Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Cut Height of Floor Plans

Anonymous
Not applicable
Give us the option of choosing the height of the section cuts used to produce floor plans for each story.

Thanks.
14 REPLIES 14
KenMcN
Contributor
And once we have that, enhance it to allow a 'stepped section' line to be drawn on the 3d model to enable the cut to take place at different heights for different parts of the building.
This would help us to deal with mezzanines and buildings where one part has differrent f-f heights than another.
V25 & 26 (fully patched); Mac Ventura, MacBook Pro M1 Max
I'm probably in the minority, but I was missing the 0 (Please Don't) option on this one. I consider myself a virtual building zealot, but this is too pure.

Plans are diagrammatic. Stuff on the floor gets drawn solid, stuff above gets drawn dashed. High windows get put in high walls on a hidden layer.

I do not want to worry about where my openings are cut vertically so they display right in plan, the way I already have to in section. Would we still use the 2D symbol? If so, what's wrong with the high wall method?

I do not want to worry about cutting a foundation plan and having basement footings below and crawlspace footings above.

I do not want to worry about where to cut a stair so the cut appears in a convenient place, I want to place a cutline where it best shows what's going on above and below. I have never ben in a meeting where a client, contractor, or firm principal who cared whether that cut represented 4', 5', or 4'-6".

I won't even discuss split-level homes.

I do not want to juggle all of the above and more in picking the 'perfect' (reality: least troublesome compromise) height for the cut. Nor do I want to manage multiple cut heights throughout the plan.

I want flexibility in drawing clear plans without having to work around AC telling me something is overhead because it's at 4'-1", while something else is on the floor at 3'-11".

Finally, such a feature would seem to be developmentally very costly at the expense of other highly-rated, ancient wishes. (*cough* slab fills *ahem*)
James Murray

Archicad 25 • Rill Architects • macOS • OnLand.info
Dave Jochum
Advocate
I was going to quote James' post above, but I agree wholeheartedly with his entire post, so I'll avoid the redundancy.
Dave Jochum
J o c h u m A R C H I T E C T S http://www.jochumarchitects.com
MBP 16" (M1 Max) 64 GB•OS 13.5.2•AC 27 Silicon (latest build)
Djordje
Ace
Dave wrote:
I was going to quote James' post above, but I agree wholeheartedly with his entire post, so I'll avoid the redundancy.
Now I am making a redundant post, just to say that I agree too!

We don ot need more complexity, we need streamlining and existing methods and functions working perfectly!

On a sideline, there was a "real" horizontal cutaway planned for 5.1 or so if I remember correctly, and was shelved - for good reasons of adding too much complexity to the workflow.
Djordje



ArchiCAD since 4.55 ... 1995
HP Omen
David Collins
Advocate
One of the things that really impressed me about ArchiCad, when I first started looking at it, was the way it used the floor plan as an abstract symbol interface for the actual 3d model. That's what a plan view is, after all. Back in the pencil and mylar days, the convention that a plan is a horizontal section cut at 3 ft. off the floor was a guideline that had to be fudged all the time in order to produce the clearest possible floor plan.

Before settling on ArchiCad, I had spent some very unhappy weeks fussing with Microstation TriForma, which seemed to work in the opposite manner by attempting to extract a plan view directly from a 3d model. I was a self-taught newbie, but the results were horrific.

Not to be completely negative about the wish, it may be that there is occasionally a need for the ability to cut a section horizontally through the model at a specified height. The result would have all the minor flaws and drawbacks we presently see in vertical sections and elevations and would doubtless have to be unlinked at some inevitably premature point in time. Not something you'd ever want to do with your main floor plan, but possibly useful as supplementary information for some tricky multi-level situations.
David Collins

Win10 64bit Intel i7 6700 3.40 Ghz, 32 Gb RAM, GeForce RTX 3070
AC 27.0 (4001 INT FULL)
Anonymous
Not applicable
I think a straight floor plan cut would not be the best, but if Archicad was smart enough to allow for a represenation of differing heights in the plan that would be very helpful.
__archiben
Booster
being able to model the building and obtain documentation from it at any level is surely the way BIM should progress?

matthew lohden started a topic about this (and much, much more) at . . .

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=864&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

. . . where he expresses this development far more eloquently than i can!

my concern will always be file size and hardware capability, however i feel that this development is a must for a true 'virtual building' model to work from.

~/archiben
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
vfrontiers
Enthusiast
~/archiben wrote:
being able to model the building and obtain documentation from it at any level is surely the way BIM should progress?

matthew lohden started a topic about this (and much, much more) at . . .

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=864&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

. . . where he expresses this development far more eloquently than i can!

my concern will always be file size and hardware capability, however i feel that this development is a must for a true 'virtual building' model to work from.

~/archiben
Ok... A lot going on in these two threads... First I want to chime in and say the I don't believe it's necessary. I am still the architect and want to control the graphics of my plan. I feel that AC has the power to show this but it does require me to be a thinking human to get there. (not a dig... it just seems like stripping away our thought process is not a good thing. [ and I used to love to draw with pencil; something I don't do enough of anymore]).

Then there's the speed issue. Do I have to WAIT for 20sec / 30 sec for it to actually CUT my model? Which layers get cut? Everytime I look at the PLAN WINDOW? I feel it brings much more trouble than good.

Also, you all know that you can show walls with dashed lines while others show with solid? right? You know that with creative use of both layers and stories, you can make anything work?

Having said all that, I just created a simple GDL object that is a set of stairs. Ok, actually it's Risers and Tread... which I installed a calculation to let the user choose the height of the PLAN CUT and it will calc where the break goes! Go figure.
Duane

Visual Frontiers

AC25 :|: AC26 :|: AC27
:|: Enscape3.4:|:TwinMotion

DellXPS 4.7ghz i7:|: 8gb GPU 1070ti / Alienware M18 Laptop
__archiben
Booster
duane

i, too, was sceptical to begin with. i work on big project files that i know won't cope with matthew's proposals on today's hardware.

i have also been struggling recently to produce a set of clean, uncluttered landing plans for 10 stair cores on one of our projects in the most efficient way possible. it is not as easy as it sounds! it turned out that, yes, creative use of layers and layer combination intersection priorities was the answer, see: http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=691, but still not a proper solution!

i then had to explain this to colleagues who are "still architects" and who don't really want to learn and remember multiple workarounds in archiCAD to get the job done. you are right: it involved a lot of thinking to get there, but it wasn't really architectural thinking. the thought process in order to get to the solution went against the thought processes required to think about modelling and building the stairs and their enclosures as a physical reality.

i do understand what you are saying though, duane. i like the challenge of working out these things, as do you by the sound of it. but when the thought processes involved are 'extra-over' the process of designing and documenting a building with the tool that we have, to my mind this is inefficiency.

going back to the cut-plan (and more!) proposals: as i mentioned, the speed issue is something that bothers me too, which is also why part of (matthew's) proposal involved the user choice about when to rebuild each and every documentation window. there are still a lot of issues to resolved, but i feel that the philosophy of 'building' and documenting in archiCAD in this way would benefit our thinking like a human and hopefully begin to strip away our 'machine' (archiCAD workaround) thought processes.

maybe, as matthew also proposes, the interface to archiCAD becomes more like sketch-up, or similar, and the way that we work in archiCAD becomes more akin to drawing with a pencil, something which i too enjoy and don't do enough of anymore either!

~/archiben
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup