Story Height and Buildings...

[snow]

Hello together,

Of course, I'm not the first one who writes and "wishes" something in these realms.

But I miss different story-levels and height for different buildings in the same project so yearningly.

Earlier the slogan of Archicad was always: 'The program knows stories, floors'.

Today I liked so much to say 'Archicad knows buildings'.

[Romans]

This is one of the paramount wishes of generations of Archicad users.
In this regard, the main competitor has a perfect solution that could be considered industry standard...

[Bricklyne Clarence]

This is one of those daily problems we deal with in projects - particularly in mid- to large multi-building projects that take on different forms and floor heights and may not necessarily be phased separately (in which case I suppose in ArchiCAD you would go the "Hotlink" route) - and one that you'd think Graphisoft would have gotten around dealing with by now - especially given their heavy emphasis on chasing "big" customers and architect offices, which deal with these sizes and scale of projects.

Especially also given how much people have requested or wished for a better solution to it over the years (decades?)

Say you have a multi-tower project with 2, 3 or more towers that share a podium and parking levels, but which then adopt different storey height levels as they become separate towers (with some towers having office or hotel program with taller floor-to-floor height and others having residential or even a mix of both).

I realize some would say you just split the project per tower and common podium and then hotlink each separate tower from it's own file with it's own level settings to the main file with the common podium and parkade.

But as anyone who's had to go this route will tell you, this "solution" or workaround is rife with issues and problems of its own along with limitations that are just not that ideal to have to deal with.

I'm having a hard time believing that no on at Graphisoft has ever encountered or envisioned such a scenario or realized it needs a better solution than what we have now.

Or perhaps all the (actual) Architects have really left the building and "made by architects for architects is now only just an empty slogan? (that's a rhetorical question. The answer might be obvious from recent version releases)

Also, I don't entirely agree with the previous comment that the main rival (I'm assuming this was meant as Revit) has the best solution or a "perfect" that should be the industry standard.

It has perhaps and arguably a "better" solution than what we have in ArchiCAD (for a whole bunch of not necessarily related reasons), but as someonenow having to use Revit daily, I can say that at best (And in my ownhumble opinion), it's more of a "best of the worst" case or "best of a bunch of all terrible solutions"

[snow]

I just know, that there is CAD program, called Revit... obviously earlier Autocad ... with I also have never used.

I used to say I want to do architecture and not produce an "Autos" (=car)

And yes, Archicad had this projection that it "knew" something about buildings -> the floor management...
So today, I repeat... Why should the program doesn't know just whole buildings themselves, not just ingredients of them?

[jl_lt]

I think this aditional levels without a storey is not a "i want Archicad to be like Revit" wish. Personally i dont like those kind of wishes; not because of the wish in itself or the good intentions of the... wisher?   but because in most cases they are unrealistic and they are more likely to be implemented in revit or Vectorworks than in Archicad.

But this wish is one that doesnt go against Archicad current structure, and its one of the features i think holds Archicad back in trully competing with Revit in being implemented for bigger and more complex designs (along with centralized attributes and properties, better handling of modules and more reliable, integrated detailing system and semi automatic dimensioning systems). 

Not that i necesarily advocate for bigger and more complex projects, but not all projects are done on a plain terrain with nice plain slabs.   Complexity can be achieved in Archicad model wise of course, but at some point it becomes manual modelling and workarounding without a more detailed way of organizing objets and keeping track of them in space, which is what this wish is intended for.

[Patrick M]

but as a wish item, it's just pure nonsense. If a guy wants a ceiling story, they can have a ceiling story. In fact, I've worked with modelers that did that. they had stories that read like:
Roof

Roof Framing

Second Floor

Second Floor Framing

First Floor

First Floor Framing

Crawl Space

Foundation

Site Model

totally unnecessary, but an option. a better option is to just manage your composites and top link above/below home stories as relevant.

one of the reasons revit needs this is because of the lack of layers. AC has stories AND layers... anything more is just complicating the model management tasks

[jl_lt]

Yes, for a 3 storey building probably many of those arent even needed. But what about buildings over 6  stories, with diferent levels in the same story (for whatever reason) and structural elements of varying size in each level which you want to have a reference for???  how about 20+ stories?  how about split levels?. Otherwise, making any change in the height of elements is a total pain after the model has entered schematics, let alone developement or CD.

[jl_lt]

This is exactly the kind of situations these aditional levels would be useful for. Specially usefull in taller buildings.

[Sacee]

We need a Storey Setting that considers not only the levels of the building but also allows us to manage the structural and finished level, the existing and project levels, the levels of the neighboring building, etc. In each view you can then decide to display a combination of plans, turning on and off those that are needed or not.

We also need to assign properties and descriptions to every storey. 

At the moment, the only way to handle different levels is by using hotlinks, but it's not very comfortable

[henryL]

Structural and finished level are essential in our job. I also suggest upper finished level (celing) and lower finished level (floor)

[scottjm]

Bumping this topic as it doesn't currently appear to be in the top 200, and I feel it is a really important new feature we need.