I've made a tall wall expanding two storys

[Anonymous]

Now I've stated to think I would organize the whole model into different layers and set of layers. (Should have thought of this before). The problem is I should show an axonometry of only the ground floor (story 0), and then it would have been nice to be able to split my outher wall horizontally.
Are there such a possibility?
Else I have to take a copy of the walls, remove the windows doors at the first floor, and reduce it's height. At the copy I have to remove the windows/doors at the ground floor, and change the vertical position of the window/doors, and reduce the height of the wall, and put it on top of the other. Seems to be much work.
Do someone have a better way to do it?

[Anonymous]

You can filter the 3D view by stories and there is a check box to trim the model to the selected stories.

Alternatively you can use the ancient cutaway view dialog to set up 3D cutting planes. The trick with this one, since the view panes are so small, is to type in the Z height for the cutting plane(s) and use shift to constrain it to the horizontal. You can save the cutting planes by making views from the current camera viewpoint in 3D.

[Anonymous]

Matthew wrote:
The trick with this one, since the view panes are so small, is to type in the Z height for the cutting plane(s) and use shift to constrain it to the horizontal.

Another trick is to select just a few elements from plan view, open a partial 3D window with de F5 key (F4 on the mac), and THEN go to de cutting planes settings.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your advice.Now I became aware of some functionality I didn't know. But the problem seem to be that the walls totally disappear even if I do not select trim. In the cutaway window, the walls were not drawn at all.
I need to show part of the tall walls.

[Anonymous]

If you are filtering the 3D make sure the walls are set to show on all relevant stories.

If you use the cutaway tools it may not be necessary to filter the 3D, just cutaway above and below the story you want to model. This will allow you to include the floor structure below which would otherwise not be seen if you use the trim to stories option. Of course this means you would have to cut away the model below the floor structure above.

A hybrid approach would be to filter for all stories up to and including the one you want to show and use a single cutting plane to cut away what is below the story you wish to model. (Of course you can always use layers as well but this can get a bit clumsy.)

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Anne, as you bring up the issue...I was wondering if someone has general advice about whether it's better to make walls which are X (five or six typically in my case) high and then set stories at the correct elevations, or whether it's better to stack slab and wall assemblies one on top of the other.

We are working in a city (NY) where 25' wide row houses with perimeter masonry walls up to six stories high is a very typical form of construction, and we regularly do alterations and extensions to those types of structures. I don't have enough experience with ArchiCAD to know which, in a general sense, is a better approach.

Thanks for any advice,

Paul

[Anonymous]

Paul wrote:
Hi,

Anne, as you bring up the issue...I was wondering if someone has general advice about whether it's better to make walls which are X (five or six typically in my case) high and then set stories at the correct elevations, or whether it's better to stack slab and wall assemblies one on top of the other.

We are working in a city (NY) where 25' wide row houses with perimeter masonry walls up to six stories high is a very typical form of construction, and we regularly do alterations and extensions to those types of structures. I don't have enough experience with ArchiCAD to know which, in a general sense, is a better approach.

Thanks for any advice,

Paul

As a rule I prefer to stack walls than to extend them through multiple stories. I typically use the multi-story wall only when the fenestration does not align with the floor plates or the enclosed spaces are also multi-story (as at atria and such). Of course much of my work these days is construction coordination where we have to split the export models story by story for the MEP guys and I like to keep complications to a minimum.

[Anonymous]

Matthew wrote:

As a rule I prefer to stack walls than to extend them through multiple stories. I typically use the multi-story wall only when the fenestration does not align with the floor plates or the enclosed spaces are also multi-story (as at atria and such). Of course much of my work these days is construction coordination where we have to split the export models story by story for the MEP guys and I like to keep complications to a minimum.

Thanks for the recommendation, I have been using the tall walls approach, but I will try the stacking approach. I certainly appreciate the advice of an experienced user.

[Anonymous]

We ol´ geezers tend to make one wall per floor, because for many years that was the only way in ArchiCAD to model them.
That said, I also use the one wall per floor because that is the way most walls are really build, and building them virtually as they build them on site has many advantages downline.
If you have a long term goal to make your models available to the construction company (and what is BIM about but sharing models), then your workflow should emulate as closely as possible the construction one.

[Anonymous]

Krippahl wrote:
We ol´ geezers tend to make one wall per floor, because for many years that was the only way in ArchiCAD to model them.
That said, I also use the one wall per floor because that is the way most walls are really build, and building them virtually as they build them on site has many advantages downline.
If you have a long term goal to make your models available to the construction company (and what is BIM about but sharing models), then your workflow should emulate as closely as possible the construction one.

Thanks for your thoughts (ol' geezer here as well, though not with AC). I'm beginning to be convinced that one wall per floor is the best way to model things in ArchiCAD.

In our case, we are working with existing structures where the masonry walls are literally five or six stories high - the joists (typically spanning 25', +/- 7.5M) stabilize the walls, but the walls are definitely not bearing on the floors.

For this part of the modeling, it is existing conditions, not instructions to the builder (us, in our case), so I would have wished to be able to represent things as they are, but I'm sure the wall per storey solution will be easier, and we won't be giving wrong information to anyone.

Thanks again,

Paul