleaner. I will do this curve halfway. So I now have a smooth curve for this fill. I am not going to worry about the materials right now. I am just going to see how this works, just for walls, not for beams. I will store it, having made that change there. Let’s go back to the floor plan. What happens if we go to the wall tool, and pick the cabinet massing profile? So let’s draw a single piece and see what we have. We’ll go to 3D and see, interesting! The shape came in translucent, which actually could be quite interesting. [0:52:05]

It suggests that there is something there without making it too detailed. If we did want to make it more like a real cabinet, then we can go in here and select each of these. For example, you could select this fill and make it the marble. Let’s make all the rest of them wood. So I will select all of these. It looks like it selected fills and lines. And so we have 25 things selected, and the last thing is a line. I want to make sure that I am selecting all the fills. I can go to fill tool and do Command+A or Ctrl+A to select all fills. Then deselect this one. Oh, water, interesting! [0:53:02]

That was what it was. Let’s make this something wood trim or something like that, or plywood siding. Here is plywood. But they are not going to use the building material; they are going to be painted a white color like this. So now I can say “Store this”. And if I go back it looks like this. We have the white, but we didn’t get the top here. Let me go in and select this fill here, this fill is the marble, and it says use building material, and let’s do that and store it. There we go. So now we can easily go into a room and put in pieces. So I will go and say that this is going to go along the wall a certain distance. I will use the eyedropper here. [0:54:27]

I will draw another piece here. So we can get an L shape easily, and you can see what that is looking like. Now the end looks funny, because of the selections that we have for the end. So with all profiles, we can say that the end piece can be a certain color. We’ll make it the white that I had there. That will look better. If we want a covered end, we can duplicate this profile and call it “Cabinet Massing End” and edit it. And what I want to do now is get rid of some of these things here. I didn’t want to get rid of that. Take the fill, and I do want to keep it a little different here. But I will draw another one that will initially be this, but I will add to it. [0:56:05]

If I want to have some detail, I can go in and add a piece here, and select this and add and do another piece up here. So now, if I select all the fills, and deselect this one, I can delete the extra pieces that I have. And there are a couple of lines that are left behind. Lines will not show up in the actual element. So these lines we don’t have to worry about. They are just drafting elements, but I want to make it visually clear that this is a simple, clean representation. So I will just get rid of those lines. So now having cleaned that up I will store it. And I can now create an end here. I will go and pick from the wall tool, and say I want to put the end on it, and just draw this an inch, some small amount. [0:57:36]

Now if I go to 3D, we can see that we have the end. And I want to make sure the end here is set to something that makes sense or matches. And I would want to make sure that this piece was set up properly. You get the idea that, once I have this system in place, I can draw in cabinets using these profiles. So that’s a quick way to sketch things. So we are at the hour mark, but I have a few more things I want to go over here. Mark Phillips asked, “You could do something with the upper at the same time. Great idea.” Oh, put in the upper cabinets, perhaps. Yes. [0:58:31]

So other things that you can do here, if I go back to the article, you can see here is a road bed. Here it’s represented with a single element. We’ll go to the sample project and go to an axo view. That is what this element; it’s a wall with a profile. If I say I want to edit the complex profile – this is a command that was introduced into ArchiCAD 17 to make it easy to do. You can see it’s a single fill here. This fill is all one uniform color. But we could easily make – for example, if we wanted to have sidewalks. Let’s do a little change here. Let’s go to the profile editor and see how we do that. [0:59:48]

I am going to say make all of this the sidewalk color. So I will say, “Don’t use the building material.” Let’s make it concrete light. And I will take the center part here and say I would like to edit an individual piece. I will change it from concrete light to asphalt dark. Selected edge only. So that was this curved edge across the top. Maybe I also want to do this edge here, selected edge only, asphalt dark, and go over to this side here and make this one that asphalt dark. Say OK, store the profile. And now if we go back to 3D, we are going to see that now the road has this asphalt material and the sidewalk has the concrete. You could change that to whatever material you want. You could have the edge piece perhaps be something else. Unfortunately, you have to do each edge individually. You can’t select two or three edges and effect them. You have to go to each edge and do that. [1:01:18]

But it’s pretty quick. So how did I create that? You basically draw a fill and draft it up the way you want. There is no big trick other than knowing this is an application you could do. Now if you want this road to curve, basically we can eyedrop this and put in more road. Let’s go back to the floor plan and here is the road. In this case, the axis line here is at the center. So you see this “X”. That is the origin point. We are drawing here the center line of the road. And I will select the beam tool and eyedrop this here. So with beams, we couldn’t do a curve before, and now we can. [1:02:15]

So if I go to here, we can say we want to do a curved piece. Start it along there and curve it some distance there. So if I look in 3D, we are going to see how that works. So you could do that before ArchiCAD 17 with the wall tool, and now you can also do it with the beam tool. One advantage the beam tool has is you can actually slope a complex profile. So if this was sloping, we could say we want to have it go up. Let’s see, that’s a tilt. Here we can give it a 1˚ slope, -2˚, so it will go down a little bit there. And if we wanted this to go up here. when you have a curved beam, you cannot slope it. So that is a little bit of an issue here in terms of simulating road work. [1:03:24]

You can change the slope on straight beams. So I will undo here. So that covers that particular one. Let’s take a look at rafter tails. And then we will take a look finally at framing. So rafter tails are an interesting option built into MasterTemplate. We have some nice examples of this. You can see in the sample project, we have rafter tails in here. Let’s see if I can rotate underneath. You can see the shape that those have underneath the roof. You could individually create a piece with that complex profile. In this case, we have a piece that is going all the way up. I am going to be covering Roofmaker in the next lesson of the Best Practices Course. Roofmaker allows you to automatically create all of this framing. [1:04:40]

If I go and select this roof, and hide this layer, you can see here is the framing for this particular roof section. So if you do have some ornamental rafter tails, and you are applying them on the outside of the building, then you can create a simple shape here. We look at rafter tails. This is “Profile Rafter Tail”. This is actually a negative profile that we have in here. Let me change the scale so we can read this better. So this is a shape that is intended to be cut off of some other element. And here are some other shapes that we have. So you can create a profile of any shape that you want and draw it as a rafter tail. But if you wanted to have a long piece of any length for the actual rafter, and then have the end be sculpted, then you can use this approach. [1:06:02]

You can create a profile and trim it. So I will turn on the layer setting for this and turn on the layer for Solid Element Operations which is normally hidden, turn it on. You can see that there are some elements here that are, if we look closely, they have a shape. Let me show you that layer by itself. We’ll go to the “Quick Layers” and hide all layers other than what I have selected. And you can see that these elements are basically a negative profile, they are trimming off the other elements. So if I undo this back, you can see them. You can see how they are taking what would have been a straight piece and carving it off. [1:06:58]

Now I’ve done a whole video on this topic. So I think that’s enough on that in today’s lesson. You can find that video in my YouTube channel. It’s called “Rafter Tails”. I may have also copied it to the Best Practices course. I will go and make sure that it ends up in the Best Practices course listings, because it definitely belongs there. So that is the idea of using it for rafter tails, and using it as a negative operation; using Solid Element Operations to do that. I want to credit Abe Spira of Sacramento California. He showed me that idea and I thought, “Wow, that is so cool.” [1:07:40]

One of the things that you can do here, and I will demonstrate this because I don’t know that I showed it in the other video, is if I go here and edit this profile, these are just lines. If I say I want a different profile shape, let’s say that I want to do something more ornate, like this. So I will eyedrop this fill here. I will magic wand this one, so now there is another fill here. I will drag this into position, and then rotate it. And we will get rid of the earlier one. So I now have a different profile. And remember how I was editing the profiles, and you just made a change and you would see it update? When I edit this profile and say, “Store It” that changes these invisible or normally hidden elements. [1:08:42]

Then look at the rafter tail. We are going to look carefully. See the shape here? When I go back to the 3D window it will update. You can see how the shape is now a different profile. By doing it this way, we have the option of changing that shape for study purposes. Maybe the client changes their mind, or you change your mind. You can cut off a different end piece. If they were little pieces that were stuck on to the side of the building rather than carved off the end of a real rafter, then you could do it with a positive image rather than the negative image there. But hopefully you see that’s a really powerful way to do it. [1:09:29]

And I just needed one of these cutting pieces off of each side of the building. So there are only eight or ten of those that I have to put in, so it’s very easy to do. Let’s look at Profiler. So what is Profiler? It’s an option under the Design menu, Design Extras, Profiler. It’s installed automatically with ArchiCAD 17 and 16 and possibly back a few versions. Earlier, you needed to add it in manually by going to the Help menu, ArchiCAD Downloads, or ArchiCAD Goodies, and loading it in as an extra. Graphisoft decided that it no longer would be an optional goodie, it would just be built into the design extras. [1:10:17]

Now Profiler allows you to do different shapes. It has largely been superseded by the complex profiles and the shell tool, but it still can be used for specific things. I’ll create a fill on the floor plan. And here is a shape that might be something you would want to do for a baluster. So I will add this point here. Why is it not curving? There we go. Curve here; curve this in, like that. So I have this odd shape, and I am also going to draw a line like this. So I have a line and a fill, and I will go to the Design menu, Design Extras, Profiler. And when I have a line and a fill, we can draw profiles. This looks like the molding concept here. And while you can do that, while it has some power, generally I prefer using the profile manager tool for this. [1:11:45]

But for this one, this is a lathed form, a rotated form. So I will say I want to make this out of marble. And we will look at some of these settings in context. Say OK. And it says, “Enter revolve surface anchor direction.” So I am going to click on the anchor direction here. It says it’s going to create a profile. I will call it “baluster”. I think that’s how these things are spelled. And save it. So you see it’s created something on the plan that goes right through this point and this point here is the extension of that. So if we look at it in 3D, you can see it doesn’t look like a baluster, but it looks like something. [1:12:36]

Alright, so I basically defined the center line that it was rotated around and the shape, and it created this complete shape. Now it has some odd things, because the handles you can see are at the top and then going above it. That’s a glitch there, but at least it does show up. It’s going from zero to 3’9″. Let’s just take a south elevation and make sure that’s it’s where I think it should be. No, it’s not. In fact, it’s saying that it’s going up here, but it’s actually – we’ll just drag this up to here. So now it’s sitting on ground level. Now if I select it, we’ll see that having created this, there are some options.  [1:13:30]

For example, what angle do I want it to contain? If I say 120˚, we are going to see that it’s going to be cut off as 1/3 of a circle. And now you can see how it’s this hollow shape. You could have something fit into a corner, either 90˚ or 180˚, to stick out from a wall here. Now this 180˚ would be tilting it. Right now we’re going straight up. Let me put it back to the 360˚, and then go in here and change this to 90˚ and it’s going to rotate. So you can rotate this to some odd angle. We don’t have the resolution here on that. I know I have experimented with turning this into an object and changing the resolution. In the article here, you see, once you have turned it into an object, you can go in and manually change its resolution. [1:14:45]

I don’t want to take the time on that right now, but that could be an interesting option, and it would be part of the week 21 of the course where I go into objects. So hopefully you see the potential power of this when you want to have a lathed form. But the shell tool will also do most of these things now built in. we’ll be covering the shell tool in my next live lesson a week from now. This concludes our lesson on Complex Profiles, updates for ArchiCAD 17 as well as advanced usage. Please add your comments and questions to the page down below this video. This has been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

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