Structural Plans and Wall Visibility

[Anonymous]

Hello Archibots,
What is the best way to setup structural framing plans? I want to do floor framing plans with the floor below shown dashed. This works fine while drafting and using the ghost story shown below but getting it to plot right is another matter.
Right now I'm using RCP plan for showing walls on the current story and coping the walls up from below and changing the cut wall line type to dashed. is there a better way?

Thanks

[Karl Ottenstein]

info.kaldis wrote:
Hello Archibots,
What is the best way to setup structural framing plans? I want to do floor framing plans with the floor below shown dashed. This works fine while drafting and using the ghost story shown below but getting it to plot right is another matter.
Right now I'm using RCP plan for showing walls on the current story and coping the walls up from below and changing the cut wall line type to dashed. is there a better way?

Yes, better way there is.

Copy things not, for therein the deep peril of error lies.

On your layout your drawings stack: one view for your 'walls below' and another for your framing.

Your 'walls below' view with RCP settings you define, but also on top a striped diagonal fill with a heavy white pen you place (on top). This dashed the lines makes.

Completely live drawings this will give you.

Archibot

PS My Archibot responded pretty well, but I'm back from a break and just to correct him - a single striped fill (that I put on a layer called Ghost Masking Layer or somesuch thing) works if your walls are all rectilinear and orthogonal to the screen. If you have angled walls, you'll need multiple fills at different rotation angles to accomplish the solid-to-dash fake-out. There are also games you can play with the floor plan cut plane (FPCP), but they require that you do not use 'symbolic' for your wall representation. The method given here works in all versions of ArchiCAD. --Karl

[Anonymous]

Nice, thanks. I will play around with that.

PS, How is the weather in Montana right about now?

[Karl Ottenstein]

info.kaldis wrote:
Nice, thanks. I will play around with that.

PS, How is the weather in Montana right about now?

You're welcome. Weather's beautiful, but a bit more snow would help. 😉

[Anonymous]

Karl wrote:
On your layout your drawings stack: one view for your 'walls below' and another for your framing.

Why stack the views? Is there an advantage over creating a single RCP view with a structural plan layer set to display framing?

[__archiben]

Chris wrote:
Why stack the views? Is there an advantage over creating a single RCP view with a structural plan layer set to display framing?

in theory you can try and cobble something together with all sorts of complicated cutplane levels and offsets - but it's quicker (and easier to maintain) to overlay a couple of simpler views on a layout . . . (small steps )

and the guy wanted the walls from the floor below - those wall layers would then be washed out by the current floor walls as well, no? to get around that you would need all sorts of different wall layers and again it starts to get far more complicated than it should.

~/archiben

[Anonymous]

~/archiben wrote:

Chris wrote:
Why stack the views? Is there an advantage over creating a single RCP view with a structural plan layer set to display framing?

in theory you can try and cobble something together with all sorts of complicated cutplane levels and offsets - but it's quicker (and easier to maintain) to overlay a couple of simpler views on a layout . . . (small steps )

and the guy wanted the walls from the floor below - those wall layers would then be washed out by the current floor walls as well, no? to get around that you would need all sorts of different wall layers and again it starts to get far more complicated than it should.

~/archiben

I'm probably missing something but if you want a framing plan, say a second floor framing plan, wouldn't you just create a first floor plan view set to Reflected ceiling plan and then add the structural elements there? Or is it that you would want the structural elements to be visible on the Second floor plan?

I'm thinking of this as more of an annotation issue rather than modeling.

[Link]

No, in AC plans don't look upwards. So an RCP still looks downwards, but we use model view option and layer combinations to filter elements. Still the plan itself looks down.

So we stack two plans on top of each other on the layout. The one on the bottom is usually the walls from below and the one on top is the structual plan above.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link

I think Chris is saying "view the floor below (in RCP mode) and show the floor framing overlaid on it" still looking down, as your framing sits on the walls below. That's the way we do it here, seems to work o.k. for us.

And Karl, since when was Yoda an autobot?

[Karl Ottenstein]

And... the original question included:

info.kaldis wrote:
I want to do floor framing plans with the floor below shown dashed.

Tricks with fills are the only way to get elements to appear with solid lines in one view and dashed in another...and getting the stacking order right when beams, etc and lots more are involved is next to impossible. As Ben said, simple views and small steps... 😉

Karl