Elevation views at face of buildings

[KeesW]

When using the elevation tool with sloping sites one frequently finds the bottom of walls obscured by the shaded site mesh. One could create a new elevation or section line at the face of the outside walls, but this doesn't give a useful elevation. In manual drawings, the usual method is the show the slope of the land as a dashed line in front of the building, or to show the floor levels as hidden lines. One can easily fake the view and the information required. What is the best way to achieve this in Archicad?

[Anonymous]

Fake it like the good old days. I sometimes have an elevation with the ground mesh layer turned off when necessary on the uphill side of a building. Turn the mesh on temporarily and use it to draw the outline required. Use a fill to show where to actual ground level will be immediately adjacent to the building.

[KeesW]

What? I thought that Archicad was beyond such trickery!

[Erwin Edel]

It's things like these that make me happy to work in NL where, for the most part, terrain is flat like a pancake.

You could maybe dice up the terrain in such a way that you can hide the parts you do not want to see on certain elevations. Either hide them by having a layer like Terrain West Elevation Hidden or use the renovation tool.

With diced up terrain and graphical overrides in ArchiCAD20, maybe you can achieve what you want (setting a transparant cut fill and a dashed cut line, etc).

It would probably still be faster to fake it, though.

Maybe ArchiCAD 24 will have all these bells and whistles as we enter the 2020s 😉

[fuzzytnth3]

One Workaround I have used when I couldn't get the elevation marker close enough to the building - Is to set the layer that your ground plane is on to wire frame, so you see the line of where the ground plane mesh but you can see through it.

Another Workaround is to use two elevations one hard up against the building the other further out to clear any overhanging features then in the Layout Sheet alter the edge of the placed drawings so they match up