Using Hotlinked Modules

[Anonymous]

I am about to embark on a project and am crossing my fingers that hotlinked modules will help me, and I'm just wondering if any body has any helpful suggestions/advice. This is what I'm doing:

I have modelled a small street containing 9 buildings, all owned by one client. Over time they will be refurbishing or rebuilding each building on the street, and so I need to separate these buildings into different .pln files (for ease of documentation, smaller files etc...)

What I am hoping is that I can create each building into a module of the street, as I need to be able to place neigbouring buildings into some of the plns (e.g - if working on house #5, I'll need to put house #4 and #6 on either side of it.)

This all seems fairly straight forward, however there are a few things I'm concerned about, as I haven't used modules that often:

* Would there be an issue with file size? Or to put it another way, are modules intended to be used for small things (bathrooms etc...) and not be very happy with big things (like whole buildings)

* Layers - When separating the original street into modules, will all layer settings be retained? Or is everything put onto one layer?

So, hope this makes some sense and if any body has any bright ideas or advice I'd love to hear it.

Cheers,
Tom

[Anonymous]

Hi, Tom.

You can certainly do all the things with modules that you are suggesting. Size doesn't matter! Layering within the modules can be the same as per the main model.

You can 'clip out' the modules from your main model, using 'Save Selection as a Module' from the 'Xrefs & Modules' pull-down. However, when you want to edit the module, you'll have to close your main model and open the module (some of us have been pressing Graphisoft to incorporate 'in-place' module editing).

You'll also find that, if you open the module, without having first opened and closed the main model, the settings of the module may not reflect those of the main model (if, for example, you've been in some other project first). Modules also tend to open, disconcertingly, as a blank screen, and you have to perform a 'zoom extents' in order to see them.

Main benefit of using them, though, is if you have multiple occurences of a room, flat-type etc. Then you can edit all occurences 'at a stroke' just by updating the module.

Good luck - Keith

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that, I've had a play and it seems like I can use this for my project, which should save heaps of time.
The only problem I have found is with view sets - does any body know if there is a way you can transfer your view set file structure between projects? When I open the module file that I've made, the view sets go back to the default Archicad ones...

[Djordje]

Tom,

You should maybe name the module layers per building, or have the same prefix for all the layers of each; this is, if you want to manage all of them.

You will probably use the whole street only for massing and 3D views, so make sure that you have layer combinations ready with all the internal stuff off.

Make the master file, that contains everything fixed - existing buildings, streets, whatever. All that is changeable is to be a module.

If the speed becomes an issue, replace the modules with GDL objects, binary ones at that, again because you will probably use it for visualization purposes only.

Last time I did something like this was on 7.0 some years ago ... so sorry if I forgot a tip or two

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

Tom wrote:
When I open the module file that I've made, the view sets go back to the default Archicad ones...

Modules are lightweight versions of the files without viewsets and unused attributes. If you want to use viewsets with each individual building then the way would be to
- have the buildings as PLN files
- in which you set a view with only the layers you want to send to the site file (using a layer combination named 'Site file export', say)
- which you Publish as module to a folder where you store the .mod files for your buildings, which are the ones you will link to your site file but on which you will never be operating.

For different versions, revisions or proposals you can have several module folders where each building (or each building story, it they are multistory) keeps its name, and redirect the links of all of them to the new folder from Hotlink Manager.

Of course you can hotlink the buillding pln files straight to the site file, but the advantage of having modules as the intermediate step is that you can use the say A-ANNO-FLOR-DIM layer in the building file for building floor plan dimensions that don't get exported to the site file, so that you can use that layer in the site file for overall dimensions. The same with notes, geometry, etc.