topic Re: Housing Types in Modeling

Housing Types

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:24:25 GMT

I am working on a Master Plan for a residential development.

I have six house types that i need to design. As they are all similar building types, is there a way to organize one ArchiCAD file for all six buildings? or am i better off to make new ArchiCAD files for each house?

I guess a similar way to look at this problem is to handle each house type as a 'design option'.

Any suggestions are welcomed. Thank you!

Re: Housing Types

TomWaltz — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:49:15 GMT

There's two ways I know of to approach that:
1) Make one file for each house
2) Put them all in one file, divided into stories. For example, check out this shot of the Navigator (the "dashed" stories are strictly for visual separation when you look at the Navigator)

Re: Housing Types

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:08:54 GMT

thanks for the advice.

i guess my only concern with six units in one file is a possible slowdown during navigation in 3D.

for my purposes, i think i'll stick to one file per unit.

thanks again!

Re: Housing Types

TomWaltz — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:36:55 GMT

Offset them from one another in plan. Then if you all-story marquee a unit, you only see that unit.

Re: Housing Types

jbArch — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:15:10 GMT

LINZ wrote:
I have six house types that i need to design. As they are all similar building types, is there a way to organize one ArchiCAD file for all six buildings? or am i better off to make new ArchiCAD files for each house?

It has been awhile, but I did this once where I used hotlinks/modules and it worked fairly well.

IIRC, each building type was a separate archicad PLN file. Then I had another file which essentially was the site plan file, where each building module was hotlinked into it. So if you made changes to one of the buildings, the effect on the footprint would show up when you went into the site plan file.

Another nice thing about this method was that you could draw everything on a normal orthagonal grid, but you could place the buildings at different angles on the site and easily adjust them later.

The biggest pain of this system is the constant opening/closing of files to go between building types, etc. I guess multiple AC sessions is an option, but in AC9 & earlier it wouldn't keep an emergency backup file when I ran two sessions... not sure if this problem persists in AC10.

Cheers,
JB

Re: Housing Types

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 04:03:55 GMT

thanks for the advice!
i do need to have a site plan ready shortly after - i'll try this method.