2020 | 028 – Site Modeling – Adding Areas, Paths, Roads, Parking

Hey, everybody.  Welcome to the ARCHICAD Best Practices 2020 training course.  Today, we’ll be focusing more on site modeling, looking at adding areas, paths, roads, parking, and shadows to site plans and site visualization.  So, let me know that you can hear me and see me OK. We’re going to be communicating through the Slack channel, as usual.  If you haven’t been using Slack for the previous calls, go to Bobrow.com/Slack, put in your email address, follow the instructions, and within a minute or two, you’ll be connected, and then once you’re in, you’ll be in the General channel.  Click on channels and then go to 2020 here.  [0:01:06]

Alright, so I see Zlatko, Tom, Jimmy, Bob, Lou, Chris – a bunch of you are there, so let’s see.  Luther – hey, Luther.  So, you want to go to the 2020 channel to join us for conversations there.  Alright, so let us get going.  Now, we’ve been working on site modeling for several lessons, and I think that the last lesson that I did was a little bit disjointed, and I may actually record some updates to that to give a little bit more succinct approach to the cut and full calculations that I demonstrated, but we will go on from there to look at some additional options related to creating a site with the different areas delineated for whether it’s different properties, different units, parking, paths, roads, etc.  [0:02:18]

Then, we’ll start to look at some of the ways that you can integrate things like shadows and other graphic components to do presentation plans.  Alright, so I’m going to be doing a quick review of some things that I know I’ve shown some of the them in the 2020 training courses, and sometimes in the coaching program.  We’ll go quickly through some of these things and then go to some new things that I’ve been experimenting with.  [0:02:51]

So, if we wanted to color-code areas here to indicate either different usage – whether it’s for planting,, or it’s a neighboring property, or for paving – things like that, there is a simple way to do this very, very quickly.  So, I’m going to go to the floor plan or the site plan here.  We’ll jump out here.  Now, as you recall, this particular file – this was a fire rebuild, so the area was destroyed, or the buildings were destroyed in a fire in the last year or so, I guess.  [0:03:36]

We have a site where the new building will go in.  This information on the side here was part of the previous lesson, where I was showing how you could do excavation calculations for cut and fill and backfill.  Now, let’s just say that in this area here, I wanted to delineate this section as being a different use – planting and things like that.  You can see it says planter.  Of course, obviously, if you have a real, physical planter that you’re designing, then you might be raising it up with walls and filling it up with earth and some other representations, but let’s just start out with something simple, just to say that this area here is going to be different than the rest.  [0:04:28]

So, how would we do that?  Well, I’m going to go use the Slab tool.  Now, I’m not going to worry right now about layer management.  I just want to show the modeling part of this.  Obviously, as we work through this in a real project, you’d want a certain element to be on certain layers to work properly.  Right now, I’m going to put this slab on – let’s see. We have a site modeling layer. What is it?  [0:04:57]

Actually, this is site landscaping or site 3D.  We’ll do site 3D here.  So, I’ll just draw a shape, and this is purely for demonstration purposes to show the shape in the sense that I’m not following any of the real information from the drawing. This slab – I’m going to make it very big in the sense that I need it to go above the grade and down into it.  Now, I don’t remember the heights, but let me just take this up absurdly high.  So, I’ll put it up to well above this, and I’ll take it also down further.  [0:05:45]

So, I’m making this 50 feet – 15 meters in thickness there.  Now, when I go to 3D, you’ll see there it is.  OK, everything is sort of reversed from what was on plan.  Now that I’ve done that, I just might take the height down using the pet palette – down a bit. The main thing it is has to go above the grade here, and I’m going to give this a different material. We’ll just say that we’re going to give it something. We’ll just make it a gold color here.  [0:06:25]

Now, the reason why I’m doing it as a different color is I want to color-code this in 3D.  Now, we could actually leave this as something like concrete site work here, and then perhaps better would be just to override the surfaces and make them all uniform with something.  So, let me just do it a yellow color here.  So, now it’s yellow, but it’s concrete, so it’s actually – if there is any calculations by ARCHICAD in terms of how it relates to the other elements, it will pass through them.  It will be stronger than the earth.  [0:07:04]

Now, what I want to do is make sure this follows the terrain that is around it.  So, the simple case is I just want to have this color code the surface, and what I do is I use the Design menu, Solid Element Operations.  That will bring up the Solid Element Operations or SEO palette, and if you have something selected when you do that, it will make it the target immediately, and the target means it’s going to be modified by the action.  [0:07:35]

Now, I’ll take this terrain mesh and make it the operator, so it controls the action, and it operates on the target, and I will do intersection.  So, intersection says the target here is only going to exist where it intersects the original element.  In other words, it won’t exist above, below, or outside it.  So, I say Execute, and you can see that now we’ve got a color-coded area.  [0:08:01]

Now, you might just do that, but to get it cleaner and to avoid having this sort of conflicting color there, we need to cut a hole in the mesh. The reason for this is that right now, they’re both in the same physical 3D volume, and ARCHICAD – depending upon where or what angle we’re looking at, will be showing some of the green and some of the yellow intermittently.  [0:08:30]

So, in order to fix that, I’m going to select the little slab and make it the operator.  So, it’s going to control the action.  By the way, I click outside it to deselect it so that I’m only selecting the mesh, and I make it the target.  So, it’s going to be modified. In this case, instead of intersection, we’re going to do subtraction.  So, basically we’re going to cut out a hole where this slab exists, and we’ll execute it.  [0:09:02]

Alright, so now you can see it got a little bit different in color.  When I deselect it, you’ll see that it’s actually precisely following this area here.  So, that’s the first thing, just a quick review of it.  You basically draw a slab.  This is the simplest way to do it.  Obviously, on the plan, I can make that as precise as I want, and even in 3D, if it was something conceptual, I could go in and use the blue outlines here and adjust this – perhaps if I go to the pet palette, I can extend this out, and you’ll see what happens is it extended the boundary of the polygon on the plan, and it followed the terrain here.  [0:09:49]

If I go and take a point and use any of the normal options here, let’s say, and do a filleted corner.  You can see how it’s created this filleted corner.  So, this is all, of course, happening on the plan.  Let’s see here. We’ll just go to the plan, and you can see there’s that filleted corner, and it extended down in one of those directions.  [0:10:19]

So, that’s the simplest thing.  Now, if we were to do a path, we can do something very similar.  Sometimes, it’s convenient to use the magic wand with some graphic tools. So, for example, I could use, and I’ll just do this as a freeform spline. Let’s say we were going to be doing a path.  Actually, let’s put this linework on one of the site layers here right now.  So, site 3D. Just do that.  Alright, so this is just a line.  Actually, it’s a spline.  [0:11:01]

I might just drag a copy of this over to here and then take this copy and adjust the spacing.  So, this is freeform.  Now, by the way, if you wanted to have the spline be a path that’s uniform, then you can’t just drag it because of the way that the thicknesses have to change. In fact, what I’ll do is I’ll show you a very cool thing, which is using the spline tool, and I’ll use the – let’s see.  It’s the Window menu, Palettes, and we’re going to go to the control box.  [0:11:43]

So, the control box is one that I rarely use, but it is very useful in this case because it allows you, in this little floating palette, to say that you’d like to do a drafting operation, creating something specifically that is either perpendicular or parallel or an offset from something else.  So, if I had this set for offset, then when, if I were to magic wand this shape here – let me go to the Polyline tool here without this active.  If I magic wand this, we now have – let’s see.  [0:12:41]

If I drag this here, I basically magic wanded the slab and created a polyline.  Now, I’m just going to delete that. If I use the offset option, then it says to enter the first corner.  Oh, I’m doing the Polyline.  I’m going to do a geometry method.  It’s an arbitrary polygon, and now if I magic wand this, you’ll see that there is this little icon indicating that I’m offsetting, and now I can go in and offset one way or the other.  Let’s just do it in, and we can type in a value.  [0:13:25]

You can see this is now a nice, even offset there. If I do that with the spline – so, if I activate the offset here and magic wand the spline – let’s see now. If I have to magic wand the spline there, I have to go to the endpoint of it to do it.  Now, you can see how it’s moving.  As it’s moving this, it is keeping a constant thickness or offset.  [0:13:58]

So, now I’m going to go and just type in distance – let’s say 10 feet there.  So, this is now a 10-foot-wide path, you could say.  Now, if I wanted to make the path in terms of what I did with the contrasting area here, I can use the Slab tool. Let me just pick up the settings of the Slab tool with the magic wand because it will be just the same type of height that I know was working earlier.  [0:14:34]

Now, if I wanted it to trace this area precisely, I’m going to go in and just maybe select the spline and add another point, like this.  So, now the spline closes.  Go to the other end, do the same thing with adding a new point there.  Now, it’s going outside of the modeled area, but that’s OK because what’s going to happen is this will become a slab that will be cut off by the site when I do the Solid Element Operations, or I can cut it off after I turn it into a slab.  [0:15:19]

So, what I’ve got now is 2D information.  I’ve got 2 splines that are connected, and I’ll go and use the Slab tool and magic wand this.  So, now, having magic wanded it, I have a slab that is here, and maybe I’ll just go and clean up that slab to just go to the boundaries here, and let’s say that I take this up to something – wherever we want here to be approximately right.  [0:15:57]

So, the slab can now easily be adjusted here.  If I go now to 3D, we’re going to see there is that path.  Let’s just give it a different color.  So, we’ll go here.  Instead of the color yellow, we’ll just make it the color jade here, and now I’ll do the same thing.  I’m going to make it the target, make this mesh the operator, do intersection, execute.  You can see how it’s now buried in here, and then I can take this path and make it the operator. Take the terrain mesh, and make it the target and do subtraction, and we now have a clean path up to this space.  [0:16:47]

So, obviously, you can use this in general for a lot of different color coding, whether it’s showing different properties or different usage – planting, paving, etc.  Now, one of the limitations that we have here is that the thickness of this – if we were to cut a section, or we had this exposed, like if we cut a section, it will actually have a flat bottom.  It will not follow the grade.  [0:17:18]

Now, the first thing is if this is exposed in a model, then it potentially looks odd there.  You can get around that often by just saying that I’m going to take the surfaces, turn off the locking, and make the side surface here be – I think this might be girth there.  Oh, interesting.  That makes this blend in here, but this top surface has changed, which is not necessarily what we want.  Let’s see.  [0:17:56]

The top is supposed to be jade, but the problem is that this cutoff surface is also affecting that.  So, depending upon what you need, it may or may not serve your purposes here. Of course, we could take this just in by a hair, so let’s just undo this, and remember that this is purely a 2D outline here.  So, if I take this outline, and I select this and use the offset here and just take it in by – I’ll just say 6 inches, you can see.  [0:18:40]

That looks like it was more than 6 inches, I think. Oh, it probably is the distance. Distance is .5 feet.  There we go.  OK, so you can see that I can have it go right out to the edge and just stop a hair before it, and visually, it will give the results that I want.  Alright, now what if we wanted this to have a uniform – if it is a path, what if we wanted it to have a uniform cross section because it’s just going to have a certain amount of concrete and gravel underneath, or sand, or that sort of thing?  [0:19:19]

How would we do that?  So, one of the things that we can do is we can convert this to a morph and then do some additional work with it.  So, let’s just look at inverting to a morph, and then let’s see.  So, if we were to take this, and just trying to think of the sequence here.  OK, this is a nice little method that you can use for a variety of different things.  I’m going to demonstrate it in terms of the morph approach, but you’ll see in a moment what I am giving you is a great shortcut for certain types of things.  [0:20:14]

So, if I take this slab here, this slab has currently got some dd intersections in terms of it being interacting with the terrain.  I’m going to go to the Design menu and convert it to a morph.  Now, when I do that, the slab itself will go away, and we will have the end result shape that this pp slab currently has instead, which, remember, follows the terrain at the top but has a flat bottom.  So, I’m going to convert it to a morph here, and we’ll take a look in 3D at what we have.  It will look different and not perfect.  [0:21:03]

You can see it is following the top grade, but it is not cut out of the earth.  Now, if we wanted to just keep it as a morph, we could.  We could then subtract this from the terrain, and we’d get a nice, clean result, but I’m going to use this instead to create the uniform thickness of the path.  So, follow this carefully, and you’ll be able to watch the recording, of course, if you need to understand it thoroughly. [0:21:47]

I’ve now turned it into a morph, so when I select this now – actually, that’s the polyline.  Let me go to the Morph tool and select this. You can see it’s got the green lines here.  It’s indicating it’s one morph.  I’m now going to copy this.  Now, why am I copying this?  Because I want to have this information available, but I want to undo what I did with the slab. So, now I will undo, and you can see that now we have a slab selected here, and if I go back to the 3D just to show you, we’re going to have it back to the original, this being a slab.  [0:22:32]

Now, why am I doing that? Because now I can go back to the plan and paste in the morph.  So, I’ll just paste in and do Command+V, and you can see how it’s showing a boundary around the shape.  I’ll click outside it to drop it into position. So, now we have a morph and a slab, both in the same space.  If I go to 3D, we see that the morph layer was showing in the plan, but not in 3D.  So, what I want to do is go and select that morph layer.  So, I’ll select the morph.  I just did Command+A with the Morph tool active, and I’m going to put this morph in Site 3D here.  [0:23:24]

Actually, you can see I’ve got the morph selected.  I’m just going to raise this up a little bit.  Right now, its base reference is -34 feet here.  I’ll do -33.  Actually, let’s do this relative to sea level so we can see those numbers.  Here’s 1,000. Let me just take this up to 1,001 feet.  Now, if I’m correct about this, what this will do is actually take that shape that was the morph and raise it up by exactly 1 foot.  Now, if I go to 3D, let’s see if that is there.  [0:24:06]

Yeah, you can see it.  The reason why I thought I wasn’t seeing it was that they were totally aligned.  Now, this is the morph here.  So, you can see I’ve made it go up to 1,001 feet.  Now, let’s just do it the other way.  We’re going to actually take this down to 999.  Now, it will be buried, and so it’s actually underneath – 1 foot down from the slab.  [0:24:39]

Now, what I can do is I can make this the operator and select the slab, which is sitting above it, and make it the target, and do the subtraction here, and let’s see what that does in a section.  Actually, let’s see if I select the slab now and say Show Only What’s Selected in 3D, you can see that this is the slab.  So, what I’ve done is I’ve actually created a morph that is based on the slab, dropped it down a uniform distance, and then subtracted it from the slab.  [0:25:30]

Now, the slab, remember, was already interacting with the terrain mesh, so it’s following the surface nicely, but now, it has a uniform bottom or a uniform thickness.  So, this is a great trick there.  Now, if we go and say to show all in 3D, we’ll right-click here.  We’ll say Show All in 3D.  Now, we could do a section, but let’s just do a cutaway with the Marquee tool, and let’s just do something like this here and go to 3D.  [0:26:13]

Now, what are we seeing here?  This is the morph, and up above is the slab.  So, we’re not seeing the uniform thickness that I wanted because the morph is showing.  So, if this morph was on a layer that was hidden, we would just temporarily put it on a layer like this Solid Element Operators here.  Now, we can see the path with the uniform thickness.  So, we’ve got this almost solved.  The one change we need to make in the process is to do the subtraction earlier in the process.  [0:27:02]

So, what I’ll demonstrate here is we’ll back up a few steps and just do the whole thing the way you would need to do it.  I want to explain it this way so that you would see both the power of it but also the limitation here.  So, I’m going to undo back here.  I’ll undo and keep on undoing back here until I no longer have the morph.  You can see we still have the morph. I’m just hitting Undo several times here.  [0:27:35]

Now, if we were to go to the Morph tool and select all, there’s no morphs.  So, basically, I’ve backed it up to a starting point.  I’ll go to 3D, and what I’m going to do here is actually undo this back one more step.  So, this is now extending out to the face, which will allow us to see the results of what I’m about to do more easily.  So, this slab here is interacting with the Solid Element Operations with the new terrain in the 2 different ways.  It’s being intersected and being subtracted.  [0:28:16]

I guess if I go here and I say – let’s see.  If I select this and say that I want to remove the operations here, you can see that now, we’re back to the original, just a pure slab that’s just sticking into the earth.  So, what I’m going to do now is remember, I had that mesh.  Let me do this. We’re going to go to subtract.  OK, so here – remember, I’ve created that morph. I’m going to paste in the morph.  Let’s see. If we have the morph here, I’m going to go and paste.  [0:29:19]

Let’s see.  Can I repeat paste here?  OK, there it is.  There’s the paste.  So, what do I have now?  If I go to 3D, I have the slab, which is up here, and then I have the morph, which is superimposed within it.  So, I had already gone through the process, created the morph that follows the terrain. Now, I’ll take this morph, and I’ll put down the 999 here. So, it just drops down a little bit, and this morph – it looks like because I had already backed it out the 6 inches here, it’s not quite out to the face here.  [0:30:08]

If I take this morph, I think we can extrude this out.  So, I’m actually just compensating for the fact that the morph was created when this was backed up, and now I don’t have it backed up.  So, let’s go and just give this morph here a different color so we can see this.  I’ll make this something else.  There.  OK, so now it’s a different color.  [0:30:45]

So, this is now going to be the operator, and the slab is going to be the target, and I’ll do the subtraction here.  So, now the slab is just sitting up above the morph here, and there may be some slight issues, just off of the corners because of the way that I did this, but now I can go and make this the operator.  Actually, let’s cancel this. Sorry.  The steps can get a little bit confusing.  I want to intersect this the same ways I did before, so I’ll take this slab and make it the target.  [0:31:38]

The terrain mesh is the operator.  I’ll do an intersection.  So, this is exactly what we did before.  Now, it’s sitting on top, and now I’ll take the slab and make it the operator and make the terrain the target and do the subtraction.  So, this is exactly what I did before.  So, now what I’ve got is the slab meeting the terrain, but it’s only this thick.  It’s only as thick as what we’re seeing here.  Now, if we were to take this morph and put it on a layer that I hide – come on now.  Put it on the operators – SEO Operators here.  [0:32:34]

So, we have a little issue, just because of the way that I backtracked and everything, but now we have a nice, clean result.  So, summarizing the steps, I basically did the intersect and subtraction with the slab to create a nice, smooth top.  Selected that slab and converted it to a morph to create that shape that would be used later for cutting.  I copied that morph so that it was available as geometry and then set the slab back to the way it was.  It was no longer turned into a morph, and in fact, we can undo the intersection and subtraction.  [0:33:24]

So, now if you imagine that, you’ve got the slab just sitting in the terrain – no relationship to the mesh, but you also have this morph on the clipboard.  So, we pasted the morph, subtract it from the slab so now it’s got a bottom that matches the grade, and then you go through the intersection and subtraction steps as before, and we end up with something that follows the grade just perfectly and has a uniform thickness.  [0:33:57]

So, I will write that out on the lesson page – the exact steps so that you can just do them like a recipe, but you see how elegant that is.  Now, variation of that would be to create this path, and after you’ve done it, turn it into a new morph. The new morph would have that uniform thickness – whatever you decide it would be, and then you could actually raise it up.  You can make this sit above the ground a little bit, if it was appropriate.  [0:34:32]

You would do this the same way for a road.  So, in other words, you can create a road using this method, but it’s going to follow the exact terrain mesh, but if you use this approach to create something that’s a morph, you can then raise the morph up by a little bit to have it stick up out of the ground, which, of course, may be a more natural-looking appearance for certain types of views.  So, you could use this for road.  Variations of this are very possible.  [0:35:08]

So, let’s see if there’s any questions about this.  Again, I will outline the exact steps where you don’t have to backtrack unnecessarily.  So, let me know if you have any questions here.  Alright, so Taren writes, “Can you go over each of the Solid Element Operations to explain what they do at a conceptual level?”  Absolutely.  Good question.  [0:35:39]

So, Solid Element Operations are ways of interacting the geometry of different elements.  So, you have operators that control the action – any particular action you’re doing, and you have targets that are being modified in any particular action, and as you saw earlier, elements can participate in more than one operation to get different types of effects.  Now, the operations – subtractions says that wherever the operator exists, take it out from the target.  [0:36:23]

So, a simple example would be having a stem wall foundation footing that is buried in the earth.  If that foundation footing is the operator, and the earth – the terrain mesh is the target, subtraction would just say to give it some space, and then when you cut a section, it will look very clean because it’ll either be earth around it, or there will be the foundation stem wall footing there, so subtraction is the simplest thing.  [0:36:59]

You can also use subtraction to take a groove out of something else or to put flashing or some other profile into some other element that sort of carves out some space for itself.  So, subtraction says to remove the space that’s occupied by the operator from the target.  So, create an empty void so that the operator can exist.  [0:37:25]

Now, subtraction with upward extrusion subtracts out where they intersect and everything above it.  The most common usage of that is for doing roofs and walls.  So, when you think about a wall sticking up in space and a roof passing through the walls – so, the wall is going up higher than it should be because there’s a roof that’s cutting it off, where they intersect would be subtracted, and everything above would disappear as well.  [0:37:59]

Now, this is a simple way of doing roofs or roof/wall joins. It will do a nice, clean cut where the roof passes through the volume of the wall.  It will not do any intersections of the framing and the cladding and all of that, but it is a very simple way to just get a clean, conceptual roof cut and everything above it.  Subtraction with downward extrusion could be used for a dormer.  [0:38:26]

So, if you think about walls that are sitting on top of the roof, then the walls can be cut underneath by the roof, and any stuff that would normally hang down below would disappear because you’re extruding the subtraction down below.  Again, a simple form if you were doing dormers.  You wouldn’t be able to show the framing relationship and things, but it’s very clean.  [0:38:55]

Now, intersection is basically saying that the target is only going to be allowed to exist in 3D space where it intersects the operator.  Now, in the case of the terrain mesh, I said to make this slab only exist where it is in the earth.  So, it basically does not go above.  There are other examples where you might have something that’s sculptural, and you draw a wall. Let’s just do an arbitrary example.  [0:39:33]

Say you had an object that was a sculpture, and you had a wall passing through it, and you intersected it.  Well, you’d end up with a piece of wall that would match the shape of the sculpture or whatever thing you were using as the operator.  So, intersection says to only allow the target to exist where the operator exists.  Then, after you’ve done that, you can sometimes just hide the operator.  So, Solid Element Operations. You can put the elements on a hidden layer, so that’s why right now we’re not seeing that morph down below.  [0:40:11]

You cannot delete the operator from the model.  If you delete the operator from the model, then the effect goes away, but you can hide the operator. Now, addition would be rarely used, but you could take something that was just maybe concrete and add another shape to it. So, you might have the stem wall and footing potentially done with 2 different types of elements, and then you could say you’d like to add some additional form to this element.  [0:40:45]

Then, when you select it, let’s say that the slab for the footing might actually think of itself as having this stuff on it – the stem wall.  I rarely, rarely use addition, but there are some cases where it can help to create forms and shapes there.  So, hopefully that explains it conceptually.  As you saw when you have elements that have been acted on with Solid Element Operations, when you select them, you’ll see this little icon that indicates what other elements are interacting, and when I hover over this, you can see other elements highlight.  When I move away, it changed.  [0:41:28]

Hover over it, and it highlights it.  When I click on it, it’ll tell me what these are, and then I can ask what these elements are, and I can use the X to undo those relationships individually or the whole thing, saying to just stop all the relationships to other elements in the Solid Element Operations.  So, alright, let’s see if there are any other questions.  I see Tom is about to type in something.  [0:41:59]

Taren, let me know if that is clear enough.  So, in terms of my outline for today, we’ve looked at color coding areas, marking boundaries – OK, so we’re raising up the path or road using the morph approach, and creating a path with a clean section with uniform thickness here, and OK.  I just want to do the marking wall boundaries with the Wall tool.  It’s going to be very, very quick and simple – very similar approach, just using a different tool – in this case, the Wall tool, and then we’re going to do something very fascinating with roads, which will open your eyes to some things that aren’t obvious.  [0:42:44]

Alright, Tom says, “Once you get the morph that you like, would best practice be to delete the previous?”  So, you can create the morph and then delete the slab, for example, and so now you have the end result.  The main limitation of doing that is that if you do want to revise the shape of the path or whatever, it is easier to edit the outline of a slab than it is to edit the outline of a morph.  [0:43:18]

While you can edit morphs, there are tools for editing it. In general, slabs are going to be easier, so when I recommend as best practices in general is that you keep your working parts – the raw pieces that you use to create objects for the library or terrain components like this, and you keep them on a layer that you turn off.  So, in MasterTemplate, we have a layer for object construction that is normally off, and we also have a layer for operators that are off.  [0:43:57]

Here, in the U.S. version of the U.S. Graphisoft template, there is a layer for operators to be turned off.  If you are very confident that you won’t need it, then feel free to delete it, but if you think at all that you might want to do some modifications later and redo those actions, then keep the raw pieces. It’s just going to be simpler.  [0:44:29]

OK, let me know, Taren, if that explained what you needed there – and anyone else, as well.  OK, so now let’s go on to marking boundaries in here.  Taren says, “Yes, thank you.”  Alright, so I think I may have demonstrated this earlier, but I’m just going to go into it really quickly here. If we wanted to indicate where the boundaries of a property are or something like that, one way that you could do that is to use the Wall tool. I’ll put this on a layer specifically related to the site again – the site boundary or site landscaping, site 3D – one of those there.  [0:45:16]

I’m going to go to this, relative to sea level here, and I’ll just take this down from 900 to 1100.  Now, this is crazy.  It’s a 200 foot high wall here, but I’m not quite sure what I’ll need, given the sloping, and I’ll make this just concrete – site work again. I’m just going to do an arbitrary shape.  We’ll do polygon shape.  Alright, so I’ve just drawn a few walls.  They’re going to just stick up in the air terribly high.  You can see it’s rather crazy there.  [0:46:06]

Let me just make them a little bit more reasonable here.  So, I’ll take the top down.  Now, main reason I make it more reasonable is I want the handles to be closer to the actual terrain grade here.  I don’t want them floating up in space, and similarly, I can take the underside up a bit.  Now, what am I doing here?  I’m creating something that’s passing through the earth and allows me to mark it, like putting chalk on it.  So, I’ll go and do exactly the same thing as I did before, where I’ll say that these walls here are going to be the target.  [0:46:54]

The terrain mesh is going to be the operator, and I’ll do intersection.  So, they will not be allowed to go up above the grade, and I’ll execute that.  Let’s make these walls the operator now, and let’s make the slab the target, and I’ll do subtraction, and I’ll execute.  Now, we can see that there’s a very clear boundary showing here. That would show up in a rendering just fine as long as we have it thick enough that it’s visible.  [0:47:43]

If I wanted it to be more of a contrasting color, I might take these guys – of course, I could group them so it’s easier to select them, and maybe we’ll just make this something red here, and now you can see that boundary.  Now, I didn’t intersect this with the path. I could do that.  I basically was just having it interact with the terrain.  So, these walls – obviously want them on a layer that would make sense. They could never be seen on a plan, or they could be seen as something representing the boundary if you wanted on a plan.  [0:48:41]

You could just have a layer and the graphic representation correct.  So, you can see that right now, these walls are set with a certain graphic appearance.  Actually, we’re in a site plan graphic override, so it’s simplifying the way the walls are drawn.  Alright, so that’s a quick example of marking boundaries using the Wall tool and that SEO method.  Now, let’s look at an interesting option for creating roads that goes beyond just the path metaphor, where we have just something that follows the grade.  [0:49:22]

We want to have much more delineation.  So, if I go to the sample project that we have in MasterTemplate, it’s really got some good resources for demonstration purposes as I’ve mentioned many times before.  If we go to 3D here, and we zoom out a little bit, we can see that here is the road. Now, what is this road?  You can see the blue line going across the center, and this road – if I right-click on it, it says that I’m able to edit the selected composite or profile because this is a complex profile specifically designed to be used as a road bed.  [0:50:13]

So, what is it?  This is just a fill representing asphalt, and on the sides, we have concrete.  Now, I do have some offsets available here.  These are the things that were introduced into ARCHICAD 22 that would allow me to make the pavement wider or narrower here on the fly.  So, that is a sort of rather standard complex profile that I’m just using for an unusual purpose.  [0:50:47]

Now, what I have in 3D here is a beam.  So, this particular element is a beam with this particular profile that’s just 28-foot road bed right of way – ROW there.   Now, if I go and wanted to extend this and maybe have it follow a curve, beams can be curved. This was something that was introduced a few years back.  For a long time, if you had beams as a complex profile, they could only be straight. Then, Graphisoft improved that option a few years ago.  [0:51:27]

So, let’s just see how I could do that.  So, if I go and eye drop this – by the way, this line here is the beam.  Right now, we’re only seeing the axis line.  So, if you think about a structural drawing, one of the ways you might show beams is just the center line of the beam.  You could also potentially show the outline of the beam, and in order to be able to see the next demonstration more clearly, I’m going to switch in my model view options here, saying that in this particular version of the site plan – let’s see.  We have site plan alternate?  No, here’s site plan.  [0:52:09]

So, this is the model view option, and it says beams will show only the axis.  Now, for demonstration purposes, I’m just going to say let’s show contour and axis.  Now, whether that would make sense in general for site plan, I don’t know, but let’s say that if we did have beams, and we were using them for this purpose, this would be a useful visualization.  When I say OK, you can see that now, we’ve got this line here, and when I highlighted it, you can see that it’s going out to the ends of the pavement.  [0:52:42]

Now, if I stretch this here, you can see that this is the actual beam, whereas what we’re looking at here is a fill.  So, this was just a graphic fill put onto the site plan to represent the sidewalk visually. It’s not actually seen in the beam.  One of the things about beams is that you cannot actually show fills on the plan, which is unfortunate.  It’s a limitation.  Beams have some very powerful options – the ability to show center line or their outline or – depending upon what you need, you can vary it without changing the beam.  You’re just changing your view of it.  [0:53:27]

So, you have to work around that if you do want to have the beam with something that is opaque and covering something else below.  You can’t do it with the Beam tool directly, but let’s just look at what happens if I wanted to make this a curve around it.  So, I’ll go to the Arc tool, and let’s just say from this point here, I’m going to go to the left.  I don’t really care about the distance right now.  I’ll just take whatever that is, and I’ll do this.  Actually, I want to do an arc by center and outline here.  [0:54:09]

I’ll say in line with this here, move over, and whatever distance I want, and then we’ll take this around.  So, what is this?  This is just an arc that I drafted very quickly, just picking out a center radius point – whatever I want, but I know that because this line is perpendicular to the axis line, this is going to be a nice tangential curve. There are other ways to draw these curves, but that will work just fine. [0:54:46]

Now, I’ll go to the Beam tool and eye drop this, and I’ll now draw the Beam tool with a curve following probably the simplest thing, the 3-point method, and say it’s going to start here, go to there, and end up there, and click again.  Now, you can see what’s happened is that this is a beam, and this is a beam, and of course, they clean up nicely.  There’s no line here, and when I go to 3D, what do we have?  We have the road curving.  Looks pretty nice.  [0:55:19]

Now, let’s go and extend this out further.  So, I’ll go and take the Beam tool here and let’s see.   Can I get the tangent?  I think it looks like we can actually get a tangent. I’m not sure.  We’ll just take the beam.  Oh, we need to set the beam to be going straight here.  Let’s see.  How would we get the tangent of this?  This line?  Trying to remember how we do it.  A tangent – if we do the line, I’m not sure that – OK, here’s a perpendicular.  [0:56:02]

So, I’ll just do a line. Actually, I’ll do a guide line. Go to do a guide line.  No, we can’t.  It’s not sensitive to the end here, so I’m going to do a manual guide line here, so we’ll say that I want to draw and create a guide line segment, and I’ll say from here to here.  Now, this segment, then, when I hover over it, I’ll be able to get a perpendicular snap because I’ve indicated that this is an angle that I’m interested in.  So, now that I go to the Beam tool, and I start it here, and I hover over that, you notice that it’s got a blue line that it’s indicating that it’s perpendicular to that.  [0:56:49]

So, let’s just take this out in space here.  So, you can see how this is now cleanly going out like that.  Now, this is all flat at this point, but I can actually slope this because beams can be sloped. So, if I go to the endpoint here, and I say that I’d like to change the end height, then I can take it up or down, so I’ll just take it down a little bit here.  [0:57:18]

So, you can see that it’s now sloping down. What if I wanted this one to be sloped up?  Now, I can do that here. So, we can create a road here that would follow any reasonable path. The limitation here is that I cannot take this point and make it go up or down.  In other words, when we have a beam that is curved, it has to stay level.  So, this is a limitation of this approach, but aside from that limitation, it’s going to give you a very nice, clean result visually.  [0:58:01]

Now, having demonstrated this with the Beam tool, I’m going to show you a really powerful way that you can use the Railing tool to create something very much like this with even more flexibility. It is actually incredibly easy to work with once you’ve set it up.  So, how would we do that?  Well, I’m going to go to the plan and first of all, I’ll go to the Profile Manager here, and you notice that this profile is still highlighted. I’m going to go and say that I’d like to edit it.  [0:58:41]

So, now it’s come up here where I could edit it, and now that I’m in editing mode, I can say I’d like to be able to use it for railings.  Now, you may wonder why you would use a road profile as a railing.  Because the railing tool normally used with stairs can have arbitrary elevations.  If you think about railings, they go up the stairs and around corners and things like that, and the hand rail can be a profile.  Normally, it would be a piece of metal or wood profile, but it can actually be a road, and then you can just have it follow the terrain, and it really does a remarkably good job.  [0:59:22]

So, by saying that I’d like to be able to use this profile occasionally for railings and save it, it will be available.  Now, let’s go to the plan here, and I’m going to go to the Railing tool. Now, the Railing tool is normally on whatever layer would make sense for railings here.  Maybe it’s turned off for the site.  So, I’m just going to put this on the site, and we’ll say site – streets.  It’s going to be on the site – streets because I’m creating a street.  [0:59:58]

Now, I’ll go into the Railing settings, and you can see there’s a whole bunch of stuff in here.  Let me go and pick a favorite.  Let’s see.  Do we have a favorite for railings?  If I go to the railings overall, and we pick one, the simplest in this case is just to pick one that only has a hand rail.  So, if I go to AMT Railings, there’s one that is a concept hand rail only.  Now, what that means is it’s going to basically have no post and no supports.  It would just be something that would just stick on the wall as a concept for where the railing goes or float in space for a concept model.  [1:00:42]

Now, I’m going to say that the top rail here – you see there’s nothing below here.  I’m going to make this top rail – instead of a built-in rail, I’ll make it a profiled rail. Now, when you make it a profiled rail, you can then pick a profile, and you can see there are different profiles that could be used.  Some of them are absolutely useless or would not make sense to use in a stair, but could be used for special geometric modeling purposes, and that’s why I’m going to do the roadway one.  [1:01:23]

You can see it’s got this really weird look, but if you look closely at it, you’ll see it’s a road bed with the concrete around it.  Now, fixings are what normally would support the railing against a wall or something like that.  We don’t need that, and when I did the favorite, it changed the layer, so I’m going to put it back to the site – streets here.  So, now I’m saying that I would like to be able to draw a railing that is using just a top rail that’s this road bed.  [1:01:59]

The one other thing I’m going to do is change the height here.  You can see the segment settings here.  I’m going to change this down to zero or close to it.  I think it actually insists that you have it just a fraction of an inch or a millimeter or two above zero.  I wish that it allowed you to have it at zero, but it puts it just a hair above.  Now, I’ve just said I’m going to be drawing something that will be on the layer for streets, that it’s going to have only the top rail being this profile, and I can have as many segments as I want.  [1:02:35]

I can draw this manually by using the option for a static shape.  If we wanted to do this based on a terrain mesh, we could actually have it snap to the terrain values, but for now, I’m just going to demonstrate this with static things, and we’ll say this is going to be zero here. It’s going to be just a line that I draw.  It’s going to be the edge of the roadway.  [1:03:01]

So, let me just do this off in space here – something similar.  You can see that this was the center line there.  I can actually go and modify this, curve it, and make that approximately tangential there.  Now, let’s just see what it looks like in 3D.  Isn’t that incredible that I can do that?  Now, here’s where it gets even better.  I can go at any point and say to stretch this here. I can also go into Edit mode, and when I’m in Edit mode, I can actually change the elevations of these elements.  [1:03:55]

So, how do you do that?  Well, in order to do that, I need to be able to select node points.  Node points would be the corners that I just had, and I can go here and click on a corner like this, and you see that it’s got a handle.  Press down on that handle, and then I can use the Move option here, but I’ll just do it straight up and down.  I’ll just use the Shift key to lock it going down.  So, now what’s happened is it’s sloping here.  [1:04:24]

Let’s do the back end, and we’ll do the same thing.  You just click on the corner point there.  You can see just a single node point, and we’ll take this up here. Now, here’s where it gets even more fun is the fact that I can go and click on a node point here, and I can take this up, and I can adjust this.  So, let’s just say we wanted to have an even steeper slope.  So, I’ll take this up here.  Let’s see.  I want to take it.  I’m just going to rotate my view around so it’s a little bit easier to see the vertical.  [1:05:10]

So, now I’m taking this up quite steep – up a driveway here, and I can take this node, and I can take this up.  So, look at what it’s doing here.  It’s figuring out what it needs to.  We can have more node points here, but let’s just take this up maybe a little bit steeper.  Now, you have to make sure that it stays vertically aligned.  I think it can have some issues if you don’t do that – if we take this up here, yeah.  You can see I can keep adjusting this and get a nice, smooth result.  [1:05:53]

So, this is a railing, which if we look on the plan, may have some visual issues in terms of just the representation.  So, you may want to have this on a layer that is only for modeling and then create something else that represents the road work, but this is literally – if I exit Edit mode here, it’s literally a railing, and I can go and move these points around, even on plan. I think that I can change these points and change curvature and things like that, and I think it’s just incredible because you can follow this shape – whatever you need using the Railing tool.  [1:06:40]

So, again, the prerequisite here is that you have a railing that is set up for only one rail, like the top rail.  You may be able to use the hand rail one as well, but the top rail is the simplest.   You set it up for the profiled option rather than a built in one, and then you have a road bed that you’re using as set up to allow it to be used in railings so that it can be selected there.  [1:07:12]

So, let’s see if there’s any comments or questions from this.  So, everybody’s been pretty quiet today.  I’m not sure if that’s because this is putting you to sleep, or you don’t quite know what to say.  Perhaps it’s not as relevant as other things in terms of your work, so please let me know what you think of this.  OK, so Lou says he’s sitting here amazed.  Jimmy says nice and useful. Tom is concentrating.  Taren says, “I wonder if anyone has used ARCHICAD to design roller coasters.”  OK.  [1:08:02]

Well, ARCHICAD has some real limitations for creating intricate machine designs, but there’s definitely more options than there used to be with the Railing tool as a way to do certain geometry.  Alright, so let’s see.  Another example here that I wanted to show is what happens when we have an intersection.  Obviously, intersections are going to happen in any urban context. How would we deal with it?  [1:08:43]

I don’t have a detailed example here, but I’m going to show you something I worked out just before this class.  If I take the beam option here, and we say that the slope – we’ll just set it at a zero slope so we’re not dealing with the slope here, I’m going to go now, and I’ll take this down to here, and I’ll take another one going across it.  [1:09:13]

Alright, now on plan, it looks actually sort of interesting, not bad.  Let’s look in 3D, and we’re going to see that the sidewalks are continuing through the intersection, and remember, this road bed is slightly built up in the center, and so that’s why the asphalt is showing here.  So, how would we deal with something like that?  Well, I found that if I go to edit this profile, I could go ahead and duplicate this profile, and we’ll just say the duplicate one has no sidewalks here.  [1:09:56]

So, I use the duplicate button here, and I created a new version of it, and this one that I’ve just created – I’m going to go and delete the sidewalks here, and let’s just say that I take the asphalt and raise it up here, and again, I’ll do the same thing on this side there.  OK, so now, this is just a simple profile here.  Now, the foundation offsets would have to be reset if I wanted to have it stretch to make it wider.  I’m just going to actually delete these.  [1:10:41]

They were referring to the little concrete, so that’s why they no longer were valid.  So, I’ve now created a new profile that doesn’t have the concrete, and I’ll say to save it, and by the way, it was saying that saving certain things and having removed the offset modifiers, it will prevent me from undoing back.  In other words, if I was in the middle of modeling things, I want to be careful if I want to ever go and undo, this would block it.  It would basically say we’ve got to sort of start our record of the model from where we’re at.  [1:11:18]

So, I just clicked OK, but that’s what that warning was about.  Now, to fix this, I’m actually going to – I might even do it in 3D.  Actually, let’s do it in plan.  I think it’s a little bit easier.  So, if I select this, I’m going to split it so that the center part doesn’t have the sidewalk.  Even though we don’t see the sidewalks in the plan, we’ve got the sidewalks coming across.  [1:11:50]

So, what I’ll do is I’ll split this by this line here, and then I’ll take that part and split it again by this line, and then this piece in the middle? I’m going to switch it from the normal roadway to the one with no sidewalks.  Then, I’ll do the same thing with this one here.  I’ll split it and leave this part selected, and then the center part will go and change it to no sidewalks.  Now, if we look in 3D, we’ll see something quite a bit better.  [1:12:34]

Now, we actually have this corner here or each of these corners. They’re not connecting.  Why?  Because the part without sidewalks is extending too far.  So, I’m going to go and stretch this using – let’s see.  I think we can get the pet palette here.  Yeah, and I’ll go and say I want to stretch this and use the Shift key.  I can snap it to this. That’s going to create a little gap and take this one and stretch it until it meets.  [1:13:15]

So, now I’ve basically got this coming up to where the sidewalk would need to end, and I’ll just do the same thing here.  I’ll stretch this back, use the Shift key to lock it, and OK.  Sometimes you have to get a better angle to use the Shift key to lock it. That’s interesting.  OK, let me just do this.  Let me see.  If I select this and stretch this out to there and then take this one and stretch it back to the black pencil there, you can now see that this is starting to clean up, and the same thing – I’m going to take this one and stretch it out until it snaps.  [1:14:04]

I’ll take the center part in there, and you can see how this is now looking beautifully clean, and we’ll just do the same thing on this end. Alright, so at this point, we have something that looks pretty acceptable.  Now, obviously, it’s not showing a rounded corner.  Sidewalks could be much more intricate than this, but this could be certainly represented in a larger-scale site plan, just to show how roads meet each other and sidewalks are there.  If you did need to get into further detail, you could potentially turn these things into morphs and go to town.   [1:14:55]

Another thing is you could just have the road bed be the profiles, and then the sidewalks literally draw as separate profiles around, and that would actually give you more flexibility and give these corner sidewalks – they could have a radius curvature and things like that.  So, that would probably be better than turning them into morphs there.  [1:15:20]

So, hopefully that looks like a fairly clear demonstration of that.  Let’s look at some things that we’re going to do – actually, let’s look at the parking areas.  I guess we’re going to do the 3D site plans in the next class. So, let’s look at parking areas and some options there.  I don’t know how many of you do parking for commercial structures, but certainly that is an area that would be common on sites.  [1:15:52]

So, if we go to our other file here, where I guess I’ll just do this off to the side here – alright, so if we wanted to have some parking – maybe in this area here.  Let’s just pave this.  Alright, so we’re going to say that instead of being yellow, we’re going to make this the asphalt or something like that.  OK, so there’s asphalt.  Now, we could put in parking stripes using the Wall tool and just sort of create walls every – the width of a parking space apart, and then intersect, but obviously, that can get tedious and hard to manage if you have a larger area.  [1:16:41]

So, there is an object that you can use that’s in the library.  Actually, there are a variety of objects that are useful for parking.  So, if I type in parking here, it’ll find some within the standard library and then others that are online that you can just download by clicking on them and saying you want to download them.  So, the parking place is one.  If I highlight this, you can see what’s it representing on the plan. It’s showing 2 stripes, but it’s indicating 3 spaces, so it’s not showing the lines on the end.  [1:17:17]

With the stripes, for example, you can say to show the first stripe here, and you can see this shows up.  Show the last stripe.   So, you can do that.  If you look in 3D, you can see that the same thing is showing in a 3D view.  Now, you can have things with a slope – a lengthwise slope or a sideways slope, and if you do tell it to use a slope, if I give it a 5° angle or something like that, I don’t know if that’s valid, but you can see how it tilted this up here.  [1:17:51]

So, you can have the slope going one way or another, which I think gives you at least some flexibility.  You can also put in disabled spaces, etc.  Now, you can also start numbering.  So, if we’re looking on the plan here, let’s just place this down on a plan, and I’ll just zoom in on this, and we’ll just click to place it.  So, you can see here are the numbers indicating how many spaces we’ve got.  If I actually stretch this out like this, you can see that it is following a rule saying how wide a parking space is.  [1:18:31]

Well, we want to get some more in there.  Now, it’ll do even divisions within certain rules.  So, for example, you can say where the – I know that there’s some things for determining minimum parking place width, 8 feet.  So, that’s about 2 and a half meters that you would say.  So, you just type in whatever that is, and it’s going to maintain that as a minimum and make a nice, even number there.  [1:19:05]

You can do things for the ends.  So, if I choose to have bollards at the ends, there are some options here.  You can see the shape that is showing up there.  It’s a little bit less visible right now because I’ve got more of them, and it’s showing them in a small preview.  So, at least there’s some automation there.  The numbering – I think you can do the numbers to text here – the font size numbering starts from, so if you were doing a lot, and you had 10 over here and 5 over there, and then you wanted to start this group at 16, you could say to start it at 16 here, and then this is going to say 16 through 22.  [1:19:53]

So, these are things that will allow you to get representations on plan as well as 3D, and I think I can handle a variety of conditions fairly gracefully.  So, let’s see if anyone has any questions about parking.  Obviously, when you’re doing full parking site planning, you have things about turn radius and other concerns, but this is a way that you can easily get something representing the parking and see how many spaces you can fit in in a site with a reasonable amount of automation in terms of just stretching things. It says, “Oh, well it will fit 12 spaces here.”  [1:20:51]

So, let me know if you have any questions about that.  OK, so Lou says, “This has been around for a while, and it’s been improved and become even more useful.”  OK, so let’s see, then.  We are at an hour and 24 minutes, so I think that’s probably a good place to finish.  What we’ll be looking at next time will be doing some graphic site plans with shadows and different types of graphic embellishments to make them look pretty.  [1:21:35]

What I’d love to get your help with, and I will send out an email about this, is send me some examples of site plans that are attractive, that you’d like to understand better how to create.  Maybe there are things you’ve already done, and you just want to say you’re proud that you made a beautiful site plan, and I can use that as an example.  I’ll take your file, if you have an ARCHICAD file that has that, or you can send some images or a web link.  [1:22:10]

I was doing a little bit of web searching just before, while I was preparing for this class here.  So, I did some searches just for site plans.  Let’s see.  So, this was one that I just found pretty quickly for different types of site images.  Now, many of them are going to require use of other tools like Photoshop – other graphic tools to get the effects, but I will attempt to use some examples here and talk about how you could get them.  [1:22:55]

For example, if we look at this one here, how would you get something like that with the trees – with that type of appearance and delineation?  Obviously, these things take time to create.  It doesn’t happen automatically, but there are shortcuts that will allow us to get the shadows in there automatically and just give attractive results.  So, rather than just go arbitrarily from my own research, if you have something that you particularly want to ask how you would do that in ARCHICAD, or you did something nice in ARCHICAD, let’s take a look at it together.  Then, send those in to me – either images or .pln files that you send via Dropbox.  [1:23:48]

So, let us see if there are any more questions or comments here.  Alright, Bob Schwenke, nice to see you on there.  I know you’ve done some things with Google Earth.  Wouldn’t mind seeing what you’ve done or getting a file to actually do some tests on.  So, I know you and I had talked a little bit about that a few months ago.  So, would love to hear from you on that.  [1:24:22]

Alright, so let me know if you have any final questions before we finish up.  We will be meeting.  My plan is to meet next Monday as usual, but then Wednesday, I will be taking off.  I will be in Chicago next week for the Architect Marketing Institute meetings.  We run these – this is my other company with Enoch Sears and Richard Petri, helping architects with marketing.  We run meetings usually a couple of times a year in different cities for our Mastermind members.  These are our architects who are getting direct coaching and implementation assistance on marketing.  [1:25:05]

We also often have an event that’s more open to all architects to learn more about marketing strategies, and so I’ll be in Chicago next week for those meetings, and I’ll teach from my hotel room on the Monday, but then on the Wednesday, some of us are going to be going to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Museum in Oak Park, outside of Chicago, which will be fun.  So, I’ll take the Wednesday off from teaching.  [1:25:37]

OK, and Jimmy, thank you for my birthday wishes.  Yeah, I did enjoy the time off.  My wife and I went away to the wine country to a hot spring center that we have enjoyed over the years.  It was burned down in a fire about 3 years ago, and it’s been partially rebuilt, so it was great to go back there and actually be able to enjoy something that is close to our heart and take some time off.  [1:26:13]

So, alright, thanks, everybody.  I’ll be back next Monday, and if you have specific questions, and you want my help, please join the coaching program call tomorrow at a similar time, and I will help you apply these best practices principles in the contexts of your projects.  Thanks for watching.  Take care.  [1:26:33]