topic Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House? in Modeling

Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:42:26 GMT

Hi There,
What would be the fastest method to draw walls in Archicad 13 for a domestic house?

Do you think Archicad could do it allot faster?

What is your opinion?

Thanks,

Manuel Trantalis Home Designs.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

alemanda — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:37:26 GMT

Sorry ... What do you mean? What does it mean "to draw wall in archicad"?

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:46:25 GMT

mthd wrote:
Hi There,
What would be the fastest method to draw walls in Archicad 13 for a domestic house?

Do you think Archicad could do it allot faster?

What is your opinion?

Thanks,

Manuel Trantalis Home Designs.

CLick on wall tool,select size,draw your wall

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Dwight — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:38:07 GMT

That's an interesting question because it relates to design methodology.

I prefer to not draw walls at all in Archicad, but to use the magic wand to surround the perimeter of assembled fills, zones or slabs responding to room planning/building masses.

Another approach is to magic wand various independent room slabs/zones/fills, push the assemblies around and together to get good massing and then split and convert exterior wall types to interior partitions.

Whenever you can find a way to use the magic wand, your work is faster.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Brad Elliott — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:50:28 GMT

Dwight wrote:
Whenever you can find a way to use the magic wand, your work is faster.

I find that to be a universal truth.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:14:22 GMT

Thanks Dwight,
I have tried the magic wand method and it is nice to know that others use this method.

I will try using this method of surrounding a zone as you can use the zone stamps as a house room planner as well.

It would be good if you could some how click the edge of a zone stamp and tell it that it is and external wall edge to be wrapped here.
Then the edge of the zone may go thick or dotted to indicate an external wall. If the magic wand could determine your internal wall first preference
and you first external wall preference. Then it could all be more automated and faster.

What do you think?

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Dwight — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:23:24 GMT

i don't agree with that approach at all since the way zones interact as rooms means that premature determination of precise wall type slows the process down. How often would an entire zone edge be a single wall type - many zones share would share wall types along one edge.

Since most projects fall into two basic wall types [at the preliminary stage, anyways], you can easily establish the exception [internal] individually.

OR:

make all the walls internal type and merely convert the perimeter walls to external.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:54:12 GMT

Dwight,
OK covert wall type is fine.

Going back to direct wall drawing, some other programs seem to be
faster with their click and drag auto snap approach and the adjust wall
or room size by clicking an interactive dimension to resize the room.
Shooting walls out to meet others is a bit slow for me.

Particularly with drawing houses since you need to make lots of room
adjustments when the client changes the plan.

I almost feel like reverting back to a cheaper program just to set the walls in position then import that into AC to finish it off.

Do you have any suggestions as to how it can be done even faster in AC with maybe using the right hand only on the mouse and the left hand only imputing dimensions?

Or some other ingenious faster method that could be developed for AC14

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Dwight — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:58:28 GMT

Are you aware of the marquee tool?

And as to the covert wall type… they only use that at the CIA building in Washington DC

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Haneef Tayob — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:00:11 GMT

I often use the drag a copy feature to get walls (mainly internal walls) in the position I want them.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Haneef Tayob — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:18:38 GMT

mthd wrote:
Dwight,

I almost feel like reverting back to a cheaper program just to set the walls in position then import that into AC to finish it off.

I know someone who used to draw up the plans in another program then import them into archicad and then retrace everything. Then again he did not even know about plotmaker and used to place a sheet over each of his plans in the project map. That was in AC5.

As a (power) user of a few other cad programs before I migrated to ArchiCad I can understand that you might find it slower as you are used to other ways of doing things. My suggestion is to get used to the various ways of inputting sizes, coordinates, grids, guidelines, magic wand, etc.
It's definitely not to your advantage to do as you suggested.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:51:24 GMT

Dwight wrote:
Are you aware of the marquee tool?

And as to the covert wall type… they only use that at the CIA building in Washington DC

The real covert wall types are for buildings that have never been seen housing agencies no one has heard of.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Dwight — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:59:06 GMT

Or in hospitals where they do the covert operations.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:01:17 GMT

mthd wrote:
Or some other ingenious faster method that could be developed for AC14

Very fast and ingenious methods already exist in ArchiCAD.

Guidelines and numeric entry are nearly instantaneous. Locks and constraints allow precise snapping to anything very quickly. Set Extend, Split and INtersect to single key shortcuts for really fast operations.

Sure some other programs' features are marginally quicker in some circumstances, but ArchiCAD is much more flexible and adaptable to differing needs and practices. In my experience ArchiCAD rewards expertise more than any other BIM tool I have seen.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:48:05 GMT

Dwight, I found your comment about using massing to build in archicad very interesting. Because Im not very confident with using the magic wand tool to draw walls around zones etc it has not occured to me to use this method, but I would very much like to try/explore this idea myself.

I feel a short article explaining this approach would be very much appreciated by many people using Archicad, submitted to either the Archiwiki or something like AECBytes for example.

Any chance Dwight? or anyone else who uses this method ???
please!

Lisa

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Karl Ottenstein — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:29:22 GMT

Hi Lisa,

This is just standard magic-wand stuff. I'm not sure that the Wiki can have an article on every tool / procedure that is part of very basic training. But, of course, if someone wants to write it up, wonderful. 😉

Be brave and experiment. There is always undo. 😉

Karl

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Dwight — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:33:55 GMT

All you need to know is that the magic wand has 2 behaviours:

Click the magic wand in the middle of a shape - get the shape with all
possible interfering trims.

Click the magic wand on the edge of a shape - get the shape.

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:34:42 GMT

Thanks for the tip Dwight,
Overlapping shapes representing the rooms and using the wand in the middle of the shape or on the edge of the shape can produce walls in the required places right?

I am aware of the marquee tool but I dont use it anywhere near to its potential.

So what else am I missing here ?

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:13:15 GMT

Dwight wrote:
All you need to know is that the magic wand has 2 behaviours:

Click the magic wand in the middle of a shape - get the shape with all
possible interfering trims.

Click the magic wand on the edge of a shape - get the shape.

I cant get nothing if i click in the middle of zone ...
Region not found around this object - this is mes.that i get

it works with slabs.fills etc but with zone - not . . . why is that ?

Re: Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Erika Epstein — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:30:06 GMT

Matthew wrote:
Set Extend...to single key shortcuts for really fast operations.

Extend?