2020 | 021 – Conceptual Design – Area Schedules, Sketching and Precision

Conceptual Design - Area Schedules, Sketching and Precision

Hey, welcome, everyone, to the ARCHICAD Best Practices 2020 training course.  Today is Wednesday, March 27^th, 2019, and we’ll be continuing on our study of conceptual design strategies for, in this case, calculating up areas for program analysis and some initial methods that you might use for sketching and getting precision in your work without worrying too much at the beginning about typing in values.  [0:00:40]

So, let’s make sure that you all can hear me and see me and see my screen.  I see greetings from Ken, Tom, Zlatko – a bunch of you. Thank you all for joining me today.  So, we shall proceed.  If you have not been using the Slack communications channel, then go to Bobrow.com/slack, and you’ll be able to put in your email address and get instructions to join us.  You’ll come into the general channel, and then you can go click on Channels and pick 2020, which is where we’ll be having our discussion.  So, feel free to add that.  [0:01:27]

I see Carlos says he’s here in the regular GoToWebinar communications channel.  So, Carlos, please – it says “Present, Mickey,”  so I’m not quite sure.  Kevin Harris as well – so, Carlos and Kevin, please join us in Slack, bobrow.com/slack, and then go to the 2020 channel once you have logged in. It only takes a minute to get set up to use Slack in your web browser.  [0:02:00]

OK, so we shall proceed.  Alright, so in the last lesson, we looked at ways that you could lay out your building design and get feedback on the areas.  We’ll just take a very brief look at what we had drawn up, which wasn’t very much, but basically, combinations of drawing some general areas and this being linework, this being a fill, and things like fills can have area total turned on.  So, if I turn this off, you can see that disappears, and if I undo that, you can see that it comes back because this area is attached or connected to – if I make this a little bit bigger here, you can see that’s live there.  [0:02:56]

These fills – looks like I’ve got a graphic override that is making them all black.  Let’s just turn that off.  So, now we can see the fills with normal colors.  We also looked at laying out property lines with setbacks and offsets, and then we went on to look at zones to delineate room areas within a building or zones that you might just lay out to say that we have so many of certain types of rooms of a certain size and then end up being able to get a report and optimize your design to meet your program requirements.  [0:03:38]

So, let’s take a look at some of the scheduling of these zones and fills so that how you can get reports to help you make sure your design is on track with program requirements as well as essentially the elements that you would be placing later on on your working drawings, to indicate site area and floor area – FAR numbers, etc.  [0:04:10]

So, in the sample project of MasterTemplate, we actually have an area calc plan clone folder.  So, what is that?  That’s a folder with views of each story. The particular folder is set up with – it’s a clone folder that’s set up with a particular layer combination and a scale here.  Nothing really special about this clone folder except that it’s focused on, in this case, area calculations, and if I go to the Layer settings here, the area calculation layer combination has most of the layers turned off except for the partition walls and some columns there, and there would be – where is the notation?  I think it’s down lower.  [0:05:06]

You can see there is a layer specifically for the area calc information.  Alright, so what do we have here?  We have just the building outline, and we have a fill.  So, this fill, with the area text checkbox, is reporting on the area there.  If I go up to the next story, we’ll see a similar thing, and in fact, in this case, I think we even have the foundation – the enclosed foundation area indicated.  Now, there is a schedule that tabulates this.  [0:05:43]

So, if I bring this up – the gross area schedule, we’re going to see some area reports like these numbers, and there’s some additional ones, so let’s just look at that, and it looks like I left out floor one and floor two.  I think it’s because I was just making some additions just before our session. Here’s the foundation.  If I select this fill, there’s no ID.  So, an ID you would always put in for windows and doors is optional for other elements, like this fill, and let’s just say that this is B Foundation Area.  [0:06:29]

OK, so in this case, I’m using the first letter of the ID to help sort the schedule.  So, when I go in here to the gross area schedule, we can see that this now shows up.  We’ll just make the column wide enough to see that.  So, the reference here is the ID for the element, and the ID is something that we can modify on the fly. It does sort based on the columns, if we have the scheme set up, in this case, to sort based on the ID.  [0:07:11]

I have this set up for a hotlink to be shown in the first column. This is certainly optional, but if you did have multiple buildings that you were bringing into a project, you could be grouping or sorting the report based on this building and that building and the third building, etc., if they were all being hotlinked in.  [0:07:32]

The area is live, as you would expect.  Now, these 3 here are the ones that we’re looking at that were fills.  These are actually on a different layer.  These are fills related to the building – the site, and the buildable area.  Now, if I go and say to show me this total site area, you can see I’m switching to a different layer combination – in this case, I’m just turning on all layers so we can see this total site area – the bounded area with the handles.  [0:08:14]

Now, if I go to the site plan, I think – so, site plan, and we’ll see that that element is a fill that takes up the whole site.  I also have a fill. Let’s see.  If I use the Fill tool and hover over this one, this is another fill – the 2503 here. It’s the pad area, and this is just indicative of a way of dividing up the total site area and perhaps the buildable area.  So, whether it’s buildable in terms of having setbacks or in terms of having a slope – in this case, there’s a slope going up, so this is the pad area, but this is just an example of tabulating things for different purposes.  [0:09:09]

So, if we go back to that gross area here, we can see that here’s the 2503 and the 4418.  So, some of the limitations of these schedules are that the sort order is based on just alphabetical numbers.  So, you can put in a prefix like A or B or 1, 2, 3, etc. there.  When you’re using fills, and we go back to the site plan here, a fill that we’ve got selected – like this one – doesn’t have the option for putting in much data.  [0:09:48]

So, fill gives us a graphic representation, and there’s just some appearance on the plan or wherever you draw it, and it has only the ability to have an ID.  There’s no other attributes that you can add.  You can’t add properties to a fill, which is seemingly an odd limitation, in terms of ARCHICAD, because you’re going to add properties to virtually all the elements, and fills are one of the only ones – maybe lines and fills and hot spots are probably ones that you can’t really add anything more than an ID, but with the ID, we can at least get some basic reporting.  [0:10:30]

Now, those are reports for the area here.  Now, we can total up schedules when we want to have a total.  So, obviously, we could total up the area here, but it would make no sense because we’d be adding up a lot of things that overlap each other, essentially.  So, you could take these numbers, and you could export them and do something in Excel easily.  If you wanted to have ARCHICAD total up things, then you need to group them.  You need to either have a schedule that just has the floor areas and, in this case, the scheme is saying that it’s listing fills or zones on any of these layers.  [0:11:21]

So, I’m very quickly going over concepts here.  I’m not going into all the mechanics of how you set up schedule schemes. We’ll be looking at that later in the course, and certainly, if you have specific questions about it, we can deal with it in a coaching call, but essentially, a scheme has criteria saying that maybe things that you exclude, like we don’t want to have the fills that are in the hotlink that is just a legend, so that these are ones that are from the kit of parts in MasterTemplate.  [0:11:59]

We’re choosing to only list fills and zones in this particular schedule, and then we’re saying only the ones that are on certain layers that relate to this usage, and then here, element ID is not blank.  So, that’s basically saying the element ID has to have something in it.  That’s why the foundation one didn’t show up at first until I put in some identifying information.  [0:12:27]

So, the limits here – when you sum things up, you can only sum up – actually, we wouldn’t sum up the drawing, now would we?  We would be summing up something like the area so that you could potentially sum it up, but you’d need to group things in order to get any sort of usable report, and the only way to group them would be in one of these preliminary columns in the first or second column, and so you’d have to have multiple things that had the same category or grouping.  [0:13:06]

Now, the problem with fills is that we only have an element ID, and if it happened to be hotlinked in from another file, then we’d have that, but we can’t group it and say room area fills versus site area fills, for example.  So, there’s some limitations there.  Now, if we go to zones instead, then we can go a lot further.  So, now I’ve just put in a total here, which obviously has a lot of overlapping stuff, like the buildable area is within the total site area, and all of these, similarly, are duplicating as part of that.  [0:13:52]

So, let me just turn off that total because it’s going to be misleading to have a total there.  Alright, so let’s look at some other area listings for analyzing program requirements.  So, Graphisoft, in the U.S. version, provides a room areas schedule.  So, this is one that, in MasterTemplate, I just imported so that you’d have everything in MasterTemplate that is in the standard Graphisoft template.  Now, I haven’t looked closely at the international version, but I’m sure there are some schedules that are similar.  [0:14:30]

So, this one – obviously, we have room names: living, kitchen, sleeping, with areas here. The scheme settings are listing, of course, the story name, the number, and the name of the zones, and the area, and it’s totaling up the area, and it’s grouping this little flag by the zone number.  So, if you did say that a particular zone number was something you wanted to total up that all the zones with number 3 were offices, then you could have all of them grouped – offices, and then total for that grouping of the office there.  [0:15:10]

So, with zones, you can have many more defining criteria there, but this is what’s built into the standard Graphisoft schedule.  Now, we have, in the MasterTemplate sample project, a room finish schedule, which is going to be listing those same rooms, but just other types of data, so obviously all schedules can pull information from the elements in the project and list different types of information about it.  [0:15:42]

In this case, the finish schedule is not saying anything about the area of the rooms.  It is giving us the ceiling height, which obviously can be relevant to defining the room finish information.  Now, I believe – let’s see.  I think that Graphisoft has a finish schedule from zones as well, and theirs is showing the same zones, but with other information that are pulled from the zone stamps.  Now, today, we’re focusing on more of the concepts for geometry, like making sure you have the right number of rooms or the right area calculations going on.  We’ll be looking at all of these things about finish schedules and other types of schedule later on.  [0:16:32]

I will show you – just if we go back to the gross areas, and we wanted to have something very simple like this, but with the rooms, here’s how you would do it.  You go to the scheme settings, and we say that we want to get a new scheme here.  In this case, I’ll start out with a duplicate because it’s going to be simpler to do that and then just modify it slightly.  So, let’s just call this room areas here.  So, it’s going to be a duplicate but have a name that I’m choosing – room areas, and let’s give it another number here and say OK, this is what we want.  [0:17:07]

So, now you can see that it’s showing up in the list on the left, but it’s identical to begin with.  Now, let’s say that I only want to show zones, so I’m going to go and remove this one.  Now, it’s giving me a warning that the current set of criteria is invalid because there’s an extra parentheses here.  So, it was saying element type is fill or zone.  So, I’ll say we don’t need to have a parentheses there. Now, it’s OK.  [0:17:38]

Now, the layers – again, these are not the right layers for the zones, so I’m just going to go remove 2 of the layers and then set the desired layer to an area identifier zone.  So, this is where, in this MasterTemplate, we place our typical room zones, and then I’ll remove the parentheses here, and now we have, in this particular schedule of room areas, we’re going to be listing all the rooms.  [0:18:11]

So, let’s say OK, and what do we get?  Drumroll, please.  Let’s see.  Alright, just looking at our Slack notes here, and I see 2 other people that signed in after our initial starting point.  OK, it’s still thinking about it.  Remember that the first time that I make a change in a file, it seems to take a while before it finishes calculating it, and then afterwards, things move quickly.  [0:18:59]

So, this should be finished shortly.  So, let’s just – while this is thinking about it, and it is taking longer than I expected, let’s just talk about where we’re going from here.  So, when you’re laying out your design, you can use a variety of tools to do 2D, just place things, and get the arrangement and the sizes and the ratios correct.  We can also be working in 3D, and we looked a little bit last time at how you can take the zone tools, and even if they’re not part of rooms, you can have some volumes that show the space usage in a stacking, massing sort of style.  [0:19:45]

We can also do things with morphs, and we’re going to be looking at how morphs can be used, of course, for a variety of geometry, but also can be used for area calcs.  Now, let’s see.  This is still – I don’t know what’s going on with this, and so while this is thinking about it, and I don’t really understand why it’s not completing the operation.  Let me go and switch over to a different file here.  Let’s see.  Let’s see if my computer will work.  I’m trying to switch to another file.  [0:20:33]

Let’s see here. This here – OK, so at least it switched alright.  So, here is the – oh, so Jim says, “Is there a way to stop this calculation process?”  Alright, good question.  Let’s just see.  So, I’m in this progress calculating globals.  If I click here, sometimes clicking – there will be a button or a message saying click to stop the process.  It isn’t, in this case. If I hit Command+., sometimes that will work. That’s an old method of terminating commands dating back decades on the Mac – holding down the Command key and typing a period, and I’ve seen that work sometimes in ARCHICAD for some processes.  [0:21:22]

In this case, it does seem like it’s gone off the deep end, so let me say that we’re going to take a little segue here to what happens when ARCHICAD stops responding.  What can you do? OK, so let’s go back to that file here.  So, I’m switching by using the Command+Tab or Ctrl+Tab or Alt+Tab on Windows to switch between programs, and you see this dialog box is coming up.  [0:21:58]

The calculation of the schedule is obviously not going to finish up.  So, how do you force quit a program, and how would you recover from force quitting?  So, if I hold down Command+Option+Esc on the Mac, bring up force quit applications.  On Windows, I believe it’s Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Then, you’ll have a list or some way of saying what’s running and whether you want to possibly force this to quit. So, I’ll say this ARCHICAD here – the one that says it’s not responding, I’m going to force it to quit.  [0:22:32]

It’ll ask if I really want to, and I’ll say to force it to quit.  Alright, so you can see it’s come red here.  Now, it’s disappeared from the screen. Now, you can see Graphisoft Bug Reporter is coming up. I could report it, but I think I’ll just quit out of this if I can here, and we’ll be going back into that file, and it should recover it back to the last step that I did.  So, I do want to quit the Bug Reporter, and now, in order to reopen it, I’ll go to the File menu, Open, and here is the sample project that I was working on.  [0:23:13]

So, I have a preference setting here that you should know about. This is another little tip.  Under the Options, Work Environment, I think it’s under More Options.  Launch New Instance of ARCHICAD with opening a project from the recent list or dragging onto a running ARCHICAD.  So, basically, if I don’t have that checked, when I go to the File, Open, and go to the recent list, then it will close the current file, giving me a warning asking if I want to save my work, if it hasn’t been saved recently, and then it will open up the other file.  [0:24:03]

With that preference set, now it’s going to go start up a new instance of ARCHICAD and then open it.  In this case, once it starts to open it, it will recognize that there is a temporary backup of the file most likely.  Now, I had saved it just before we started our session, and I’m not sure whether I’d done anything else in terms of drawing.  I guess I did change the fill there – the ID of the fill.  [0:24:36]

So, here’s the sample project here.  I can say to open this project.  So, this is basically – now it’s getting a spinning beach ball even here.  Now it’s finished. Say Continue, open the selected project, and it should have that – I’m guessing at least where that fill is showing up in the floor schedule, and hopefully it’ll even have the new schedule definition, but we’ll see.  [0:25:08]

Alright, now it’s says this ARCHICAD is not responding, but that’s normal when we’re opening the file. It basically is hard at work and not paying attention, so it’s not responding.  I’ll just move this off to the other screen, and when this comes back, we’ll look at it.  So, now switching to the conceptual design file, if I bring up the 3D window here, we’ll see just the zones that were set up for massing study purposes.  [0:25:44]

Now, remember under the View menu elements in 3D view.  I used a command called Filter and Cut Elements in 3D, which has a keyboard shortcut Command+Option+A or Ctrl+Alt+A, I believe, and you can then choose which element types to show.  So, for example, right now we’ve got the zone showing.  The default is to have all types except for zones, and of course, you can just say to give me everything.  So, I want the normal geometry plus the zone, so now we can see some walls.  [0:26:17]

There isn’t much in this project, but having done that, now I can go and draw things like a morph and have that show.  So, I’m going to go to the Morph tool here, and the Morph tool – without going into any detail, is a very freeform geometry element. It means that you can draw things from scratch, or you can convert simple or complex elements into a morph and then do some more editing on them.  [0:26:51]

The morph is less intelligent than other things. It’s more just dumb geometry, but you can assign properties, and you can get areas out of it, which is very powerful. So, if I just draw a shape here, and I can type in values.  So, let’s say I wanted this dimension to be 80 feet by 50 feet here in each of the directions, and then I take it up, and let’s say we’ll do 55 feet here.  OK, so this is now a shape, obviously.  If we go to the floor plan, we’ll see this shape show up on the plan.  [0:27:34]

Now, if we wanted to get a schedule for this – well, we have multiple stories.  Imagine that this is a shape that may not be – OK, here’s my other project – the one I was working on. It finally finished reopening it.  We’ll switch back to that in a moment, but let’s go continue with my thought about morphs.  [0:28:01]

So, with the morph, it could be a straight shape, or it could be a more elaborate one. Without going into all the details of how you work with morphs, I can select an edge here, for example, and then I can move that edge to have a shape.  So, now we’ve got something that is at least suggestive of a building with a receding façade there, and if we imagine the story lines that would be there, each story would have somewhat different areas.  [0:28:43]

So, how would you know what the areas are?  Of course, it could get very elaborate, but this is the simplest one to just demonstrate there.  OK, so we’re going to go to any of the schedules, and this is just the standard Graphisoft U.S. template. Here’s the room area schedule.  Scheme right now is saying to look for zones, and we don’t have zones on a particular layer here.  [0:29:11]

Let’s just create a new one, and this is going to be calling massing.  So, just call it that, and this new one – we’ll start from scratch.  I’ll go and say that I want to list the – where is it?  Morph tool or morph elements.  Let’s say we don’t need to be more specific than that.  We just want anything that’s a morph to be listed, and I can go and add fields, and we’re going to do the story.  So, home story number or name. If we do number, then it will sort numerically.  If we do names, then ground floor, second floor, third floor may jumble up.  [0:29:54]

So, I’ll say home story number here, and then I’ll do area.  Now, when we choose area here, there’s a lot of different types of area that we could be looking at, but there’s one specifically for morphs that says area by story.  So, I’ll say to add this, and I’ll say OK, and we’ll see what we’ve got.  Now, I don’t have to make this so wide.  I can just make this story here, or I could just put a NO for number – things like that.  So, we’ll just do that.  [0:30:40]

Alright, so now we have something that could be totaled up. It’s giving us some areas for that particular morph. Obviously, we can have more than one morph. We can have morphs stacked on each other. We can have a 100-story building, and it will total them up. There’s all sorts of things we can do, but that’s the simplest report that you can imagine for just saying that if I had this general shape, what sort of areas am I going to get?  [0:31:10]

OK, so that’s very useful for the right types of design.  Now, let’s go back to that other project that I had here, and we’ll go to the scheme settings. Alright, so it did not get as far as having the new area schedule. So, let’s try this again. Hopefully, the second time it will work.  I’ll say new one.  It’s going to be a duplicate.  It’s going to be room areas, like this here. It comes up without a problem. Let’s just delete the fills, and we’re going to take it as only zones, and then we’ll remove these layers and say that the layer is going to be the zones, and remove the extra parentheses, and now I think it’s good.  [0:32:01]

We’ll say OK, and fingers crossed.  There it is.  OK, so now the information here is confusing because it’s zone numbers, and those rooms in this building – we weren’t numbering them. We weren’t saying it’s Office 212. We’re just calling it living room, so what we need to do is change the scheme settings to say instead of the element ID, we’ll just remove that. We’re going to add a field, and this is going to be name and zone name.  [0:32:36]

Add that, and we’ll just drag this up here.  Maybe we want to also add a field for the story, so we can group them by story.  So, we’ll say story number.  OK, and we’ll put that up at the beginning here.  We’ll say OK.  Alright, and maybe we don’t need the hotlinked module here.  We just need the story here, and I’ll just call this room here, and I’ll make this bold and this one bold so they fit, and we’ll get rid of the HLM there.  So, we’ll get rid of the hotlink one, and now we have the areas for each of the different zones, and if we wanted to total it up by story, then we can go to the flag, say that whenever the story changes, we’re going to group and give us a new grouping, and if I want, we can total up the area here.  [0:33:47]

So, if I’m just clicking multiple times in the cell next to that field, and under the column that in this case indicates the total.  So, I’m saying I’d like to total up areas and group things based on the story.  I’ll say OK, and this total here is right now set to be a bigger text size.  We’ll make it a little smaller like that, but it’s still standing out as bold.  I think that’s what we wanted, and actually, it’s bigger, and then this is bold – the grand total here.  [0:34:24]

Now, obviously, the 569 or 190 total to 760 here.  We would want to change the title here. This is area 04, and well, it is room areas as opposed to – yeah, because I titled it room areas rather than building areas or gross areas there.  OK, so we’ve now looked very briefly at the basic methods that you can get schedules for fills, for zones, and for morphs – for morph floor areas and some of the ways that you can total up areas like we just did and group based on particular shared field values.  [0:35:17]

So, in other words, all of these zones have a field value that says their home story is 1 or 2. We’re grouping them by the ones that have that and getting its subtotal.  Now, by the way, I’m just going to change the format here to be center aligned. It looks a little bit nicer there, and we could even – if we wanted to, we don’t have to have the word story. We could just take that blank, and it’ll still total up just fine.  [0:35:46]

So, we can group things in any way that we want.  OK, so let’s see if there’s any questions here in our Slack discussion.  Alright, so Jim is saying, “So, that stopped the entire instance of ARCHICAD.”  Yes, not just the calculation.  So, I was trying to see if there’s a way to stop the calculation.  Sometimes hitting Escape – in fact, I didn’t actually hit Escape.  It’s possible that could have worked.  I tried Command+., and I tried just clicking in the area where it showed the progress.  None of them worked, so when I did a force quit in the operating system – in the Mac, or if you did it on Windows, it was quitting the entire ARCHICAD application.  [0:36:36]

Now, aside from it taking 5 minutes to get out of it and then start it up again, I basically only lost one step, just the last thing that I had done was to create a new schedule, but everything else was still in place.  So, the automatic backup of your work – every step is so powerful. It’s so much nicer than what we had years ago, when it would do it like every 10 steps or every so many minutes.  So, anyway, it was a relief to be able to just go back in and start almost from the same place.  [0:37:18]

So, Tom, “How are the ARCHICAD zones related to the energy evaluation zones?”  OK, so I haven’t really worked with energy evaluation very much.  I believe that zones can be used as part of the energy evaluation process, and the energy reports in ARCHICAD, but that’s not something I understand well enough to give you advice there.  I know that there are some real challenges in working with the geometry to get energy calcs because everything has to be very precise, and if you think about it, sort of like airtight.  [0:38:01]

A building has to have flashing and caulking. Well, all of your geometry has to be touching each other and precisely snapping in order to get clean numbers out.  So, let’s put that aside because I just don’t have a good answer for you there, Tom.  So, Diane.  “Can schedules be imported and exported between files like attributes can?”  [0:38:27]

Yes.  I’ll show you the basics of that in a moment.  If you improve on your schedule setup in one project file, for example, and want to transfer that to another project, yes.  So, the basic thing is I’ve got a schedule here.  I go to the scheme settings. I go to this little button here.  Now right now this is the schedule.  It’s highlighted, but I could select multiple ones.  I could use Command+ or Ctrl+click to do multiple ones.  [0:38:51]

When I click this little button here that says Export, it will export one or more of the schedules somewhere on my computer, and then later, I can go and import with this similar button, and it will go and allow me to import the files, and I believe you can actually export several files into a folder, and then you can go into another project or your template and then import multiple ones.  You can select all of the files.  [0:39:26]

They have the ending .xml, which you may be a little familiar with.  It is a text file that you could open up in a text editor, but it’s got data that’s really computer structured, and it carries across the names of the schedule, the names of all the fields, the references – all the data that we carefully put in.  What is this field?  What size is that text?  What’s the width of the columns?  [0:39:53]

It’ll essentially – when you bring it into another project, it should look and function much the same, as long as things are consistent.  For example, if you say this schedule lists things from a certain layer, and that layer exists in the other project, it will work similarly.  So, that’s how you work with that.  OK, let’s take a look at where we are in my little notes here.  [0:40:26]

Alright, so I think we’ve done as much as I can do in this quick intro to the schedules.  I’ll point out a couple of things that you could do further than this and a couple of things that you can’t do directly in these schedules.  So, for example, if you wanted to get a ratio of the total floor areas to the site – so, the FAR, you could have a schedule that has the areas, as I did the first floor and second floor, and you can have a total.  [0:41:04]

So, ARCHICAD will keep that up to date as you change your building envelope and as long as you make your fills fit that area, and you can get a number right in that schedule.  You can have another schedule that just reported the site or the site buildable area, the setbacks. Those sorts of reports could be listed in a schedule, but there’s no way in a schedule that you can ask what the ratio is of the total area of the building – all of those different stories, to the site.  [0:41:38]

Now, you can pull those numbers yourself.  You can use a calculator or a spreadsheet to do it, and you can type in values.  You can just say on your sheet – you can say FAR is equal to and give your numbers there, but it won’t be in a schedule.  One reason why that’s not possible is all we can do in a schedule is total things.  We can list them, and we can total them.  [0:42:04]

Now, in ARCHICAD 22, we have some new options for formulas.  So, a formula can look at some data about an element and calculate something.  So, a good example is if you have a piece of steel, and you know its length, and you know its weight factor based on its profile, you could – with a calculator or a spreadsheet – say it’s 20 feet long, and its weight factor is 51, so 20 times 51 is 1020 pounds or kilograms, whatever unit you’re working in.  [0:42:42]

Now, in ARCHICAD, you can have a formula that says to multiply the length times the weight factor and give me that number.  It will do it for each one of those pieces of steel individually, and if you had a list of all the steel in your project, you could then get a total weight of the steel.  Similarly, you could have other things that are multiplying factors – area times cost per area, so dollars per square foot.  [0:43:12]

You can do that for zones.  So, that is something that we can do, but you can’t take a total in a schedule and another total or another number and arbitrarily just do a formula in a schedule.  You can only do formulas based on individual elements.  So, it probably is worth it, though, in this  case, just looking at the zones and asking how we would set up a cost schedule.  So, we can start getting some preliminary numbers or costing.  [0:43:46]

OK, so we’ll take a look at a formula for that.  I think this is a little bit daring for me because it’s a little bit elaborate to set up, but I think in the next 10 minutes, I can probably get something that illustrates this.  So, let’s say that we wanted to calculate the cost of these rooms or these areas based on certain factors.  Now, in a residential project, maybe all of these are going to have a certain common cost per square foot, but of course, in certain projects, you’re going to have remodels, and you’re going to say that it costs so much to refurbish an area.  Compare it to so much to build a new area.  [0:44:36]

So, you can have things based on that or other considerations that would be rules of thumb that would just help you to say that our budget’s looking like such and such, and then you can have a discussion with your client or with your design team for how that stands relative to your target.  Alright, so let’s just look at the couple of really key things that we can do with formulas with these schedules. [0:45:09]

So, in order to do that, we’re going to be using a feature in ARCHICAD 22 that is based on properties.  So, under the Options menu, Property Manager.  Now, properties have existed since version 20, I think – either 20 or 21.  I think it’s 20, but we now have the option to set up properties that will calculate values based on a formula.  [0:45:38]

So, that’s something that is new in ARCHICAD 22.  So, if we look at these properties, each one of these is a data field. Data could be just a name or text.  It can be a number. It can be a set of options – for example, fire resistance ratings can say 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc.  So, this is a list.  When you’re picking things like doors, you can ask what its fire rating is, and you can pick from one of the options here.  [0:46:13]

So, in this property setup, it’s asking what type of information goes in this place, and sometimes it’s predefined values that you pick from. Other times, you’ll just type in a value – a name or something like that.  Alright, so if we go down to zones, here you can see there’s things like occupancy and occupancy load here that are set up. This is an integer, and you can basically put in a number in a schedule and say that this restaurant can have 85 people in it, or whatever that number is.  [0:46:48]

Now, you’re just putting it in, and maybe this totals up your occupancy totals automatically for the building.  It’s not, in this case, a formula.  Now, you can see ventilation requirement.  This is saying so many cubic feet – cfm per person.  I don’t know what this is.  It’s a number, or it’s a value that is just a text string, in this case.  [0:47:20]

Let’s look at something like, for zones, adding in some information about cost.  So, I’m starting from the base level of what Graphisoft supplies and has been elaborated a little bit in the MasterTemplate project.  There’s nothing about costing here. There’s some things about products and purchase price, etc., but in terms of zones, it’s no calculation.  So, what would we do?  [0:47:51]

I’m going to create a new property that will be in that group – zones.  It highlighted zones because that’s the last thing that I had selected, and it’s smart.  It says, “Oh, maybe you’re focused on zones here,” and what are we going to call this?  I’ll just say Cost Per Area Factor.  OK, maybe a better way to describe that is just cost factor or something like that.  OK, so what is that?  What does this mean?  Is it a string, just like you type in expensive, cheap – you know, something like that, or is it a number?  [0:48:35]

OK, so an integer would be whole numbers.  A number could have decimal place, so I’ll do it in numbers so we could have a decimal there, and what is the value?  Well, let’s just say that it could be zero, but maybe we want to have some options here.  So, we could do an options set, and we’ll just add in 50.  Actually, let me just leave that out.  I’m going to just say that it’s a value that’s a number because with the option set, I’m not quite sure whether it’s going to multiply right, and I don’t want to make this too fancy.  [0:49:16]

So, we’ll be putting in a cost factor, and then we want to have a new value that is – we’ll just say area cost here, and what is that?  That’s also going to be a number.  It’s going to be a total value – so many dollars or Euros or whatever for that room.  Now, it’s going to be a value, but it’s actually going to be an expression.  Now, I will go and create that formula in a moment, but I need to do 2 things.  I need to select these 2 and say that they’re available for either all element types or a custom set, and, for example, under Edit, if we do space here, I think we can pick all these types of spaces here.  [0:50:21]

I don’t think we can do zone because the zone is not actually in master format.  No, I don’t think we want ozone in here. For now, I’m going to just say that these are available for all elements rather than try to restrict it.  This means that we’ll have this information that we can use, regardless of what element.  Now, I’m going to just say OK and then go back into that Property Manager here, and now that I’ve defined it, and we’re coming back in, I can go and say that area cost is going to be an expression that is defined by the – I click on parameters and properties, and I say factor.  [0:51:18]

Here’s the cost factor, and I’m going to multiply it.  So, I do a star for multiplying, and right now it says there’s an error because I haven’t told it what I’m multiplying by.  So, it’s warning me that I need to complete this operation.  So, what am I going to multiply it by?  I’m going to multiply it by the area of the zone.  So, here’s the area, and I’ll scroll down to zones, and zones have a measured area, and they also have a calculated area.  So, the measured area would simply be the boundaries of the zone already calculated.  The calculated area would allow certain things to be removed.  [0:52:05]

If you had a closet in there and it’s not being counted as part of the same area, but let’s just do the measured area.  I think that’s going to be sufficient, and I’ll say measured area.  It says that this has got an error because you can’t multiply cost - $100 per square foot times 20 square feet.  You have to say it’s times how many square feet by saying to divide the area by 1 foot, too..  So, this is basically saying if the area of the room is 180 square feet, it would be 180 square feet divided by a square foot, and you would end up with 180.  [0:52:56]

So, now we have the area converted into just a number, and we’re multiplying 2 numbers together to create a new number.  So, I say OK here.  So, that calculates that.  So, let’s just say OK.  I’ve now created 2 field values that we can fill in, and one will fill in the cost factor, and then it will fill in the cost. So, here’s what we do. We go to scheme settings, and we add in a field here, and this is going to be the factor here, and then we’re going to add in the area cost that I just created, and we can move these up if we want to bring them closer to the left side of the list.  [0:53:49]

Alright, so basically, the bath is 46 square feet.  The cost factor is 0. Well, what if we said that this was 75 and hit Tab?  It’s getting 3500. Interesting. Now, is that right?  46 times 75? That doesn’t look quite right.  What if I said 100 for the cost factor and tab over?  Well, yes, that did multiply. Interesting that 46.67 – exactly that number here.  So, we would put in something like 125 here – 80, so whatever you put in here, you can get some totals.  [0:54:35]

Then, we could total up that cost in the same way we do with area.  So, that’s the basics of getting some combination of the geometry with a factor that you can put in for these elements.  Now, this cost factor – you could hide it from the schedule.  So, we would just say bath 1, $3500.  Kitchen - $10,880. Whatever these numbers are, you could leave that out, but it is probably useful.  Certainly, it’s absolutely useful when you’re starting the process of defining this that you’re seeing what those factors are, and then this is the calculation.  [0:55:22]

So, I did probably do it in about 15 minutes, so I’m pleased that the basics could be explained and demonstrated on the fly that quickly.  Alright, let me know if you have any questions about this and whether you find this type of possibility useful.  I know that I’ve gotten some emails periodically from different people asking how you do this type of report.  How can I get some preliminary numbers from it?  This is one way that you can get it.  [0:55:59]

By the way, you could export these schedules to a spreadsheet.  So, when I’m in the schedule here – so, I’m in any schedule.  I can go and say File, Save As.  So, Save would save the project, just with the latest updates, but if I say Save As here, this is going to save it as an Excel file or a .pdf.  You can choose different formats, including some tab text – a plain text file here, but you can just export that, and then, of course, in Excel, you could do a whole lot of other reporting.  [0:56:39]

OK, so Christian says, “Definitely useful, but the accuracy is somewhat concerning, so can you round down the area cost so there are no decimals?”  Alright, let’s just take a very brief look at that. So, the area cost here – how do we change that number?  Good question.  If I go to the Options, Project Preferences, Calculation Units and Rules, we can, for example, say for the area unit that we want maybe – we don’t need any decimal places.  Let’s say OK.  Come on now.  [0:57:26]

You can see that now, it removes it here.  So, the area is understood as something that we can have calculations. If I go to the scheme settings – I’m sorry, the Project Preferences, Calculation Units and Rules, I don’t know that we can do anything here.  I’m going to just calculate totals by – so, let’s see.  Set up rules here.  I don’t see anything here that relates to that.  Display values,, exact values.  We’ll just change this. I don’t think this is going to change anything. These are exact values here.  [0:58:18]

So, I’m not sure if we have an option for doing that.  Sometimes, I found with brute force that if you just change a bunch of things, you can see if any of them have an effect there.  Say OK. No, none of them had an effect.  So, this calculation value right now is – and these totals – I don’t see a way to deal with it.  Now, if we go to the Property Manager, probably the one way that we could do it is by using a rounding factor.  [0:58:54]

So, that would be a way to do it. If I go to the Edit menu here, there are some.  Let me just position my cursor here. We’ll just put a parenthesis around this, and so what would be this number here? So, I say this is a function lookup, and we’ll just do Round here.  Round down to a given number of digits.  So, let’s say round down, and so the number here – copy this, paste.  Actually, I just want to get rid of this one, and then the number of digits?  We’ll say zero.  Try that.  [0:59:42]

It says it’s OK. It’s happy enough to do that, and we’ll say OK.  I don’t see a result there.  Let me just, by chance, refresh, rebuild.  OK, well, it actually rounded it down to zero, but we don’t have any odd numbers, but it’s not taking it as a whole number.  Now, let’s just see.  Actually, we could go just a little further to the Property Manager and say, “What if we made this value an integer instead of a number?”  [1:00:25]

Alright, so now we’re rounding it to the nearest one and making it an integer.  Maybe we don’t need the round down if we just say integer, and say OK.  Ah, there we have it.  Alright, and if we wanted to list this right aligned or center aligned, we could, but right aligned is probably better here, and we can just say cost here.  [1:00:58]

Alright, so there we have something, at least with the control. Unfortunately, I don’t think that we can put a dollar sign there or a Euro sign and still have it something that you can sum up.  I may be wrong about that, and maybe someone else can help me, but basically, we could do what would be called the concatenation where we would say to take a dollar sign and put it with the number, which is what we do intuitively whenever we’re typing things in context.  So, you could do that, but in ARCHICAD, I think you would be saying to make a text thing, and let’s combine this text character $ with the number converted to text.  [1:01:52]

So, you could have something like that, but then it probably wouldn’t be able to be totaled directly.  So, there are some limitations here, but at least this is now giving us a rounded number.  Now, I don’t think we can round it to the nearest $5 or $10 or $100 or things like that.  Let’s put it this way. We would probably have to do a formula that says to round it to this and do some other manipulation to take it to the nearest something, if you wanted to round it to the nearest $100 or the nearest something. [1:02:29]

OK, so 20 times 50 = 984.  Now, that’s interesting.  If we take this area and say that the Options, Project Preferences, Calculation Units and Rules, and we said that the area – we’re going to do it with 2 decimal places.  Here’s the 1969 times 50. That’s why it’s being rounded here.  So, of course, there are some things you have to be careful about.  Is it going to be misleading?  Is it going to raise questions?  Why did that 20 times 50 get turned into 984?  [1:03:13]

So, another little warning is that the Calculation Units and Rules affects all schedules.  So, whatever you put in for area here is going to be used for anywhere that an area is listed. Let’s just put 1 decimal place.  Maybe that’s going to be a little bit better.  Alright, so now we’re seeing some numbers here. Obviously, this would be 985 if it was truly 19.7, but it’s not begging the question of 20 times 50 being 984.  OK, and so rounding – yeah, it’s rounding incorrectly.  20 is a rounded number.  Use the function Round Up/Down to multiples, said Jerry.   [1:04:01]

Jerry Teacher is an expert at these things, and he’s been teaching me a few things about it. So, today, we’ve gone deeper than I expected on this particular area, but hopefully, you see some of the basics for just getting some reports on areas and the possibility for getting reports for some costing based on numbers that you can refine to reach a point where they’re at least useful for internal purposes.  Whether you ever put them directly onto any drawings is another question, but this definitely can give you some data to work with as you’re creating your design.  [1:04:50]

OK, so let us move on to another area that I think is useful, which is what happens – actually, we’ll go to that other project here. So, when we’re sketching things, we can use our eye.  It’s just natural.  You do it with a pencil. You can do it with the computer. So, if I want something – if I’m drawing a shape here, and let’s just go to the Fill tool.  I can say I want to line this up with this corner, so I hover over this and then go down, and I get a guideline.  [1:05:37]

I click and if I wanted to line it up with this, I can hover over this one, get ARCHICAD to circle that area, and now I can snap, and I know that it’s going to be in line.  Maybe I don’t know in some contexts how big this shape is going to be, so I just sort of eyeball it.  Alright, so now it’s precise snapping – in this case, lining up the left and right sides, but the height or the distance from top to bottom here – the Y value is just by eye.  [1:06:08]

Alright, so let’s say that I do that.  It looks about right here towards this shape.  Now, later, we want to come back and say, “You know what?  What is the dimension of this?” We’ll go and put in a dimension along from here to here, and it’s 57.84 feet.  Alright, now most frequently, in the U.S., you’d be having 57 feet, 8 ½ inches or whatever that is, but this is currently set up for decimal.  [1:06:45]

How would you change that?  That is under the Options, Project Preferences, Dimensions, and the dimensions right now for site plans, which is what we’re currently using says decimal feet whereas if we were in a floor plan or something like that, it would be down to feet and fractional inches.  1/64 is way too detailed, but you could change that to whenever we do schematic plans.  [1:07:20]

This is the Graphisoft standard template. I think that it’s crazy to have the floor plans show the dimensions down to 1/64, although it does force you to be honest about them.  In other words, make sure you’re actually doing a nominal size.  So, let’s just change it to the floor plan combination right now.  Rather odd value.  How would you make this something reasonable?  Well, you could round the dimension because you could make it down to the nearest half-inch or whatever value, but the Marquee tool is a very powerful method for making sketched out shapes and forms into nice, nominal numbers.  [1:08:04]

So, how do you do that?  If I go to the Marquee tool, and we take and surround an area, this area is now included in the marquee. Because it’s included in the marquee, there’s a lot of different things I can do with it.  So, for one thing, if I hit the Delete key, all the stuff that was enclosed goes away.  Now, if I do that, they come back.  [1:08:29]

Another thing, as you know, if I have the marquee around something that’s got 3D, and we go to 3D here, then we’re going to see that part of the design, whatever that is, included there, but a special purpose of the marquee that I would say a lot of people know about, but not everybody remembers to use it, and not even everybody knows you can do this.  You can stretch or shrink or deform geometry.  [1:09:04]

So, what do I mean by that? If I move my mouse within the marquee, and I have the Marquee tool active, we get this funny little symbol. I call it a trident.  It has 3 little arrows on top of a stalk, and if I click within it, I can move this marquee around.  Sometimes you just want to adjust the marquee to a different place.  You didn’t quite draw it the way you wanted, but if I go an element, and I go to a corner or an edge, and I click, now what it’s going to do is modify the geometry.  [1:09:41]

So, if I move this off to the right just some distance – any distance – and click, it has stretched this.  OK, so those shapes are now much bigger.  Now, I could do that just to be like, “Alright, it’s going to be a little bigger here and a little smaller there.”  You can do this just as part of the sketch process, but let’s say that you’ve now delineated this and say that you don’t want it to be 57.10 or whatever.  Let’s just round it to 60.  [1:10:13]

OK, how would you get it to be 60 or 58 or whatever it needs to be?  I can go to this corner, and I can say that that means I have to make it 2 feet wide, and I’d have to calculate how much further you’d go, but you can ask ARCHICAD to do that, and here’s the way you can do it.  I can either type in a value.  Let’s just say 2’-1” here, and you can see it’s now almost 60 there.  So, I could type in a value, but I’d like to have ARCHICAD calculate it precisely because this value is even somewhat rounded.  Even though it looks precise, it may be just a hair off of the number we see.  [1:10:57]

So, I’m going to go and click here on this point and bring it back to this area. Now, if I were to click again, and I’ll just demonstrate this, it basically took those lines and collapsed them, and I guess it felt that with the Fill tool, it would make a fill that was not valid because a fill has to have some volume or some area.  So, it refused to do that, but if I go and position it here, you’ll see in the tracker that it says the distance I’ve gone is 57.10 and whatever, and I’ll say that I’d like to go a different distance.  [1:11:42]

So, I type in, in this case, 60-0, so 60 feet and 0 inches, and then I’m going to type in a minus. What it’s going to do is go back the other way.  So, in this case, I went to the left, and I’m going to back the other way partway, or in this case, more than partway, and I’ll hit minus, and you can see that it’s now reposition the cursor a little bit to the right of where I started, and if you look closely at the number in the tracker, it says -2’-1” and 59/64.  You don’t have to remember that number. There’s going to be no test on it.  [1:12:18]

What it is is the distance it would have to go back the other way to make this a nice, even 60 feet and 0 inches.  So, I’ll hit Enter, and look at that.  OK, alright.  So, I had the dimensions, so it’s easy to see, but we don’t have to have a dimension written there.  I can simply go there, take this point, and go up to this one here, and it says 17’-9”. Well, let’s make it 18’-6”, whatever we want it to be.  I say 18-6-.  It says, “Alright, well, you’d have to move 8 inches and a fraction down.” Alright, it’s now slightly bigger.  [1:13:00]

If I do the Measure tool – hit the M – I’m floating around, and I click on this point, hover over this point – here’s the 18’-6”.  So, the rule here is that the Marquee tool – if you enclose points like these node points on the right-hand corners of those shapes – if you enclose those points, and you do this stretching operation, those points will move.  If a line or an edge of a polygon is partially enclosed, then only the node points will move, and of course, the shape will get bigger or smaller in a very intuitive way.  [1:13:46]

This line didn’t break into pieces.  It just stretched to get a little longer.  So, things that are totally enclosed like this vertical side or this side of the polygon that’s vertical here – they moved the nodes as well, and on this end, basically only this side moved. The other one stayed connected.  So, the Marquee tool is awesome for doing this type of clean-up.  Now, if I have the Marquee tool in a heavy border, most of you know that that means that it will show multiple stories if you take a 3D view whereas if it’s of a light border, then it’s going to give you just one story.  [1:14:30]

In the same way, if I have a building with multiple stories, and let’s just take this stuff here.  Alright, I’m going to copy it. I’m going to go up a story using the keyboard shortcut Command+Up arrow or Ctrl+Up arrow and paste there, and now, if I go to 3D, we have a two-story building up here, right?  OK, so now if I am back on the second floor, and I use the marquee here with the thin border, I could take this back, and let’s just do it part way.  So, I’ve now just made the building a little bit smaller, but only on the one story. [1:15:28]

So, I go to 3D, and you can see what it’s done, but let me just undo this.  If I have the marquee with a heavy border and do the same sort of operation here, then I go to 3D, and we’ll see that they both got shorter.  So, if I undo it, and we just go back to 3D, we’ll see the difference that I did.  So, the heavy marquee will affect multiple stories.  It will show things in multiple stories. It will also affect it in terms of a stretch.  [1:16:06]

Now, what are the other rules that you have to remember?  That is that when you’re working with the Marquee tool, it’s affecting what’s visible – either on one story or multiples stories, so that means it only affects layers that are turned on.  So, if you hide a layer, it’ll be ignored.  If a layer is locked – you may have locked the column grid or something like that, those elements will not readjust.  They will stay in position.   [1:16:40]

Now, if you have groups of elements that you’ve grouped – if the groups are active, meaning that when you select one element, it selects all of them, then when you do this, they will all adjust, even if they’re on hidden layers, whereas if groups are inactive or suspended, then only the ones that you’ve got visible will readjust.  [1:17:08]

So, there are some subtleties there, but that’s the basic rules. Visible and unlocked will be affects by the marquee.  So, can the marquee have an irregular form?  Absolutely.  This geometry method for the marquee has thin or thick, and then we also have polygon, rectangle, or rotated rectangle.  So, the polygon one, I can go in and say that we can do something like this here.  So, this would affect only things here, or if we just go to 3D, we’re going to see a cutout based on that.  [1:17:53]

So, the polygon method allows you to delineate an area and do things with it – view it in 3D, or possibly adjust things.  So, yes, you can work around stuff that way.  You can use it also to select things.  So, if I go to the Zone tool, and I say to select all zones, it’s going to select them all in the marquee. You can see all of these.  Of course, they could be objects like furniture. It could be text and things like that.  So, basically, when you activate a tool, and you go to the Edit menu, and you say Select All, if there’s a marquee, it will only select the ones that are within that marquee.  [1:18:42]

Yes, so there’s a polygon method, and we could also, with the zone tool, go to the rotated one, and then in some cases, you may want a marquee on an angle because your building is on that angle, or part of your building is on that angle, and it makes more sense to deal with it there.  OK, let’s see. So, there’s one other thing I wanted to talk about for sketching, in terms of dimensions, and let me know if – OK, let’s just see here.  [1:19:14]

Frank says, “What happens if you stretch the included volumes in the irregular marquee?”  Well, remember, what it’s looking for is if you have a node point – a corner of something, that will move if it’s inside the marquee.  If you have an edge that is fully enclosed in the marquee, it will move, essentially, because it has both ends included. Now, if the marquee partially encloses a wall, then in that general case, you have one node of the wall in place and one not.  [1:19:52]

It’s not like it will split the wall at that line.  So, it won’t try to break it at the edge of the line.  It will just look at the node points.  So, that’s the key thing.  Another thing is that if a window or door is included, and you do this, I think that they just stay still.  I don’t think that they actually move.  Let’s just test that out.  [1:20:16]

So, here’s a door, right?  Let’s go and draw the marquee here, and I’ll take this over.  Oh, in this case, the door did move.  I was incorrect about that.  Obviously, if I had the marquee not including the door, then it doesn’t move.  Now, it will not stretch the door, so even though you might say one side of the door is in and one side is not, and I move this over, you’ll see that in this case, it ignored the door. So, it has to have both sides in there.  [1:20:58]

Now, if you think about it, objects and doors are generally – the geometry is based on parameters.  How wide is this door?  It’s 5 feet for a double door, 1.5 meter – whatever that is, and you don’t want to just arbitrarily stretch it while you’re stretching the other elements.  Now, you can grab the door, and you can pull its handle to do that or type in a new value, but the marquee will not deform it.  The same thing goes for furniture, chairs, toilets – things like that.  [1:21:31]

Some you might want, like the cabinet, countertop, or maybe you want the counter to stretch or something like that.  You’ll have to manually go and select objects like that and stretch them. The marquee will not do it.  So, it will work on walls, slabs, roofs, and other 2D elements that are geometric, like lines and fills.  [1:21:59]

Now, if you did stretch a roof, you can get some odd results, depending upon what nodes you’ve included.  So, you’ll get used to it when you play around with it, but the main thing is the marquee tool can be used for refining or changing your design at any time. Early on, I find it very useful to just tighten up things.  You’ve drawn it by eye.  You get it certain proportions. You’ve snapped to certain things, and then afterward you move things to either snap or get a nice, even number for the size.  [1:22:35]

Alright, let’s talk about even numbers in a different way.  Alright, when I’m doing a wall, and I’m making it out of – let’s say we’ll go to composite here, and we’ve got – do we have a CMU here?  Masonry, foam board?  OK, I don’t see something that would quite do it. Let me just go back to the masonry.  Maybe masonry – structural is actually what I want there.  [1:23:16]

OK, so if I’m drawing this wall here, and we look at it in 3D. So, the wall is made of blocks, right?  Typically, when you’re doing that, you’re going to aim to have it start at a block and end at a block, but not always. Certainly, that’s something that can be an optimizing factor.  So, when you put in openings, you’re going to want to have it line up to a block.  [1:23:48]

So, I’ll just stretch this a little bit. That would be an example of one you’d want to generally avoid if you have a choice.  So, how would you do that?  Well, you can use what’s called a snap grid to help you quickly sketch things but keep them on a nice, even unit.  So, here’s how the grid snap can help you in conceptual design here.  [1:24:15]

So, I’m up on the second floor.  Well, let’s not worry about it being raised up in the air.  Let’s look at grid options, and there’s lots of stuff you can do with grids, so I’m just going to focus on one particular area, but to make the context clear, I’ll say to show the grid display.  Alright, so I just used an option under the View menu saying to show the construction grid.  [1:24:42]

So, what is the construction grid?  It looks sort of like graph paper.  The grid and background command allows you to say what the color of the grid line is.  You could make them a more prominent dark black or red or blue or something like that.  You can also change the spacing to 4 feet. We can have 1 meter, 1.5 meters – whatever number you want.  [1:25:06]

Now, if I turn on the snap – where is it?  Grid snap, snap to construction grid.  Now, when I draw the wall, you can see how it’s jumping to the nearest thing.  So, this is now a 4-foot, 8-foot, 12, 16, 20-foot long wall. I go up 8 or, let’s just give us some more space.  12, alright.  So, that’s fine.  If you want to work in those large units, go ahead and do that. Now, you could set this grid to be 1 foot.  You could set it to be 8 inches, but these lines would get really dense, so to some extent, it would be harder to work.  [1:25:55]

Now, I could turn off the display of this and still have it jump to this number.  You can see how it’s jumping here. So, that’s a possibility, but we could have the construction grid display show but then do what’s called a snap grid.  So, under the grids and editing plane options, we go to grids and backgrounds. There is a main grid, and you can also have an auxiliary grid if you want to say the columns are 1 foot thick, and we’re having 12 feet between columns. There are some things you can do here, which I’m not going to go into right now, where you have combinations of multiple grids.  [1:26:43]

The snap grid is very useful.  Let’s just say that we wanted it to be snapping to the nearest 8 inches here, just to give an example of something that maybe is relating to the side of blocks.  I’m not sure – 16 inches or whatever.  Let’s just say 8 inches.  Now, this snap grid – if I go and say that my grid snap options are to the snap grid, now let’s just zoom in a little bit.  As I click, you can see this is 2 feet, 2’-8”, 3’-4”, 4 feet – so it’s jumping every 8 inches, and I know for those of you who are metric, if you’re as familiar with feet and inches, it’s really weird.  [1:27:29]

There’s 12 inches to a foot and all of that, but basically, you can see it jumping to the nearest value.  Now, if I look at this in 3D, what do we have here?  It’s a nice, even number, given the blocks that we’ve got – nice, even value.  Now, I started on a snap point because I just hovered and clicked, but let’s say we had something that’s not on the grid snap here, like this.  This is a funny context, but let’s say this is a point that we wanted to start the wall, and it’s not on this snap grid, right?  [1:28:18]

OK, so what I’m going to do is turn off the snap to snap grid.  By the way, you can turn it on and off with this keyboard shortcut Shift+S.   So, hold down the Shift key like you’re doing a capital letter, and type S.  Now, there’s no snap, and I can click, and I can do this just freeform, right?  OK, now I can go and move the measurement origin, which is this option here – the user origin to this point.  [1:28:53]

So, I click on it.  Now, that does 2 things.  If I use the Measure tool with the M, the numbers are going to relate to this zero.  Now, with the M, most of the time, I just am going to go a point, clicking, and then measuring from that point but this also just allows me to – if I’m measuring, just see distances relative to some origin point.  [1:29:20]

In addition, if I turn on that snap grid – so, let’s say I do that Shift+S to turn it on, now the snap grid is – here’s the 8 inches, 1’-4”, 2 feet, etc.  The snap grid is now lined up from that point. So, by putting the user origin on an important point, the snap grid will move, even though the construction grid didn’t move around. The snap grid will line up, so that’s how you can use the snap grid to say that you’re going to be doing something here with masonry blocks, and you want it to be a nice, even division of the masonry units, and it’s going to start here, and it’s just going to be a nice, even unit.  OK, we’ll stop it there, and you know it’s going to be a good value.  [1:30:13]

In a similar way, let’s say – remember, this is now on a grid point.  What if I popped in a window here?  Now, normally, you would be popping in a window, and you want to either visually place it about here, or you want to snap it to the center between things, or you type in that you want it to be so much of a distance from the corner, but you want to say it’s going to be about here – let’s put it at a masonry line, then we can go and say to put it in by corner because the line is at the corner, not the middle, and we can use the snap, and you can see there’s this little dot moving around on screen as I move my crosshair.  [1:30:56]

Now, that dot – you can see how it’s jumping.  Alright, so now I know that the window is going to be at that point.  Now, it’s got some sort of reveal.  What is this window?  Let’s just select that window. God, what the heck is this?  I don’t even know why it’s got a reveal here.  Where is the reveal? I don’t know, reveal here, and it’s got some negative reveal. Anyway, let’s not worry about that.  I just want to make the point that the grid snap is putting the corner of the window at a nice, even division based on this user origin and the measurement division – 8 inches or 1 foot or whatever value that is for your blocks.  [1:32:09]

Alright, so Chris asks about previous parts of the section. Can I make the costing schedule available?  Yes.  I will post something that you can use. Christian says, “Can you move the construction grid also?”  Yes, you can.  So, how would you do that?  So, let me just deselect this. We’re going to turn off – alright, so I’m going to use the Shift+S or just select grid snap and turn it off. By the way, you can also turn this off using this button.  That’s the grid snap there.  [1:32:57]

Alright, now we have this thing.  We could have an orthogonal grid. That means on the normal axis – x and y, we can have a rotated grid, and we can set a rotated grid, and we’re actually going to use a rotated grid to reposition the grid to a new point.  It’s not instantly intuitive, but it’s so easy that it will make sense in 1 minute from now. You’ll understand that.  [1:33:28]

If I set a rotated grid, and I say that it remembered whatever was the last rotated grid, and that’s probably in a 45.  Well, if I go to the view grids here – set rotated grid, and I click on a point, and let’s say I wanted it on a 30° angle.  So, I’ll say A330.  Alright, so now I’ve just said to start the grid point here, and that’s the angle.  Of course, I could have snapped it to some part of the wall and say that’s my grid, but you notice that that point started right here.  [1:34:08]

So, how would you get a rotated grid that was orthogonal?  You use the same command, view, grid and editing plane options, set rotated grid, click on a point that you want, and go horizontally or vertically, and now you have a new orientation for the construction grid.  Now, this is a modified grid.  If you look under the View menu, grids and editing options, it is rotated.  [1:34:37]

If you set it back to orthogonal, it will be back to whatever was the original value, but if we go back to the – remember when I put it on a rotated grid?  It remembered the last one. Now it’s back here. Now, of course, you could move it to another part of the building, set the grid there, but that’s how you would do it. You set a rotated grid from whatever point you want to start and either rotate it or make it horizontal or vertical, and your gird will start at the point you want.  [1:35:11]

So, Christian, I hope that answers that question.  So, we’ve got a little over an hour and a half.  I think I actually did cover all of the points that I wanted here.  I talked about the construction grid and the snap grid, marquee adjustments to the building, and essentially, just how you can work freely with sketching to get your shapes and forms.  Use snaps. I showed you very briefly just the idea of hovering over an element and then moving to get with the grid line having it lined up.  [1:35:49]

Then, also, we had something that was just done sketch-wise, and you want to tighten it up to a nice, nominal number.  The marquee is a great way to do that.  Now, you could literally select a wall and stretch it and tell it to be a new length, and we can type in a value.  The marquee is great because it works on multiple elements at the same time, which is very natural.  [1:36:14]

Alright, so let me know if there are any final questions or comments before we finish up.  Alright, Jimmy, thank you.  Jimmy says, “Powerful techniques.”  Christian, great.  Typical ARCHICAD logic – somewhat non-intuitive, but easy when you know how it works.  Very true.  Yeah, it would be nice if you just had an option saying to move the construction grid.  Alright, I don’t think there is one.  I think it’s just set rotated grid, and make it start here and go horizontal.  [1:36:58]

Alright, so thank you, Diane.  Gestur, Karen, Tom, alright, and John Dunham.  Alright, awesome.  So, we’ll be continuing tomorrow.  We have a coaching call as usual on Thursdays.  Now, what are we going to be looking at next? Let me just bring that up so that I have a quick reminder.  So, we’re in the 2020 course. Last time was conceptual design with geometric constraints and requirements, so setbacks, areas, etc. This lesson, which will be posted shortly is about sketching, precision, and reporting there. [1:37:52]

The next one – I think we’ve done all the stuff from the original Best Practices course plus some additional things like the morph stuff, and we’re going to be looking at some early modeling approaches.  So, some of the ways you use different approaches – you could play this video here to look at the old one, but we’ll be going into ways that you can work with massing, profiles – different ways that you can just do concept modeling quickly, easily, without getting too bogged down in details.  [1:38:35]

You know, one of my favorite little things there is you want to put in some kitchen cabinets, and you don’t really want to deal with how many cabinets you’re going to have, what sizes they’re going to be, and you just want to say the kitchen cabinets will be against these 2 walls, and we’ll have an island over here, and you can use a complex profile that is the shape of a kitchen cabinet with a little kick space underneath and a space for the countertop that sticks over the edge a tiny bit and has a backsplash – what do they call it?  Updraft?  No, up-something.  [1:39:11]

So you have a profile, and you can literally just stretch it around and very quickly, as a concept, you can see where those cabinets will be.  So, we’ll be looking at things like that, and I’ll probably also, as I look at the original lesson here, be adding onto some additional things that would expand it beyond what I created a few years ago.  [1:39:40]

So, thank you all for joining me today.  I’m really excited to be presenting this to all of you and sharing ARCHICAD’s power and the best practices for using the software.  So, please feel free to write some comments, send me some feedback.  If you’ve been enjoying the course, I always love to hear that.  If you have any suggestions, you can add them via email, or you can do it in the feedback area here.  [1:40:11]

Feedback can be suggestions or, “Hey, really enjoyed such and such lesson.”  Any feedback that you think would be useful that’s public, then please put it in there.  So, we’ll be back with more soon.  Take care.  Thanks for watching.  [1:40:30]