BIM Coordinator Program (INT) April 22, 2024
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Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

How do you show walls on other floors?

rob2218
Enthusiast
Just curious...besides the 'creating a different viewmap for different ways to show walls".............how would you see walls which are on the 1st floor shown on the second floor if they only travel vertically "ON" the first floor?
...Bobby Hollywood live from...
i>u
Edgewater, FL!
SOFTWARE VERSION:
Archicad 22, Archicad 23
Windows7 -OS, MAC Maverick OS
15 REPLIES 15
adamsb
Newcomer
If there is a way to do this, besides using the "show on relevant stories" option, I would like to know this too. I actually just created a wish for this, hoping to have the option within the wall tool to select which stories the wall should show up on.
AC21 64-bit
Mac OSX 10.12, 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 64 GB mem
Mac OSX 10.11, 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 32 GB mem
rob2218
Enthusiast
I mean...this would be a common parameter to have in walls?....don't you guys think? I mean, there are times where a wall, 2 or 3 stories down needs to be seen, say from a roof plan or a top floor plan. Where you need to see walls "BELOW" the cutting plane line ALL the way down to the ground level and NOT need to have to use "viewmap cut plane line settings" to accomplish this graphics.

There are certain objects that allow you to select which floor you want this object to be seen on....1st, 2nd, custom, etc...but WALLS, which SHOULD ABSOLUTELY have this functionality.....do not.....dunno. Sometimes I wonder who are the dudes who are programming this stuff......cause they may not be aware of traditional documentation techniques on how to represent a building in plan properly.
adamsb wrote:
If there is a way to do this, besides using the "show on relevant stories" option, I would like to know this too. I actually just created a wish for this, hoping to have the option within the wall tool to select which stories the wall should show up on.
...Bobby Hollywood live from...
i>u
Edgewater, FL!
SOFTWARE VERSION:
Archicad 22, Archicad 23
Windows7 -OS, MAC Maverick OS
sinceV6
Advocate
I'd say current display options are more than enough. Having another parameter to control walls' visibility would create more complexity rather than flexibility.

Oh... and a lot of the dudes behind programming are also architects and, as you may know, "traditional" documentation techniques are different from country to country. IMHO, GS has known how to solve the workflow part beautifully and maybe that's why AC has a lot of flexibility... for the most part that is.

Best regards.
rob2218
Enthusiast
humm...ok. fair nuff.
though..."walls" in general, you'd think would be the 'first' object type that would have the visual flexibility to be seen on "any" floor chosen by the user....other objects in the box do...why not walls.
Besides...the "viewmap cut plane" adjustability is, well, not that intuitive and I'm not the only one who thinks that either.

But I take your point.
Maybe it's too much to program a wall to be seen "where" the user wants/needs it to be seen.....but I hear what you are saying.
sinceV6 wrote:
I'd say current display options are more than enough. Having another parameter to control walls' visibility would create more complexity rather than flexibility.

Oh... and a lot of the dudes behind programming are also architects and, as you may know, "traditional" documentation techniques are different from country to country. IMHO, GS has known how to solve the workflow part beautifully and maybe that's why AC has a lot of flexibility... for the most part that is.

Best regards.
...Bobby Hollywood live from...
i>u
Edgewater, FL!
SOFTWARE VERSION:
Archicad 22, Archicad 23
Windows7 -OS, MAC Maverick OS
sinceV6
Advocate
rob2218 wrote:
humm...ok. fair nuff.
though..."walls" in general, you'd think would be the 'first' object type that would have the visual flexibility to be seen on "any" floor chosen by the user....other objects in the box do...why not walls.
Besides...the "viewmap cut plane" adjustability is, well, not that intuitive and I'm not the only one who thinks that either.

But I take your point.
Maybe it's too much to program a wall to be seen "where" the user wants/needs it to be seen.....but I hear what you are saying.
sinceV6 wrote:
I'd say current display options are more than enough. Having another parameter to control walls' visibility would create more complexity rather than flexibility.

Oh... and a lot of the dudes behind programming are also architects and, as you may know, "traditional" documentation techniques are different from country to country. IMHO, GS has known how to solve the workflow part beautifully and maybe that's why AC has a lot of flexibility... for the most part that is.

Best regards.
Walls do have that flexibility. Having an option that allows the user to show a wall only in certain floors would probably create documentation issues, as in "why does this wall shows in floors 1, 3 and 5; but not 2 and 4?". How far have you played with all available FPCPS&Wall-FloorPlanDisplaySettings combinations? I find the settings quite logical.

If you need walls to show several stories above, in that wall just set:
Show on stories: all relevant stories
Floor plan display: as you need
Show projection: would depend on what you want to show in that specific plan view.

Then change the Relative Floor Plan Range options in FPCPS.

Say you are on level 2, you could set Relative Floor Plane Range in FPCPS to show down to 2 stories below, offset by 0. Your wall (in level 0) should be visible. If you set the show projection (in wall properties) to floor plan range, you would use the Floor Plane Range offset to limit the wall projection (it will ignore the Absolute Display Limit, but the offset would also limit the entire view); set it to Absolute Display Limit, and it will work the other way around, ignoring the offset and using the other value.

Changing to another story, would be...errr... another story Display would be according to FPCPS but related to current story.

All this is easier to understand if you create an inclined wall several stories below, set FPCPS to show down to that story, and set different offset values for Floor Plan Range and Absolute Display Limit; then play with the "Show projection" value in the wall. For very specific cases, there are other things that could be done to document what you need.

I would prefer that FPCPS could also be applied to the tools missing those options, such as slabs. Having the ability to view several stories down is not complete when only some elements are shown.

I think the the programming part is not the issue. I would certainly have some difficulty, but I think the bigger issue would be how to make it work with everything else and not create more BIM problems than it would solve.

Just my 2 cents.

Best regards.
rob2218
Enthusiast
thing is is that the FPCPS (I'm assuming you mean "Floor plan cut plane settings"..right?) is limited to a continuation ONLY horizontal cutplane.

Sometimes, walls in particular, need to be shown a certain way where they shouldn't be controlled ONLY by the cut plane rather but a toggle button IN the wall itself that says...just that...."Show on floors 3, 4, 5 ONLY".

that way the user has full control of where and when he shows WHAT walls and how....not by only being dictated by the cutplane plane.

How many times have you wanted to show elements that were in 1/2 stories or 2 or 3 stories below or above...well, plenty of times, yet a "walls" visual displays are governed by the cut plane setting INSIDE the viewmap...where the first line of adjustability should be INSIDE the wall parameter itself.

Just like the "walls" have the option to be shown in "cut only", "projection with overhead", etc.....they should be able to be "shown" in whatever story the user needs them to be.

just "my" 2 cents...and you know what they say about an opinion...."with my opinion and 75 cents..you could by a pack of gum"
...Bobby Hollywood live from...
i>u
Edgewater, FL!
SOFTWARE VERSION:
Archicad 22, Archicad 23
Windows7 -OS, MAC Maverick OS
sinceV6
Advocate


This is a great discussion. Do you have any specific examples where you need this functionality? I just can't grasp the concept of a wall that only spans a certain amount of height of a story to be shown in an arbitrary number of views above (as in some you do, in some you don't)

If you ask me, I would change the whole paradigm. I wouldn't have stories as they exist right now (although the current workflow has proven quite useful from an organizational point of view); but I would rather have the building model as a whole and "model" the floor plane and cut plane (with any quirks and level differences it may have); kind of like the section tool, but in a horizontal plane.

But as it is right now (and it´s out of my hands to change it), I take what I have and make the best of it.

Best regards.
rob2218
Enthusiast
I think this is the best advise so far....i'll see what I can do.
sinceV6 wrote:
.....

But as it is right now (and it´s out of my hands to change it), I take what I have and make the best of it.......
...Bobby Hollywood live from...
i>u
Edgewater, FL!
SOFTWARE VERSION:
Archicad 22, Archicad 23
Windows7 -OS, MAC Maverick OS
Tim Ball
Expert
I use 2 overlays on the same plot, one shows the plan you want, the other shows a trace reference on the layout behind. You can't plot a trace reference from a layout but you can create the same effect using a layer combination and another pen set with everything set say to grey.

You can then show a structural 1st floor layout over a ground floor layout.
Tim Ball

AC26, iMac

User since V5
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