Site modeling tutorial

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys,

I was just wondering if anyone is familiar with any tutorial that shows an in depth look at site modeling in Archicad. I have recently switched from Revit to Archicad and I'm slowly getting my skills to industry standards.

What I would like to be able to do is import a given survey that I usually obtain from a surveyors and model the exact heights and terrain from the survey. I also want to be able to model site characteristics such as driveways, fences etc. I have looked at numerous tutorials on youtube and they're not in depth enough to allow me to set up my project.

For instance in Revit, I was able to market the different regions such as driveways, footpaths and other areas and I was also able to accurately model the site contours and calculate my finish floor levels based on the generated site terrain.

I'd appreciate any help in this subject.

[Anonymous]

Modelling complex sites has always been one of the things that I hate doing, as I always feel like I have to spend way too much time doing it to get it accurate. I try to keep it as simple as possible, keeping in mind what I need for presentation and documentation.

If you get a txt file or xyz file from the surveyor this can be imported, under the design tab, using Place mesh from Surveyors data.

Otherwise you can manually draw a mesh and add points to create the contours. This is usually what I do as often I want less points on the mesh, to make editing easy. It comes back to how complex the site is and how detailed you need the mesh for presentation and documentation.

AC19 has Point Clouds, but I haven't even looked at that yet.

For annotating the mesh you can always use the level dimension tool and use gravity to get the spot levels.

Modelling a driveway I use various methods using either slabs, roofs or a mesh depending on the complexity of the site to start with and how accurately you need it modelled. Again you can always use level dimensions and gravity to get the spot levels you want.

The other thing that I will often use is solid element operators when cutting out a large portion of the site