Lock stories

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

is the a way to lock the stories at their height?

The main reason is to avoid changing the levels of stories containing land form meshes.

The way that ArchiCAD story settings works is quite weird. It automatically and immediately change the levels of the stories below if you are amending the levels of stories below the 0, and the ones above if you are amending the any of the ones above storey 0. This really frustrates me. It forces to write on paper all the levels beforehand and than insert them in a certain order.

Also, most importantly, it happened that people in the office inadvertently changed the levels below the 0, moving the height where the mesh of the site was modeled... you can imagine the consequences!!

Thank you for your time

[Anonymous]

No it is not possible to lock the story settings (except perhaps in teamwork - I haven't checked this in TW2).

Why are people changing story elevations? In my experience once the initial setup is done and floor heights established these settings rarely need to be changed.

When I do need to adjust the story heights or coordinate them between projects I'll often just take a screen shot of the story settings dialog for reference. It beats writing on scraps of paper.

[Anonymous]

Hi Matthew,

thank you for your reply.
Well, at design development stage we normally don't change levels. It happens mostly during Concept and Sketch Design stage, where you want the ability to raise or drop the whole building to fit under height limits, optimize excavation and so forth.

In saying that though, it happened to us that we had to drop a whole building by 600mm because the lift needed a higher headroom over and was going over the height limit.

Also... sometimes there are things that people do that you cannot understand and would be great to be able to lock in place all the existing retained/fixed information.

Glad to hear that someone else is using the screen shot, thing is that at the beginning all the fields are empty

[Anonymous]

I have often wondered if there ought to be an administrative tool to lock settings and perhaps even layers and/or elements.

The obvious example is the structural grid which, once settled, should not be casually or inadvertently changed. This could also apply to columns and other structural elements as the design progresses, and I can see where it might be nice to lock down much of the building once the CD phase is underway.

Of course this can all be done in teamwork and I manage my grids by converting them to hotlinked modules so I guess it's not that big a deal.

As far as the stories go it sounds like you need to give your staff a tutorial on the stories dialog and why any changes must be carefully considered (ie if you're not absolutely sure you know what you are doing then check with someone who does).

[Anonymous]

Would be great to have an 'anchor' box that you can tick when you want certain objects to stay where they are regardless of ANY other change both in plan and elevation.

I suppose that you can keep certain elements fixed through the TW2 having the file open with those elements reserved, correct?

Hotlink would help but they are still linked to stories. Change the story levels and you move the module in it. Though, is there a quick way to export selected elements as modules or you would open a new file, adjust the story settings and paste copied elements from the origin file?

[Anonymous]

The quick way is select the bits, go to File > External Content > Save Selection as Module and check the box to replace the selection with the saved module.

[owen]

Look into the user permissions settings which can be applied to Users/Roles in TW2.

Standard operating procedure for us is all files are TW'd and only the project Model Manager has the permissions required to change story settings, layers, manage hotlinks, etc

There are still holes in this as Graphisoft has still not fixed the issue where users can circumvent some of these restrictions by copy-pasting elements in from other files, but generally these TW2 user permissions can give you as much or as little control over team members as required.

hth

owen