2020 | 024 – Site Modeling – Project Location, Story Settings, Intro to Terrain Mesh

Hey, welcome, everyone, to the ARCHICAD Best Practices 2020 training course.  Today is – what is it?  Monday, April 8^th, 2019.  Let me just switch over my web cam here to the web cam that’s facing the side a little bit.  Let me know that you can hear me and see me.   Let me move my microphone where I can’t see it.  It’s actually this web cam podcaster mic on a boom stand, and it seems to be working pretty well.  Out of sight but making the sound clear enough.  [0:01:02]

So, I’m going to bring up Slack here and verify that everyone is in.  Alright, so Monica, Frank, Scott, etc.  Scott, Tom, Ken, Gestur – OK, everybody here.  Good.  So, today we’re going to be moving on to focus on site modeling. So, we’ve basically done the foundations of ARCHICAD Best Practices in terms of getting organized and knowing how to approach your project setup as a whole. We’ve looked at conceptual modeling, certainly up to a certain level.  [0:01:51]

Now, we’re going to be looking at working with the site, which clearly is one of the ways that you might get started.  I think that sometimes, projects are really placed somewhere in the middle of a site, and you don’t have big constraints, and so you’re working on the floor plan, partitions, square footage or area, budget, program, etc., and it may not be dependent upon the site, but certainly placing it on the site to visualize it and to deal with setbacks and other requirements and road work access, parking – these frequently are a major part of your design process.  [0:02:42]

So, we’re going to be looking at setting your project location in space, setting the orientation of the north arrow, bringing in site survey information for property lines as well as topographic contours, using a variety of different file formats - .dwg, .pdf, and survey files that can come in a variety of other formats such as xyz point of references or point clouds.  So, we’ll be looking at these types of workflow.  [0:03:19]

The site modeling section of this course will definitely go at least 3 lessons, possibly more – possibly 4 to 6, depending upon how deep we go and how quickly I cover the basics.  So, we’re going to be developing it as we move on for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll cover it in a fair amount of detail and use both theory and practical applications. What I mean by practical applications is in this kind of case, I send out an email.  Some of you saw that this morning or earlier this morning, saying that I’d like to get some samples of site surveys and topographic information from real projects to use as a context for the presentations for the training.  [0:04:23]

So, quite a few of you did respond.  I think probably about 8 or 10 people responded.  I want to thank you.  I will be reviewing them probably in the next 24 to 48 hours and starting to pick out some of them for demonstration, and it will be focused not so much on whether they did it right but more that here is the context.  [0:04:48]

What’s the best way to approach it?  It may be that what you’ve sent in is actually just raw materials, and then I can be talking about how to approach the project when you do have a survey in this format, or perhaps some of you have sent in some .pln files where you’ve already done the site terrain, and I’ll be looking at both how you did it and maybe some recommendations or some ways to go beyond that, or simply talking about how you did it and the methods that are in use and the benefits of those methods.  [0:05:30]

So, I’ll be getting started.  I see comments here. Alright, so Bob said he would love to send me a plan for an Oakland house but lost all of his plans.  I remember you had a computer meltdown and didn’t have a backup, which is really frustrating.  I see Monica.  I know you sent me a file by WeTransfer.  So, I will be looking at these before the next session and using some of them, and I do thank all of you that contributed bcc it will give me some good materials.  [0:06:08]

Alright, so let’s look at the site modeling and the concepts here.  By the way, another side note is that I’ve been managing the 2020 course structure just as a series of individual lessons, but we’re now up to 23.  So, this is the 24^th one in the 2020 course, and I’m going to start grouping them.  I’m going to reorganize it so that, for example, the concept modeling will all be under one heading with several individual lessons.  The site modeling will be under one heading, and some of the early sections will be also grouped in a way that makes it just easier to focus on things and see the relationship of those modules.  [0:06:57]

So, let’s just talk about the concept of working with a site in ARCHICAD and its relationship to design of a building on a site.  So, there’s a concept in ARCHICAD of the project location, which, of course, is clearly related to what we commonly think of as either the physical address – the street name and number and city – or the latitude and longitude of the specific location on the planet as well as an orientation.  [0:07:40]

So, we have an orientation for how we’re drawing, how the building is facing, and where is north in relationship to that.  So, when you put in the project location information into ARCHICAD, it allows you to coordinate the project model, where you’re just building this virtual building – this abstract model of the real world – and put it into the context of where it is on the planet.  [0:08:08]

Now, the project zero – when we’re working with a project, it can be anything you wish, but generally, the most common, and I think the most useful way to approach it would be the floor level of the ground floor. It could be any other nearby point – perhaps the grade outside the door could be a geodetic survey point.  Maybe you have a survey point that’s down the block, and that could be your zero if you wanted, but having it at the floor level of the ground floor makes it very easy to say the next level up, if you have multiples stories, of course, will be 10 feet or 3.5 meters – whatever that is.  [0:09:03]

So, in your modeling and your settings, you’re talking about a relationship to an easy reference as opposed to sea level or some other distant reference.  If you’re in certain parts of the world, you may use a different reference.  For example, in Australia, they have the Australian Height Datum, and that’s based on a sea level calculation from a historical time frame – I think in the 60s, and since tides go up and down, they decided not to call it sea level.  They’ll call it a datum point – AHD.  [0:09:40]

So, we’re setting the project zero in relationship to sea level.  I’ll just say sea level in general, and it does allow you to then relate surveys and topographic and contour information to the outside world.  So, we have a concept of essentially the model having its own reference system and then the world – we have a metric saying where this outside world is in relationship to the project or vice versa.  Where is the project in relationship to the earth that we know of?  [0:10:24]

So, let’s take a look at some of the settings that are commonly used here and just contrast different ways of approaching this.  So, go into ARCHICAD here.  So, I’m just creating a brand new project for this purpose using the U.S. standard template as opposed to MasterTemplate in this case, and we’ll just close this here. So, when we’re first working on a project, at some point, you’re going to want to look at the story structure if you have more than one story.  [0:11:05]

To access that, you can go under the Design menu, Story Settings, or you can right-click on any Project Map view point for a story or any other View Map view of a story, and when you right-click, you’ll have the option for story settings.  So, we have the ground floor, which can be called different names – first floor entry – that is number 1 in the U.S..  In international versions, it’s zero, and so in the U.S., the second floor being the one up above is number two, and in international usage, this would be called the first floor.  [0:11:51]

So, we’d have the ground floor and then the first floor – zero and one.  Now, ultimately, we have, of course, these elevation points here, and this is the simplest example, where they’re all a nice, even number 10 feet apart – roughly 3 ½ meters.  Now, if we decide that we want to have a higher story – let’s say the ground floor has got a higher ceiling, then we can see the height to next will be 12 feet – let’s say 4 meters or something.  [0:12:21]

Now, when I change that here, it moves the entire upper part of the building higher.  So, it’s like taking a crane and hoisting everything above.  Now, I’ll just put it back to the 10 feet, and let’s look at the different between doing that and changing the elevation of the next story up to the 12 feet.  So, if I change this 12 feet here, what happens is it does change the height similarly, but it leaves the gap to the next story.  It leaves the story above unchanged.  [0:12:59]

So, we’re basically just moving one story at a time when we change the elevation.  So, if you do want the entire building to move, then you want to use height to next, and if you only want to move one story, then we’re going to just handle that.  Now, in the old days – and I’ve been working with ARCHICAD for 30 years, the story structure and the project zero and relationship to sea level was a little bit simpler or more simplistic, and so sometimes, people would say that we’re going to have the first floor be called the site here.  [0:13:39]

We might say that that is sea level, and then we might call this one – I’ll just name it first floor, etc.  So, we might do that, and then we’d say that if we say – instead of site, let’s just say sea level.  We might say to go and make this first floor – maybe it’s at 125 feet above sea level, about 40 meters or something like that.  Well, if I said 125, it’s going to beep at me because it basically says you can’t take this story up above the next story that is in the structure.  [0:14:17]

Basically, you can only bring it even with it, where it has a zero.  So, let’s just put it back to the 10 here, and say if we wanted to change our story structure dramatically like that, then what we would need to do is to boost this up to hoist the whole upper part of the structure, or actually, let’s just take this here and say 125.  Now, what that’s saying is that from sea level to the next story, which is where we’re drawing the actual building is 125 feet in distance, and this is where we start.  So, that’s the way that you can move these things around and not get into issues.  [0:14:59]

Now, another possibility – if I put this back to the original here, and we put this down to 10, is to insert a story below.  So, sometimes people will put in a story below for site. Of course, you could have a basement, foundation story, and then a site below that.  We can add in negative stories.  Now, when you insert below, it will always be a negative story in this case.  If you’re in international usage, then you’d be at zero and go down to -1.  Here, we go from 1 to -1 in the U.S. versions.  [0:15:42]

Now, in terms of the site, if I wanted to, I could say this is -125 and say that that is the level of the sea or reference, and then I put in my site terrain in relationship to that, and that will work, although there are some limitations or some issues with it.  So, what I recommend instead is that we just work with the – let’s say that we have a basement here, and let’s just say it’s a full height basement 10 feet below here.  Then, I would recommend that we actually put the site information on the same story as the ground floor.  [0:16:35]

Now, there are pros and cons. It’s not like there’s only 1 way to do it, but it does give you the advantage that you can see the footprint of the building – the walls, the shell of the building in relationship to the site with no problem at all.  So, that is at least one positive about that, and so putting the site with the ground floor has some benefits.  Now, if we do that, let’s just say OK.  All I’ve done is add an extra story here at the basement story there.  [0:17:09]

Then, what we want to look at is the options, project preference, project location.  In fact, we do want to work with this in any event, regardless of whether you have a basement or where you place the site. So, when we’re creating the project location, we have the opportunity to give it a name.  Now, this project name is going to be retained and available for placement on the layout sheets using auto text.  So, you’re familiar with auto text, where you can say you want to put text or a label, and it has some information that ARCHICAD is going to fill in based on the context, the current environment – perhaps you have a print date, and it’s going to print that and always update.  [0:18:01]

Last time it was printed, you might have something that has information about an element like what the wall skins are or a note about the element, or you can have the information, particularly on the layouts, about the project as a whole. So, whatever we put in here is going to be available in the auto text for use, particularly on layouts or a site plan.  [0:18:26]

Now, we can put in the latitude and longitude manually here, so if you do have that information from the survey, or you look it up online to get latitude and longitude, you can pop that in.  If you just want to get it within general area for sun calculations because obviously, where you are on the planet affects when the sun rises and falls for a given day of the year. If you simply want to get in the ballpark, then you could choose a predefined city.  So, for example here, this is Columbus, Ohio. Let me go and see if they have something near me.  [0:19:05]

So, we have San Francisco, CA here.  So, I say OK, and by the way, let’s look here at the numbers 42 and 71.  Say OK, and you can see 37 and 122, and then we can set the time zone. Now, why would you care about the time zone?  Again, if you’re calculating when the sun rises and falls – if you’re calculating shadow studies at 3 o’clock on the spring equinox or something like that, then having it set to be where on the planet and the standard time will allow ARCHICAD to do those sort of things.  [0:19:41]

Now, here is where we’re looking at the sea level, and this is where you’re saying what I call project zero is a certain distance above my reference altitude of sea level.  So, let’s just take that 125 as a number.  Again, roughly 40 meters here.  Now, what is the north orientation?  So, placing all of these things in terms of the location on the planet does not specify which way is north.  [0:20:18]

So, when you’re drawing the project, ARCHICAD – if you don’t tell it anything else, will assume that north is straight up.  Now, you can drag this around and get it approximately.  If you’re looking at a paper survey, and you don’t have a number, you can say north is about there, and you can move it until it looks right. [0:20:39]

You can also type in a value, and of course, if you have a survey drawing, then you can measure that using ARCHICAD standard tools or in any CAD program, you can say what the angle is, relative to the vertical or relative to the zero, and the zero in a CAD environment is going along the x axis, and it’s polar coordinates, so zero would be going to the right, and 90 degrees would be going straight up on the plan drawings.  [0:21:16]

Now, we can also use some connections to Google Maps.  I’m not going to jump off there right now, but there are some built-in tools to be able to go find things in Google Maps and also to pull information in.  I’m not going to focus on that right now. We’ll look at that later on in the site modeling training lessons.  So, I’ve now set up a north relationship to where I’m drawing the project.  Now, I’ve got my altitude, and I picked latitude and longitude, in this case, based on a nearby city, and I say OK.  [0:21:58]

I don’t see any change on the plan. Why?  Because I’ve just said in relationship to the abstract world that I’m drawing my model in, this is how I want to relate it to the outside world, and we’re not seeing the outside world, so we don’t have any visual change, but let’s draw, for example, a box of walls, just as a simple structure like this, and we’ll select one of the walls and ask what the settings of the wall are.  [0:22:35]

So, right now, it says that this wall goes from zero to zero. Basically, it lives on the first floor. That’s the story we’re on. It goes up to the second floor, so it’s going right up to the reference level of the second floor, passing through the slab but probably intersecting and making a clean drawing in a section, based on building materials.  So, this is an abstract, simple model, just from one story to the next.  [0:23:15]

Now, in relationship to sea level, it already knows based on what I put in that the bottom of the wall here is going 125 feet above sea level.  Now, we could ask how it is in relationship to project zero.  Well, since we set the story to be project zero – it is zero.  Now, if we were on another story – let’s say we’re on the third floor, two stories up, so it’s 20 feet above the ground floor, then the home story would be the third floor, and this would say 20 feet because it’s 2 stories up.  So, project zero does give us a reference to building elements, typically, because that’s how we relate the project zero to the building itself, whereas looking at it in relationship to sea level gives us other data.  [0:24:16]

Now, we can also have other reference levels.  So, these other reference levels might be some other – maybe in the jurisdiction, you have some measurement of where the street is in front of the house, and your maximum elevation is in relationship to that point.  So, then you might want to just define that reference level as something that you can easily just cross check there.   Maybe it’s some other neighboring building, or it’s an existing condition or anything else.  It could be a reference level.  [0:24:54]

Now, in order to see the reference levels or to set them, we can go to the options, project preferences, and we can look at reference levels.  So, quick reminder. Project preferences deal with this project.  A template, of course, will have project preferences that will be inherited when you start a new project, but this is project-based.  Work environment are in a similar areas, but they relate to the workstation. So, for example, your keyboard shortcuts are on your work environment, and you can copy them to another computer that you use or around the office, but they would not go across when you send that file over to another person.  [0:25:42]

What does go across are all of the project preferences.  Are you working in feet and inches or metric?  What are your preferred styles of dimensions?  How do you prefer to calculate?  How are the zones being calculated, in terms of impaired clearances and things like that? What are these reference levels?  So, the reference levels for the project are available to you and will stay with that project, essentially, through its live, unless you change them.  [0:26:14]

So, this reference level, you can give it a name.  So, we could call it street level or something like that, and then we can put in a value.  So, it’s really just a convenience so you measure at any time.  You can select any element or use the Measure tool and say that you would like to measure in relationship to that level, and you can see sea level here.  I can’t change the name because it is set up in the ARCHICAD standards.  [0:26:43]

I don’t know in Australia if it actually says sea level or if it says AHD, but basically, I can’t change the level here because it’s set in the project location, but the reference levels that we’re looking at can be changed, and we also – project zero is defined as zero.  That’s just the basic starting point of everything else.  If I go here to some other controls under the project preferences, we’re not going to look at them right now.  [0:27:16]

OK, so just wanted to explain the reference levels.  Now, let’s look at putting in a slab underneath this, and so this slab has a top surface – right now, zero.  It’s saying that the reference plane is the top for this very simple slab that’s made of just concrete on gravel.  So, it’s the top here, and it’s at zero, relative to the story, which of course is relative to project zero again.  Zero, but if I say sea level, it’s up at 125.  [0:27:57]

Now, just going to show the sea level as a reference doesn’t change anything.  It just simply visually displays it, but if I say that this is going to be one foot below – it’s going to be lower, and then there’s going to be another platform or stem walls or something like that.  If I say 124, then you can see it says -1.  So, it’s going to be one foot below the main level of the walls in this case.  So, if this was the hardscape around the building or the grade around the building as opposed to the floor of the building, then of course, it might very well be lower than the rest of it.  [0:28:43]

If I switch it back to project zero, of course, it’s going to be -1 because it is the first floor.  It’s the zero, so we can have that.  Now, let’s look at creating a terrain model, and before I do that, I’m just going to check on comments and see if there are any comments or questions on what I’ve done, and I’ll take a sip from my coffee.  [0:29:09]

OK, so I see some comments before we got going, or actually just during my explanation here.  Ken says, “Boy, I was surprised when I wanted to orient the floor plan orthogonally on the layout with a plan north while the orientation on the site was oriented differently. It took a while to get the building back together.”  So, we’re going to be looking at how you can have the site plan on a layout have a different orientation from the building plans that are your primary focus, in terms of modeling and documenting the design.  [0:29:55]

So, you can easily have things in different orientations, and it’s just important to understand where you make these changes in order to not mess things up.  Monica asks, “What if we have a basement, but the site is at a higher story?”  Well, it’s very common for the subterranean levels to go down in the negative numbers of stories, possibly many stories if you have an underground mall or underground parking and things like that.  [0:30:29]

The site really can be on any layer or any level.  I just generally like the idea that it’s at the same level as the ground floor, where it’s assuming that the ground floor is where you enter the building and is at the main site level.  Now, steeply sloping terrain – it is possible that your ground floor where your roadway is up on a higher level, and so it’s up on the third floor, and you’re going to say it’s 3, 2, 1, and 1 has nothing to do with the site.  The site is way up there.  [0:31:10]

So, there are distinctions you’re going to make, but ultimately, you need to think of your building structure in the way that you’d like to label it.  I’d say that in general, use ARCHICAD’s numbering in an intuitive fashion, so the story called 1 in the U.S. – I’d say to use that to put in your first floor. If you’re international, use the zero story to put in what you call your ground floor.  Now, the site can have a relationship to the stories, and it could be almost anything.  [0:31:45]

I mean, you could potentially have the entire structure buried into a hillside, and only the roof is sticking out with some ventilation or something like that, but in general, I’d say to put the site and the actual terrain where you want to see the building footprint, the primary one. That’s a good starting point.  Alright, so I see Susan has a question she’s typing in.  So, we’ll wait a moment and take another sip, and then answer Susan’s question.  [0:32:21]

In the story settings window, what is the purpose of the box to the right?  I’m not sure what you were writing in there, but I think I know the question.  Boxes to the right?  OK, so when I’m in these story settings, and by the way, any of these views that have a symbol of a plan, and that would include, say, architectural code summary here or plans – any of these ones. If I right-click on it, we’ll see that in addition to view settings, there are story settings available.  [0:33:02]

So, any plan view gives you quick access to that.  Now, these boxes to the right – you’ll notice that above the list of boxes, there’s a symbol that has a line and two triangles, and this is meant to represent the story levels.  So, commonly, in sections and elevations, you may have story levels indicated to the sides of the drawing – either one side or both sides, and you can determine which of these stories you’d like to reference.  [0:33:38]

So, in general, we’d say real stories that you like to reference – you put a checkmark, and there will be a story line off to the side of the section with a reference.  Sometimes, you have different stories for a variety of purposes.  In a complex project, you might use some extra negative stories for modules.  So, you might have a module definition for a unit type down in a negative story.  It’s not a real story.  It’s just where the elements are being drawn, and you don’t want to show that in the story structure.  [0:34:12]

So, sometimes people will do a top plate story and a roof story, and they want to have the line going off to the side, saying that this is the top plate, and they don’t want to have a line for the roof, and they use these stories for different purposes.  So, basically, this turns on or off the views off to the side.  So, you can see the roof does not show with a line in this case.  [0:34:40]

Alright, so let’s look at the basics of creating a terrain, and I’m going to do something totally simple and abstract at first, and then we’ll be looking at how you would be working with .dwg and .pdf and other input for surveys.  So, I’m going to go to the Mesh tool, and we’re going to create a terrain environment for this little building, and given that I’m doing this just in the abstract, I’m going to just draw a few points and click on the last point again to finish the polygon because this will always be a closed boundary.  [0:35:29]

These points here are all set up with individual elevations, but they all start out initially with an elevation that is the zero here.  Now, the 3 feet here – in this case, or about 1 meter – is the thickness of this.  So, it is a platform that is 3 feet or 1 meter thick, and it’s coming up to the zero. Now, if I look in 3D here, and we zoom out, we can see that we just have a platform.  Now, I can go to any point on the platform and raise this point up.  [0:36:15]

I can press down on the corner here in 3D and use the option in the pet palette for raising the Z height.  So, X and Y are your floor plan coordinates, and Z is the height.  So, I can say I’d like to take this up, and I can type in an elevation value.  You can see the tracker is showing the numbers, and I can either snap to something like the top of the wall here.  So, in some cases, that’s very convenient.  In some cases, you might want to do it by eye, just for conceptual sketches, and obviously, in most cases, you’re going to be setting the terrain to match something that is specified in a drawing.  [0:36:59]

So, if I say it’s up at 12’-6” – what is that, roughly 4 meters?  That’s now got a slope, and you can see that it’s grading down to the building and the back corner of this building, or this corner of the building is slightly buried in the earth, and I’ll go and take this one and say that this is also going up, and let’s just say that it’s 10 feet.  So, it’s almost as high as that, and we’re now burying the building here.  [0:37:35]

Let’s look at what happens on the floor plan.  Nothing, because we’re only seeing the outlines of these points.  Now, if I select the mesh and go to a corner, one of the options here is to change the Z height, and it will say that this is up at 12’-6” in relationship to the mesh reference plane.  So, remember that I set the reference of the mesh at zero. That’s the project zero, in this case, and this is a certain distance above it. [0:38:09]

Now, I could type in a value here or not, but this is a way that we can do it. So, we have the 12’-6”.  Let me just hit Escape and go get this one here – the Z height, and it says 10 feet.   Remember those are the numbers that I had, and I can go and, let’s say, take this one at the Z, and it’s saying zero.  Let’s say 6 feet.  Now, this is the highest point. The one in the upper right is a little bit lower.  This is much lower, and these two are at zero.  So, this plane here is at the lowest point of the site.  [0:38:51]

Now, maybe it makes more sense if I were to go and say that this point is the highest. In other words, the site grades upward to this back corner.  So, let me take this up to 15 feet here, and when we go to 3D, we’re going to see some slight changes. So, this is, if I measure it using the M key, you can see that the Z coordinate is 15 feet, and so it’s now grading from this highest point down.  [0:39:26]

Now, in general, what I recommend when you have a site terrain is that you define the boundaries based on either the area of the earth that you want to include that goes beyond the property, or you cut it neatly like a cookie cutter to be the property boundaries.  That can be done either way. Sometimes, you want to show the context.  You’ve got your little lot, and there’s some context around it that you want to show – whether it’s for site lines and view cards or how the building relates to neighboring buildings or other considerations.  [0:40:08]

In general, what I suggest is that you start with modeling the outer boundary so that you get the prevailing grade, and then you deal with contours.  Now, contours are certainly going to be reported in most – well, in topographic data, and so it’s very easy to set up contour lines in ARCHICAD.  Now, the contour lines will come in, either as 2D or 3D information, and we can actually import 3D models in certain formats, but the most common thing that I’ve seen over the years, and even still – given that technology has changed – I think the most common thing is to get the 2D topographic contour map.  [0:41:04]

So how do we deal with that?  Of course, if you remember, I’m dealing with this in relationship to the project zero right now, but I’m going to talk about how we deal with it on the contours, which generally are reported based on sea level.  So, we’re going to be looking at that in a moment, and let’s see if there’s any questions on what I just did here.  [0:41:28]

So, Roy says, “Hi Eric, is there a way to get the number 1,2, etc., off of the story settings?”  I’m not quite sure what you mean.  Oh, the number in terms of the story number.  OK, so you’re talking about the story settings or the story levels in a section.  So, let me know what you’re referring to.  Stories will always have a number, but you don’t have to display it if you don’t want to.  [0:42:02]

Scott says, “How would you handle setback or easement lines so they would show in 3D?”  Good question, Scott. Let me see if I can work that into the presentation. Monica says, “The blue line is set where?”  OK, it’s good that we’re getting these questions so I can address them as we move forward.  Alright, so Roy says, “The story level.”  Monica’s asking about the blue line, so let’s answer those quick questions.  [0:42:30]

So, if I go back here into ARCHICAD and rotate this around, you can see this blue line here is always horizontal, in terms of a mesh. The blue line is the reference level.  So, you can see this little symbol here that asks where is the reference level?  It’s just got a tiny dashed line to indicate what we’re talking about.  It’s asking where that is in relationship to the project zero.  So, height and home offset.  This is the height relative to the story.  [0:43:14]

If we say relative to sea level, now we’re going to say that the top line here, which is the blue line, is 125 because if you remember, I set up the project zero at 125, and since I made it 3 feet thick or about a meter, this is the bottom, the 122.  So, in general, when you have terrain mesh, you are laying out a convenient reference point as a starting point, and then you have a platform.  It could be zero, but most commonly, it’s just got a little bit of thickness to start out with, and then you raise up the points from there.  [0:44:00]

Now, in general, and I’m going to be going through contours in a moment.  In general, we want to have the blue line – the reference level here, this zero, be something that makes sense in relationship to the lowest point on the site.  In other words, in general, I personally don’t like seeing the blue line floating up in space and having the site contours below it.  I like having the blue line below and all of these points being some offset above it.  [0:44:37]

Technically, you can take these points down.  So, this point here – I could take the Z height down to a negative value like this. You can see the blue line now is floating there. I don’t think that you can take it down below here without causing an issue.  Now, it’s going down below the abstract 3 foot thickness that we have, and now the site is no longer solid, and generally, we want it to be solid because then it will show up in sections properly, and it will give a lot of benefits for any type of analysis.  [0:45:16]

So, if I did want this to go down lower, I could say that the thickness is 20 feet.  Now, we have this much thicker platform.  Now, I could take this point down here, and it’s still going to remain solid.  So, there is some flexibility here, but my general suggestion would be to take, and I’ll just undo back here.  It’s to have the blue line at the lowest level of the site or a little bit below that for easy reference.  [0:45:55]

Alright, let’s see some other comments, questions.  So, Roy was asking about the story level here.  So, the story level – if I go to the section drawing here, we can see the little box of walls that I drew, and they’re floating above the slab that I had originally created.  We’re not seeing the terrain mesh.  It’s probably on a layer that’s turned off.  I’m not 100% sure, but let’s look at what we have on the side here.  [0:46:37]

So, you can see that the story level information here has some level elevations, and it has names of the stories.  So, it doesn’t actually say 1, 2, 3.  Now, if I right-click in empty space in the section and go to section settings or similar for elevations, elevation settings, we can look at the story levels and say how this is going to be drawn.  I don’t want to get into a whole long discussion, but there’s a built-in story marker, and there’s also potentially options where you can have something that’s programmed to do something a little different.  [0:47:21]

In the built-in story marker, currently you have some options for the font size, the text style, and the symbol.  So, there are some things about the 2D representation – the story marker geometry, for example. Here we have the sort of bullseye symbol, and we can choose the reference level.  So, you could say you’d like to have these numbers show sea level.  So, that will actually change here. We’ll just say OK, and you’ll see that these numbers now show in relationship to sea level.  [0:48:01]

I don’t think you can show both at the same time automatically, although there’s nothing to prevent you from putting in some similar annotation manually that would have information there.  I’ll go back to the section settings, and we’ll look at this.  So, we have sea level here. There’s some options for where the marker shows in relationship to the line, and there’s some other things here. So, story index text.  These are things that will control what we see.  [0:48:32]

If I say that the story index text is automatic, then I think it’s going to show the index number of the story next to the story name.  So, it was saying custom, and it was blank, but if I say automatic and say OK, then we’re going to see there’s the numbers.  So, I think if you didn’t want the numbers to show, then you would just turn that off. In this template that I’m working with, it was not on to begin with.  [0:49:02]

The name of the story comes from the project map name.  So, these names here that I was playing around with – if I had changed them, that’s what they would show up on the right side here or on the sides.  OK, so Roy says, “Mine seems to have the corresponding setting with the story setting view.  I’ll double-check it out.”  OK.  Can you get the level height and story name on the same line?  I’m not sure, so let’s not get into all the details of every little thing that we can customize here.  I just want to show you where you’re controlling it, and you can experiment with the options there.  [0:49:42]

OK, so Scotty says, “I like the idea of showing the terrain as the actual property line, but from a modeling or rendering perspective, having a larger terrain area with property setback and/or build area visible for perspective is better.”  So, you can obviously model beyond the property using ARCHICAD’s tools.  You can delineate the property in a variety of ways, and you were talking about showing setbacks. We can show setbacks, and we can show property lines, and I’ll show you a really cool advanced, but not at all tricky, thing to do to show this, and this is something that I think you’ll all appreciate.  [0:50:28]

If you haven’t done this already, look at how easy this would be.  So, right now, let’s just imagine that this is not the property line.  This is just some context.  So, we’ve decided based on whatever survey information we had to show, and we’re going to show the property. Maybe the property boundary is within it.  Now, it could be the setback lines. That would be another option that we could do.  [0:50:53]

So, let’s just say I’m going to draw a polyline here, and I’ll do this with a dashed triple line here, and we’ll do a box like this. Alright, so this line here in space – let’s just imagine that is our actual property line, or it could be the setback lines. I’m going to go to the Wall tool, and I will create just a simple wall type here. We’ll just give it a generic exterior color for now, and I’ll just leave some of the settings alone, and I’m going to magic wand this.  [0:51:39]

So, I’ve just basically put some walls out there.  Now, these walls here – let me undo that because these walls really shouldn’t be considered exterior walls. We’re going to put them on something. I’ll just put it on the site 3D layer.  So, let’s not worry about when you’re going to see them, etc., in terms of layers. Let’s just get the modeling things to show, like you were asking.  [0:52:02]

If I magic wand this, and we go to 3D, we’re going to see these walls that I just drew out beyond it. Now, I actually want to have it painted on the surface as if it was chalk – as if it was something that just visually showed the boundary. How would I do that? Well, if I go and just use the keyboard shortcut Command+F or Ctrl+F to bring up Find and Select, it’s a great tool to use frequently when you want to modify a bunch of elements that meet a certain criteria, or you want to select a bunch of elements that meet a criteria and do something with them.  [0:52:43]

So, if I eye drop this wall here, it’s says we’re going to be looking for elements that are walls.  If I click the plus sign, it’s going to select all the walls, but I don’t want all the walls.  I want just the ones that are on this layer.  So, I’ll go to Add Layer, and you can see this highlights here.  I’ll hit Enter, so it’s now got the setting for the layer based on the eye dropper that I had used, and now, if I hit Plus, it’s selecting all of these walls but not the other ones.  [0:53:17]

Now, I’ll go ahead and make this top not linked.  So, I can go and manually bring it up higher.  Why?  Because you can see these are buried back here. If I just take it up to 20 feet or something like that, they’re going to be much taller.  Now, we don’t really want to enclose the site in what looks like a fence. What we want to do is be able to intersect this with the terrain mesh and create a visual representation.  [0:53:46]

So, how would we do that?  I’m going to go to the Design menu, Solid Element Operations, and say that these elements here are my targets.  This site mesh is the operator, and I will intersect them, meaning that the target elements are only going to exist where they intersect the terrain.  I’ll say Execute. You can see that now the tops of them have all been trapped off.  When I deselect them, you’ll just barely be able to see that there’s some lines in space here.  [0:54:23]

Now, those lines are not very clear.  Why?  Because they are currently buried in the earth. Even though they exist there, the terrain is passing through them, and ARCHICAD is showing both the terrain and the line depending on its calculations of the surface.  Now, I’m going to go select them one more time, and we’re going to make them the operator so that they control the action, and make the terrain mesh the target, and instead of intersection, we’re going to do subtraction.  [0:54:58]

So, what that means is we’re going to subtract the space for these walls out of the mesh temporarily. So, I say Execute.  Now, when I deselect it, you can see that the line is now very clear, and as I rotate it, you can see it’s very, very clear. That’s now the setback or the property lines, whatever those are.  Now, we could leave these intact and just be done with it, but sometimes it’s helpful to be able to raise these up a little bit up off the ground, and in fact, the terrain isn’t really being cut by these. This is just a visual representation.  [0:55:36]

So, we can go a couple of steps further very, very quickly.  Again, I’m going to select these 4 walls – the ones that have been intersected by the terrain, and I will go to the Design menu and convert them to a morph.  Now, when we convert them to a morph, we’re going to keep the current geometry of the walls but lose the walls themselves. That does 2 things. One is that it means that they are independent of the site.  We no longer have to have a Solid Element Operation there.  [0:56:09]

The other is that we can also raise them to be perhaps a little bit above the site – whatever visually is convenient.  So, I’m going to turn them into a morph. We now have 4 morph elements, and it’s simple to just go to the Design menu, Modify Morph, Union, and let’s say to turn them into a single morph element.  Now, when I select it, it’s just one morph.  [0:56:37]

Now, it has a reference to the home story.  I’ll just take this up one foot just to be arbitrary. Now, these are floating up above the grade by one foot.  So, you can see what we’ve got.  Depending upon your visibility or what you want, you can make them wider or narrower.  Best to do that when you’re doing the walls to begin with, and you can also raise it up or not, depending on what you want to do.  [0:57:09]

Probably, if you want to turn them into a morph, then just raising them up even an inch or a few centimeters would be enough to be able to show that.  So, if I didn’t want this to be sticking up like that, I can select this morph, and let’s just say one inch, so it’s literally just a hair above that surface, and now you can see what it looks like.  [0:57:34]

So, that of course could be any color.  You could do it red.  You could do it white, and unfortunately, you can’t make it dashed very easily. That would be a nice thing if you could say that the wall was doing a triple dash appearance, but it certainly can be used for representing setbacks or boundaries.  Now, Jared Banks of Shoegnome – great teacher of ARCHICAD, and he’s a talented architect and very highly experienced in using ARCHICAD.  He’s written a lot of articles and created a lot of video tutorials on YouTube, and he talks about invisible forces being aspects of the project that are not part of the building but just constrain the building, let’s say.  [0:58:30]

So, you might actually have the setbacks instead of having them drawn on the site or showing following the terrain of the site.  You might have them floating up in space as a plane or a volume that you can see, and then that can be translucent so you can see into the space, and if you do that in certain ways, you might end up being able to show, for example, if you have some height limits, if you have some part of the building that sticks up above that or sticks beyond it.  [0:59:02]

Maybe there’s some angled limitations.  Then, it can visually show that.  Maybe you need to redesign, or maybe you need to get permission to do a slight variance for that.  OK, so Scott says, “SEO, brilliant.  Thanks, Eric.  I love it.”  OK, perfect.  Alright, so we shall move on, having shown some interesting ways to approach this here.  [0:59:34]

Let’s go back to my notes and see what I was intending to teach today.  Alright, so we’ve talked about project zero, the project location, the north direction here.  Now, I haven’t shown how you would reorient things when you place them onto a layout sheet, so we’ll take that as an interesting one, and then we will look at the modeling based on an imported .dwg and that workflow.  We’ve been talking a little bit about the site terrain modeling workflow here, so I sort of jumped ahead into that.  [1:00:14]

Alright, so let’s look at the rotation of views here.  So, now this site that I’ve got is very close around the building, but let’s say that the actual site – not the terrain that I’ve just done.  I’m just going to draw it with the polyline tool, and let’s do a rotated one. Let’s see.  I’ll do something like that, and we’ll move these here.  OK, so let’s imagine that this is the site, and we will want to put it so this long edge is parallel.  OK, so where do we have our north arrow?  [1:01:08]

Let’s talk about the north arrow position as well.  So, if I go to the Object tool and search for north, we’ll see that there is an element in actually more than one north arrow object in the ARCHICAD library.  In the U.S., we have one that gives you some options that follow the national CAD standards, but there’s always going to be just a basic one that’s the north symbol here, and then there’s some other ones you could see.  You could download them here from web sources.  You can see the little symbol of the Internet access.  [1:01:54]

Now, with this one here, we have an option to say to follow project north, and when I do that, notice how it instantly rotated to be that angle that I had set visually earlier on.  So, when I click to place it, let’s say, like this, we can see that there’s the north arrow.  Now, let’s just say that the site was actually aligned on that.  What was that angle?  I can’t remember now.  I’m just going to go measure and snap here, and it says the angle is 127.  [1:02:32]

You can see in the tracker that I’m snapping from the center point of that north to what it rotated at, and it’s 127.  So, let’s just say that this site boundary – I’m going to rotate it here.  So, this angle here – I want it to be 127 in relationship to zero.  Now, this is an interesting thing.  It’s almost – well, it’s 117 here.  I know that this is snapping to the 90 here, and I know that 127 would be 37° back the other way.  So, just like I’ve demonstrated with the concept sketching, this was just a concept for the site.  [1:03:15]

I’ll type in an offset for the angle.  So, it says that if I rotated this whatever angle it says – 127.2°, we’d have it vertical, but I want it to be back at the 127 from that.  So, what would that be?  I’d say 37, and I’d do minus.  Let’s actually hit Escape and now do this visually here.  So, it’s going to be 37+.  So, in this case, I hit plus because I wanted it to rotate to – angles are measured counterclockwise, so I said not vertical – not going in the Y axis, but 37° more than that would take us to the right number, and I’ll hit Enter.  [1:04:10]

So, that’s a great way to take something that you want to rotate into a defined orientation is to take it up to an axis and type in the offset from that.  So, let me just drag this in relationship to the building, just to give us our concept.  So, now the sides of these are in line with the north.  Now, this is not the only way to do it, but do we want north?  Actually, well, we’ll just take this. The north will be pointing in this direction here.  [1:04:47]

So, let’s say that I wanted to place the site plan onto the sheet with this side horizontal.  Now, that would make the north directly pointing to the left, which isn’t quite normal, but let’s start with that.  I’ll go to the rotate orientation – set orientation here and say that I want this line in space to go down to the axis.  [1:05:14]

So, now we’re looking at this visually where the site is horizontal, where let’s say it would fit on a page nicely here.  This is rotated exactly 53°, because remember I was at 127, and this essentially takes it to 180.  Let me just save this view here.  So, I’ll just say to save current view, and I’ll say site plan horizontal.  Now, the view will also have certain layers, and these are things I want to think about, but for now, we’re just going to use that.  [1:05:51]

Now, what if we actually wanted it to where the north arrow was straight up?  Let’s just rotate the view again here and say that this angle is going to come up there, so now we save this one, and we’ll call this Site Plan North Is Up.  So, just give it a name to be very clear what we’re talking about.  Now, if I go to the layout sheet, and we go to architectural site plans here, there’s probably going to be something that shows up there, but let’s just say that we wanted to put a copy of the site, where we’re seeing the whole thing, and it’s going to be reduced.  [1:06:39]

I can go to this existing drawing and say that I don’t really want this drawing.  I want the to link it to the Site Plan North Is Up, or the Site Plan Horizontal – whichever one I want.  Now, when I do that, you can see everything is rotated here.  It’s way too big, so I can go and say to take this and fit to layout.  So, now this is going to be much smaller.  Let’s see.  Fit to layout here.  Actually, I need to say to fit frame to drawing. [1:07:22]

So, now we’re seeing the entire boundary here of that site, and then say fit to layout, and it’ll get much smaller.  So, this is the size that it would fit on the layout, and it says 1 to 530.94.  Well, what would be good?  That would be if it was 1 to 500.  No, OK.  Let’s see.  1 to 30, 1 to 40. This is almost on there, so 1 to 50.  Alright, 1 to 50 here, which would be 1 to 600.  So, 1 inch equal to 50 feet would be 600.  So, that’s what is going to fit there.  [1:08:07]

Now, this is showing the scale, and it’s 8% of the original scale.  So, everything is shrunk down. If you had text in the original drawing, it would also shrink down with this.  So, when we’re dealing with a site plan, we go and say to open the source view with layout as reference, perhaps.  Now, we’re seeing the view of this drawing with a layout in the background, which we can turn off or on using the trace reference.  [1:08:42]

What I want to do is actually update the view and take the view here. I can take the Site Plan North Is Up and go to the settings and say that I want to make this 1 inch equals 50 feet.  So, now we can see that we have a little bit of a problem here because the markers have gotten much bigger.  They’re set up to be a certain size on paper.  Well, normally, we wouldn’t be showing them quite the same way on the site plan, but let’s ignore that for the moment and just say that now that I’ve changed the scale, if I go back to the sheet here and update, I can say 100% scale, which is that 1 inch equals 50 feet.  [1:09:41]

So, now we’ve got a representation on the sheet that’s rotated around, and if we zoomed in on this, if we could see where that north is – not sure where the north one is.  Let’s go back to the plan and ask where that north one is.  I’m going to also say that in this layer combination here that we might turn off – we’ll go to architectural site plans there.  We’re now not seeing all the section markers. We’re only seeing the elevation markers there, and let’s go to this view, and I can say to redefine with current window settings.   That’s going to pick up the fact that I’m in a different layer combination here.  [1:10:33]

Now, you see the background here – the Trace & Reference.  If I turn it off or on, it’s not up to date, but when I refresh it, it will be.  Now, where is the north arrow?  Here’s that north arrow.  It’s pointing straight up.  So, now we’ve gotten north straight up here on this sheet.  We’ve got everything fitting on the sheet, and we’re actually looking at the view, where we could be drawing some more information.  So, let me just turn off the Trace & Reference, and now we’re looking at it here.  [1:11:05]

Now, if I go back to the settings for that view, one of the things we want to do is make sure that this view on screen – that it’s not ignoring the zoom and rotation when opening this view.  That means that when I double-click on it, it will rotate to that orientation.  Now, if I double-click on all visible and unlocked, you can see that it is also not ignoring the zoom and rotation.  It is taking it back to the original orientation, where the site is on an angle and the building is at a convenient orientation.  [1:11:48]

So, the basic idea here is that you’re going to work on your building in an orientation that’s convenient to you and place the site in the proper relationship and orientation to the building to work out.  Now, I created the building first and then put a site in with just some linework.  If we were bringing in a .dwg file that was a survey, and let’s say it was oriented vertically with north up above, I can rotate that .dwg so that it is facing just like these lines.  [1:12:30]

So, I could say I’m working on my building in a certain orientation, and I’m going to rotate the site .dwg to fit the context that I prefer to work in.  Alternatively, you could start with the site in an orientation – you know, just the natural orientation, and figure out how the building is, and then after you’ve drawn some orientation lines, or maybe you have some lines in the survey that you want to use as well, that’s the front edge of the property, and we’re going to be parallel to that.  Then, you can say that’s zero, but I’m going to rotate my working orientation.  [1:13:12]

So, you could say that the normal plan orientation is rotated just like we had here, and that can work pretty well.  I think probably there’s a slight benefit to rotating the site drawing and leaving the native 0° orientation be how your building is situated, and the main reason for that is to remember this option here in the settings. Ignore zoom and rotation is a very powerful way to work for most of the plan views.  [1:13:50]

If you think about it, when we’re going from one store to another, or we’re going from one type of view, like a floor plan to a ceiling plan to a plumbing plan, it’s important when you double-click on a view to switch the layers and to switch other settings that give you a particular type of drawing, but in general, I find it convenient to have this checked so that as you switch from one drawing type to another, it doesn’t jump out to a saved zoom.  [1:14:22]

So, by having your building orientation most of the time at zero, you can then say that you ignore zoom and rotation when you switch from one view to another, and so that means that you’re just able to very freely move from one style of drawing – floor plan to a ceiling plan to a furniture plan to a plumbing plan, etc., without having to zoom in and out, and then the work on the site is going to be only a handful of views that you’re working on, whereas the building itself, you’re going to have many views that you’re working on.  So, I think that’s probably an optimized way to do it.  [1:15:06]

If you need to, for coordination for other consultants or other services, you need to not rotate the building or not rotate the site and have the site in its natural orientation, then there may be some other factors involved.  So, let’s just see if there’s any questions on this here.  Alright, so Taren says, “How would you adjust the site model to make a flat building pad and make the finish grid slope away from the building for surface drainage, like 6 inches over 10 feet?”  [1:15:49]

OK, so right now, I have just done a quick sketch with some prevailing grade.  We haven’t done contours.  What I think I’ll do now – we’re already at an hour and 20 minutes, is just show the basics of creating contours and then the basics of regrading with a flat pad, and next time, we’ll be looking at how we actually can regrade the contours beyond just a flat surface here, and so we’ll be able to answer your question next time.  [1:16:29]

So, here of course, I have this arbitrary boundary, and then I have the site, which we remember is the terrain mesh, and it’s got – I think this is the highest point, and these points are a little bit lower, and then it’s down here.  Now, let’s just say that this slab here – I think at this point here, I said 12’-6”. Let me just hit Escape and say what the height is here. That’s 15.  So, a common thing to do – it may not be the boundaries of the site or the contour, but let’s just say that – well, let’s see.  What is this?  [1:17:12]

This is 6 feet.  OK, alright.  So, let’s say that we were doing contour lines that were every 2 feet, so that would be a common measure, in terms of contour line definition in many U.S. contexts.  That would be like half a meter, roughly, in accuracy.  So, how would we get that information?  Well, we’re going to be bringing it in through a .dwg or a .pdf, most likely, but let me just go and do a quick sketch using the Spline tool.  [1:17:50]

Now, why am I using the Spline tool?  Because these things are going to wiggle around, and this is just a quick way to represent it.  Now, this is the 12’-6” here, remember, in the upper left corner. Let’s say that this here is about where the 10 foot one is.  So, I’m going to draw a line. This is going to be our 10-foot contour line, and this one is 6 feet, so we’ll just say this is 6 feet, and it’s going here, and let’s say that there’s an 8-foot one, and maybe it’s a little bit steep as we get to the back.  [1:18:34]

So, in other words, this part here is naturally grading up faster, and this is more flat.  Now, I just drew some lines for tracing purposes, and I’m going to take the Mesh tool and create some contours, and we’ll just see the basics of how you create those contours.  So, in order to do this, it helps to be in the Mesh tool.  In other words, not only select the mesh, but activate the Mesh tool, and then you can either draw a series of points. I’ll just manually trace these points, approximately, and I’m deliberately doing just a handful of points here.  [1:19:15]

When I do that, it’s asking if I want to add new points or if I want to create a hole.  Now, I don’t want to create a hole.  This is a contour line.  I’ll say add new points.  It’ll say fit to user ridges.  What that means is will it try to just keep the grade the same and just be a line that you could see in a 3D view, or do you want it to be at an arbitrary height?  I’ll say to fit to user ridges.  That’s generally a good way as a starting point because when I go to 3D, and let’s say I only have this element selected here, and I select it here.  You can see that here is the line in space that I just drew, and it is actually, if we looked at it, it’s going up and down in space just a little bit because it is following the original grade points.  [1:20:13]

Now, if I go back to the floor plan, and we press down on any one of these points, I can say to set the Z height, and what was this?  This one was supposed to be the 10 feet.  So, 10 feet, and then I’ll say to apply to all. That’s what makes this a topographic contour line that’s all at a common height.  Now, it’ll apply to all the points in this group that I created in one operation.  [1:20:45]

Now, if I look in 3D, we’re going to see that the shape is slightly changed.  Maybe it’s hard to remember, but this is now all a constant height.  If I use the Measure tool, and you hover over it, you can see Z coordinate 10 feet.  Every single one of these is Z coordinate 10 feet.  Now, let’s go and use the Magic Wand method here.  So, with the mesh selected, I will hold down the space bar and click on this.  [1:21:20]

So, when you hold down the space bar, you get the Magic Wand.  You can also use the Magic Wand.  I think it’s somewhere up in the toolbar.  I can’t remember where the Magic Wand is in the toolbar and if it’s there all the time, but holding down the space bar that you use to separate words in text – not the shift key, but the space bar.  Get the magic wand, and we can say fit to user ridges here.  [1:21:49]

Now, you notice that it created a whole bunch more points.  Now, these points are not really worth a whole lot. In other words, yes, they follow the contour line much more closely, but really, in most cases, we don’t need as many points as the magic wand works with.  A lot of people use the magic wand.  It’s so quick.  You don’t have to click, click, click, click, click.  You just click once with the space bar, but there is a trade-off.  [1:22:18]

Now, again, if I go to 3D, and we select this, and then I use the Measure tool, you’ll see that this is at 4’-5”, and this one is at 4’-4”, and this one is at 6’-10”.  So, these points are all varied.  Now, I could move each one of these up to 6 feet, but really, what I want is for all of them to go at once.  Unfortunately, I have to go back to the floor plan to do this.  I go to any one of those points, press down on it, type in the value – 60, apply to all, and say OK, and now we go to 3D.  [1:22:59]

We’ll go to 3D here, and now, if I measure, this is all Z coordinate 6.  Every single one of those would be 6, so if I rotate around this, we’re going to see that this is all one level.  This is all another level, etc.  So, I’ll do the magic wand on this one.  So, I’ll be in the Mesh tool to use the magic wand, and we’ll do this.  It’s going to be initially fit to the ridges, but I’ll go and press down on this and say it’s going to be 8 feet, apply to all in that group.  [1:23:36]

So, now if I go to 3D, we’ll see that we do have flat terrain here, and it’s getting steeper here.  If I zoom in on this and rotate around, you’ll see that it’s grading up a bit as we get closer in here.  Now, I’m not seeing the building right now because I just had the terrain mesh selected, and I went to 3D using the keyboard shortcut, so it’s only showing the terrain as opposed to the rest of it.  [1:24:12]

Now, looks like when I did the magic wand that it actually connected somehow around.  That is a little weird.  Let’s go and undo here. Yeah, we can see some extra points. Let me undo back.  So, in this case, the tracing didn’t really work very well because if I magic wand this and look carefully at what I do, you can see it traced both top and bottom, which is not what I want.  Let me just undo that.  Let’s go and select this point here and take this spline, and we’ll take it beyond.  [1:25:04]

So, let’s see.  Drag, modify spline path.  Let’s see.  Move tangent handle, or modify spline path will allow me to take it beyond.  Now, if I were tracing this, it’s going to go beyond this.  It won’t come back.  It won’t find a continuous boundary there, and I might even do the same thing here – take it beyond.  So, now if I have the terrain mesh with the Mesh tool active and magic wand this, you can see it only gives me the points within the terrain, and it doesn’t zip back in there.  So, now I’ll go back and say that this is going to be the 8 feet, apply to all there.  [1:25:46]

So, let’s look at this in 3D.  So, we’ll say show all in 3D, in this case, and now we can see the building is buried in this space.  Now, the original setback lines that we had – if I had left them as walls that were intersecting with the site, then it would have continued to show that, but because I turned it into a morph early, it gave me some visual clarity, but it actually no longer is going to update when I refine the terrain modeling.  So, keep that in mind that turning something into a morph has got some potential limitations in terms of the workflow.  [1:26:44]

So, what I’ve created just now is a terrain following some contour lines.  Now, the building itself – if I do Command+F and eye drop one of these walls here and then say to select all the walls that meet the criteria of being a wall and on the layer that I just picked up.  Now, I could change the reference for these walls.  Maybe they should be up taller.  Let’s just, for now, say that they’re going to go up higher.  So, I’ve just said that they’re going to stick up.  [1:27:27]

Now, where is grade going to be?  If we imagine that maybe at the front door or something like that, we would want to have this, and maybe there’s a path going in the front, etc., like that.  We need to do a bunch of regrading there.  Let’s just look at the simplest thing, which is just to cut a hole for the building.  So, the building is sitting in the site, but the site doesn’t fill up the building with earth.  We’re excavating that down.  [1:27:59]

So, the simplest thing we can do is draw a slab, and actually, let’s just do this on the floor plan here.  So, this slab – remember, I had this slab here.  OK, so this is the one I can work with.  Let’s say this was directly – I’ll just leave it out where it is here.  It basically goes out further than the building.  Maybe take the top up to the zero, so it’ll just touch the bottom of these walls, and now we’re going to use Solid Element Operations.  This is just one way to do regrading, and it’s a quick way to do certain types of work.  So, I’m going to make this the operator and select that terrain that I’ve been playing around with and make it the target and do a subtraction with upward extrusion.  [1:28:54]

That means wherever the slab is is in the world, it’s going to be subtracted out of the terrain and everything above it.  Now, this is, again, a simplistic way to do it, but we’ll just see the effect of that.  I’ll say Execute. We don’t see any change on the floor plan, but in 3D, we’ll see that we now have that slab, which is what I have indicated that went out beyond the building and cutting a hole in the terrain and everything above.  [1:29:32]

Now, when we return next time, I’m going to definitely use some of the examples that a number of you sent in for real projects.  So, we’ll be looking at how you will bring in a .dwg file.  We’ll also look at a .pdf and see a variation in the workflow there, and we’ll have a context for a building that will make much more sense than the one that I’ve done here, but these, I think, illustrate some of the basics of orientation and elevation points that are so important to recognize, even before you get into the details.  [1:30:17]

I’ll make one last point here about what I was working with.  If we go back to the floor plan, remember these contour lines here.  So, if I select the terrain mesh, and I go to a point here, this is 8 feet above the mesh reference plane, but really what if we wanted to reference it to a contour map that was with sea level references?  Well, we can say to tell me what it is in relationship to sea level.  [1:30:56]

There’s the 133.  So, 125 plus 8 is 133.  So, I can look at it here, or I can use that as the value.  If I just change this value to sea level, now I’m not going to make a change here.  I’m just going to go to another one – to this one.  See, it’s 135 to sea level, or this one here is 131 to sea level.  So, basically, I can have the references when we’re working with the Mesh tool in relationship to sea level, even though the rest of the building and everything else we’re talking about in relationship to project zero.  [1:31:40]

The final thing I’ll do, just as a very quick demonstration because it’s very easy, is to show the Level Dimension tool.  So, the Level Dimension tool here – if I click an empty space, it says zero because it’s not on top of anything.  If I click here, you see it’s 8’-6”.  If I click on this edge here, it’s going to be the 8’-0”.  So, each one of these, if I go to the boundary, here’s the 10’-0”.  So, this is showing exactly the elevation of the mesh at that point in space.  [1:32:20]

Now, there is a little challenge here in that I really probably don’t want to say that it’s 8 or 10.  I want to say that it’s 133 or 135 – whatever, in relationship to sea level.  So, how do I do that?  I need to go into the elevation information here and change it from showing the measured text to custom text.  Now, the custom text – right now, you can see it says to PZ value.  So, that’s to project zero value, and that’s 8 feet above the project zero, but I could switch that to to sea level.  You can see here that’s 133.  [1:33:06]

Now, if I select more than one of these here, and we switch to custom text and then to sea level, you can see that they all change here. Now, in this case, I’m showing 2 values, the 8’-6” and the 133’-6”.  This is 10 and 135.  I just need to, instead of adding using this pop-up, I need to replace this, and now you can see that here are the proper values.  [1:33:39]

So, in some cases, you’re going to have arbitrary grading points, and maybe you’ll be moving grade around.  In other cases, you’re going to have a contour line, and of course, it will be an easy way to both verify that your model is on that contour line as well as possibly for the annotation to indicate this contour line as the 135 level.  [1:34:04]

So, unfortunately, there’s no default for when we place the level dimension tool.  I really wish that they had this, but there’s nothing that allows you to say that I would like the level to refer to sea level.  You have to go in and after the fact, select those text notes next to the marker and change them to sea level.  I wish they would change that, but that’s what we need to do to get it.  [1:34:39]

Alright, OK, so I see comment from Taren.  “Makes sense.  Basics first.”  OK, so let me know if you have any final questions before we finish up.  Really excited to be moving into this area of site modeling.  I think we’re going to take it quite a bit further than I did in the original Best Practices course, which may mean that this ends up taking 6 or 8 lessons.  I’m not sure.  I’m going to try to cover things as efficiently as I can, but site modeling – dealing with external consultants and information – very, very complex, rich subject, and I think it’s worth really going over all of the common workflow questions that come up so that you’re prepared to get your site laid out, modeled, and documented the way that you need to.  [1:35:41]

So, thank you, Jimmy.  He says, “Another great session,” and several more thanks.  So, Daniela says, “When will I have the webinar online?”  Generally, I’ve been able to get them up the same day.  I’ve got my workflow optimized so the GoToWebinar recording usually takes about an hour or 2 before it’s ready.  I download it and reupload it to Vimeo, where I host these videos, and have a quick way of getting the video onto the training page.  So, it’ll be up, certainly by tomorrow, and maybe even this evening.  [1:36:22]

So, looking at other questions or comments.  So, again, those of you who have sent some example files - .dwg, .pdf, or .pln files, I will be reviewing them, and I might contact you if I’d like some clarification.  I may be in touch, but I will be using your materials, and I greatly appreciate your help in making the course even more interesting and more real.  [1:36:57]

So, Frank, thank you.   He says, “Useful, even for a Dutchman living in a flat country.”  Yeah, so I know that here in California, we have a lot of hilly terrain, and it is a big consideration for site modeling, but in other places, yeah.  It’s very different.  So, OK. Thank you all for joining me again. I’ll be back on Wednesday with the next lesson.  Be well.  Take care.  [1:37:32]