Stories & levels

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I've drawn a house that is basically 4 separate 2-story buildings: the garage with guest suite on top, and then the rest of the house that is the other 3 buildings connected by glass passages. HERE'S THE PROBLEM: each unit's ground floor level is 500mm higher than the previous (to follow the site's natural slope). I am struggling to make all the stories work: when I am on the last building's bottom story the garage's top story is on the same level and walls start disappearing. HELP! Is there a way to tell ArchiCAD that the bottom stories should all be seen on the same story even though they aren't on the same level? I had a similar problem with another slightly different design but I will elaborate if anyone wants to know. I can also email a 3D shot to clarify.
Thanks, Henry

[TomWaltz]

I see this as more of an organizational problem than anything.
One of my main rules of Archicad: 1 building per PLN.

If you need to see them all on one drawing, hotlink them into a "site" file.

[Anonymous]

The problem here is that the three buildings are actually physically linked to each other by glass corridors, and these corridors are also the staircases to get from one building to the other. The garage is totally separate - I solved this by moving the garage 'off site' to an area far away from the main building. How do I hotlink the main buildings? Do I have staircases on one .pln that just goes to nowhere?

The other situation I mentioned is a single building that has the garage on street level with a lounge above. The rest of the house is behind that but 450mm above the level of the lounge. (Three steps up from the back of the lounge take you into the rest of the house). Now I set it up that the garage is on one story, the lounge one up from that, and the rest of the house one up from that. The problem is that my height to next story from the lounge (450mm) is a lot less than the wall height of the lounge walls (2500mm). So now my lounge windows disappear from its own story if I move them more than 450mm above bottom of wall height.

Help!

Henry.

[Aussie John]

I have worked with two building on 2 separate levels without too much trouble. You can assign base levels for each building (preference working units and levels). Four seems to be beyond the scope of this. You could run two buildings on one storey then the other two on a new storey. Regardless it is messy.

[David Shorter]

There are 2 basic ways of dealing with stories in ArchiCAD. 1 by using the stories as a way to control the plan display and 2 by producing true RL cuts through the building. Version 10 allows both, just choose which way you want to go. If you want the see all the ground floors together, just use symbolic display and place the elements at a their correct level above the 'notional' floor (story) level. If you want a true cut then do exactly as above but set the element to projected (etc) and use the new features in 10. Don't forget that each saved view can remember a specific level for the story cut

[Anonymous]

I'm having a similar problem as Henry. My walls and floors are disappearing when i go to edit the model in 3d. However, I am able to see them in section and floor plan though. Any clues why this is happening? Any suggestions is much appreciated..

Thanks,
Hung