Best way to show flooring in the model?

[Anonymous]

What is the best way to show flooring in the "model"?

I tried the zones but, this tool is another disappointment.

Making thin slabs does the trick, however, it is so unproductive and horrible because if you make changes, now you have to "manually" change the slabs, feels like I am back in autoCAD making changes everywhere. ugh.

The zones may have a potential to do the trick, however they are meant to calculate areas, for some reason, like if we need to know the size of a cube.

If you make the zone thin, then, the height shown is useless to the room. like the ceiling heights.

If you leave the zone the proper height, then, when you want to show the room in 3D you see the zone as a big morph object covering the entire space.

By the way, zones also creep up into doorways, openings with no doors, yes, they crawl up to the top of the opening!! no way to stop them!

I hope you people are not just conforming, happy with the way this thing works.

Does anyone use this tool (ArchiCAD for 3D presentations?) Not user friendly at all. They pitch it well, however, it lacks so much

By the way, I have been using ArchiCAD for quite sometime and have managed to get around spitting working drawings that did not need much modeling.

I am now trying to use it to model homes in 3D just to find it at the bottom of the pit for usability. Simple things that are common to most construction practices are so difficult or impossible in ArchiCAD. Yes, some of you are happy working triple creating pieces, who knows, but, I am not.

This BIM tool is broken, it is not intelligent, it does not know we have so many pieces in a home, it can not create them or read them or calculate them.

[Anonymous]

Ideally the zone tool would work if it weren't measuring volume.
I modeled one house using zones that are .5" thick and not letting it show the ceiling height, instead I am using a "code" as a keynote to specify what the ceiling heights are for different rooms.

you can show finishes on zones in 3d, if you allow the 3d overrides to do so. In that sense they work, and I don't have to be creating slabs over slabs for that purpose.

[Barry Kelly]

I am a bit confused as to why you would want to add a ½' thick zone to a room to represent the floor.
Why not just add a ½' thick slab?

The whole idea of zones is that they can be used to measure areas and volumes as well as inherit the surfaces they touch which can be used to determine areas of surfaces in schedules - that is why they creep into door and window openings.
They also detect the number of openings, lengths and areas and types of openings.
They can be categorized so you can have zones for various usages - i.e. commercial, industrial, conditioned space, etc.
Plus much more.

It seems to me you are finding a use for the zone tool that it is not really designed for.
Not that this is wrong but it may affect your work flow.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Because we think outside the box, we use the tools to do what we need them to, not what the intended purpose is, just like we use "slabs" for a whole lot of other things that are not really "slabs" correct?.

Roofs can be used for ceilings, sloped garage floors, sloped stoops, sloped balconies, etc. even for walls if you get creative.

We can have more than just one zone and layer it for another purpose. 😉

[Barry Kelly]

If it works for you that is fine.
But a zone is not what I would call a building element (wall, slab, roof, etc.).
A slab will interact with a wall if they intersect - the stronger building materials will automatically over-ride the weaker ones and clean up the intersection (Priority based Connection).
A zone will not do this.
A slab can be made from a composite (layers of different building materials) whereas a zone can not.

But as I said if it works for you then that is fine.
There are many ways to skin a cat in Archicad.

You may also get messages to say you have overlapping zones as elements can only recognize one zone at a time.
Doors and windows can recognise 2 zones - one on each side of the opening so in schedules you can list the 'From' and 'To' room of an opening.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

The problem is "project" means some kind of abstraction. Software needs to let user make some kind of abstraction. I agree with this user over the issue. There needs some option or another 2d tool for floor finishings...

[Remi Lecomte]

Hi Barry, I thought the discussion was interesting.

I'm afraid I shared a lot of views with Anonymous but I don't think that he answered your question in a constructive way after.

The answer in my opinion of why would you use a thin zone instead of a slab is that it would limitate the amount of elements, and therefore the amount of work.

Let's say you have a generic slab in your project for the entire story.

You draw a zone with a pretty stamp for each room.

If you want to add a floor finish visible in plan, section and 3D, re-drawing a new thin slab for each room seems fastidious, especially if you already have nicely delimitated zones that could do the job very well.

Having thin flooring slabs AND zones for each room seems like a tautology to me.. and extra work.

I think that the absolute best would be to have a "flooring option" included in the zone tool, with a composition option, thickness, materials, etc. easily available on plan/section/3D, rather than just a cover fill. That would be a mix of 2d/3d tool but really useful I think

[Laszlo Nagy]

There is a Goodie called Accessories, which includes Room Accessories, which can create floor structures based on the geometry of the Zone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWl7JTeGSE

Goodies download page:

https://graphisoft.com/downloads/goodies/

[Erwin Edel]

If your floor finish building material has a fairly low priority, all the wals in your model will just cut straight through it. If you set it up as actual 'finish' in composite settings, it will 'flow' through door openings. The way we tackle this is that we model the 'exceptions to the rule' bits (like floor tiles in toilet/bathroom) and substract these through SEO. That leaves the majority floor finish stuck to our floor composite.

However, often with proper classification the need to model things seperately arises and the problem solves itself. However, minute detailed modelling is never needed if the walls have higher priority building material. Just make sure your slab is displayed all the way to the back in drawing order, or you will see unwanted lines in the floor plan.

[Remi Lecomte]

Laszlo: this goodie Accessories seems very interesting, looking forward to trying it.

Erwin: I think that's a good method for New build with not many different floorings.

I often have to work with the renovation tool though, but (the biggest Archicad miss of all time) I don't think that it's possible to assign a renovation status to part of a composite (wall/slab/etc...).  For example having an existing composite slab with ceiling/core/flooring, and say put only the flooring as downtaking, or have an existing wall and just add some insulation with the status new. I remember using composite slabs for generic flooring and SEO for flooring exception (bathrooms) but it was a bit of a nightmare combined with the renovation tool.

[Erwin Edel]

Partial demolishing of composite is not possible, sadly.

For new elements like added insulation, we do generally model these separately from the existing walls. Sometimes it helps to have a layer with a different intersection group number for the new elements, so they don't interfere/connect with existing elements.