Working with solid objects

[Anonymous]

I am evaluating ArchiCad 11 (will also try 12), and am having a hard time trying to work with solids for a masterplanning project.

Is it possible to get floor areas of solids, or do you have to convert it to walls, slabs and zones first? (or can you add zones to a solid somehow?)

Is there an easy way to convert solid object boundaries to walls and slabs and roofs? I did not see that in the tutorials.

I am used to using SketchUP or Revit where you can take the solid objects and apply floor lines to them so you can get floor areas. Then if you re-shape the solid, the floor areas adjust. It is a quick and easy process. Is there an equivalent method in ArchiCad?

Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Shane

[TomWaltz]

What do you mean by "Solids"? There is no command or tool called that in Archicad.

Are you using slabs? Or just objects?

Either way, Archicad cannot do any kind of element conversion directly. The closest is has is the Magic Wand tool, which traces elements you've already drawn with new ones.

[Anonymous]

Sorry for the confusion. I am using objects. The magic wand seems to work pretty well.

Thank you for that response.

Is there a process/easy way for the other part of my question? Being able to get areas from objects so that as your concept massing changes, the areas update? I can see that if I did it with walls and roofs, re-shaping would not be very quick, as opposed to SketchUp-like pushing and pulling.

Thank you.

Shane

[Eduardo Rolon]

Read up on Zones in the Reference Manual, to see if it does what you want.

[TomWaltz]

I'm sorry, I neglected that the magic wand doesn't work with objects.

As far as I know, most objects cannot report their area of volume.

[Anonymous]

I looked up zones and played a bit. It looks like (as Tom mentioned) zones cannot automatically attach to Objects.

That clarifies things a bit. Thank you.

Shane

[Anonymous]

ejrolon wrote:
Read up on Zones in the Reference Manual, to see if it does what you want.

I agree with ejrolon zones may be the way to go. Zones not updating automatically after changes like fills is a bit of a pain, as is not having the ability to directly draw zones as rectangles. The attached master plan was done with combination of slabs and zones.