2020 | 025 – Site Modeling – Building the Terrain Mesh from a DWG

Hey, welcome, everyone, to the ARCHICAD Best Practices 2020 training course.  Today is Wednesday, April 10^th, 2019, and we will be continuing on our section or module on site modeling, and let me know that you can hear me and see me and see my screen, and we’ll get going.  We are communicating in the Slack workspace in the 2020 channel.  If, by any chance, you haven’t been using that, go to Bobrow.com/Slack and put in your email address, and you’ll be able to get connected to us, and when you come into the ARCHICAD Training Slack workspace, you’ll be in general, and if you don’t see 2020 in the side, click on channels and then 2020.  That’s where we do our training course discussions.  [0:01:01]

When we do the coaching calls, we do them in the channel called Coaching Calls.  Alright, so I see everyone – several people have said that all is well and that you can see and hear me, etc.  So, OK.  Frank says he’d like to watch Ajax play against Drew Ventis.  So, I don’t know those teams, but I’m assuming it’s a sports event – probably soccer or something like that, or football, I guess it’s called in most of the countries around the world.  I’m personally focused on the basketball championship.  [0:01:46]

My local team, the Golden State Warriors, have clinched first place in their division, and we’re about to go into the whole playoff series, and for the next 6 or 8 weeks, I’m going to be very excited to see my team, and we’ll see how they go – they’ve been champions 3 out of the last 4 years, and we’ll see if they can make it again this year.  All that being said, let’s move on to ARCHICAD.  [0:02:18]

Now, here we see a site that I’ve imported.  This is from a project submitted by Andy Travers, and I want to thank Andy and a bunch of you who submitted.  Let me just bring up the folder that I have so I can thank you all.  So, Andrej, Andy, Chris Ellis, Chris Sinkinson, Daniela Reckstead, Gestur Olafsen, Taren Pang, Tom Downer, and Will Butney.  Thank you all for submitting files for me to use as part of the training.  [0:02:55]

I’ve just started the process of compiling them, looking at what you’ve sent in, and I did pick out some for today’s session to look at.  So, today’s session, we’re going to be looking at importing a .dwg, which is certainly one of the most common workflows for creating a site model.  It’s to bring in a 2D .dwg.  Of course, you could just have a survey or a site survey without contour elevations, and then in the cases where it’s a flat site or very simple terrain, you would just get the boundaries of your world input, and then possibly have just a flat site.  [0:03:48]

If you’re in a certain city area, that may be just fine, but of course, most surveys are going to have point elevations or contour lines, and we’re going to be looking at how you can import those, verify that the scale is correct, start building the model from the survey information.  Now, last time, I did give a very basic introduction to using the Mesh tool. We’re going to be applying it in a real context now, which of course is more challenging, but the principles, of course, are the same, which is that you determine where you place it.  You place it in the right location with the right elevation, and then you adjust the elevation points on the boundaries and elevation points of the contour topo lines.   [0:04:39]

You end up with the prevailing grade, I’ll call that, or the overall grade of the site as surveyed, and then you’re going to be modeling your building in that context, possibly regrading.  Certainly, you’ll want to cut space in the terrain mesh for the building, and you may, as I said, do substantial regrading, in which case you’ll potentially be interested in doing cut and fill calculations.  [0:05:14]

So, today we’re going to be focusing just on importing the .dwg and getting the basic parameters of the survey into a model form, and I’ll be using examples that you’ve sent in, from both U.S. sources and some in the UK and Europe. We’re obviously working in metric in those contexts.  So, we’re going to start out with one from Daniela Reckstead, which is actually in the – let’s see.  It would be here.  [0:05:58]

OK, so Daniela – I wonder if Daniela is on the line right now, if Daniela’s attending.  No, she’s not.  OK, so I want to thank Daniela for supplying this. Her notes – let me just bring this up because it’s just interesting to always have some context here. Alright, so her notes are, “Here is a survey for a fire rebuilt house nearby Malibu Lake that I’m working on. I’m attaching the survey.  We’re still developing the project.”  [0:06:33]

So, as some of you know, here in California we’ve had some really devastating fires the last several years. There was one down in the Los Angeles area, particularly centered around Malibu this last 6 months ago – something like that, and a lot of buildings were destroyed, so those people who had insurance and can afford to are rebuilding, and so we have a survey of a property, and unlike probably most surveys, we’re going to see something in here when I zoom in on it that says Building Remains – Rubble.  [0:07:19]

OK, rock.  Alright, so we have the survey for the site contours, and we have an outline for where the original or the destroyed building was, and we’re not going to be creating a model of the building now. We’re going to be creating just the site.  Now, what Daniela supplied was a .dwg that I imported, and I’m going to re-import it so you see that process, but you can see it is actually a sheet.  [0:07:53]

So, the reason I bring that up is that you may get a .dwg that is just the data, and it hasn’t been put with a title block, or you may get one that has already been placed on a sheet.  If you work with AutoCAD or other CAD programs and even within ARCHICAD, you know that there is model information.  You have your building so many feet or meters on each side, and then there’s paper information, where you have sheets of paper that are so many inches across or so many millimeters or centimeters across, and the drawings are placed from the model space at a certain scale onto the layout sheet.  [0:08:39]

Of course, if you take your architectural ruler, you can verify that something has been placed at the right scale, and we’re going to actually verify that this paper image – that the actual survey .dwg is scaling properly so that when we use it as a trace reference that we’re building things in that context.  So, let’s go into how this works.  [0:09:10]

The best way for working with surveys in general is to place them into an independent worksheet.  So, a worksheet in the project map.  We have our stories, sections, elevations, interior elevations, and worksheets.  So, all the ones before here are views of the models.  Worksheets and details are 2D drafting areas.  Now, a worksheet can contain external information, like a survey, or it could be copied and created from data that you see on the plan or even in a wall – a section of a wall.  [0:09:52]

However it’s brought in, it is 2D information, and in general, I’ve mentioned this before, but details and worksheets in the ARCHICAD structure perform very similar functions, or let’s say they have very similar capabilities. They’re 2D only.  You have access to all of the 2D documentation tools. You do have access to objects because objects have a 2D appearance, but you don’t have access to any of the 3D elements, and so even if you have something that looks like a wall section or detail of an eave, those elements have been turned into 2D representation.  [0:10:38]

Now, I would say just in general – again, repeating something I’ve said before, if you are creating detailed drawings – something that you call a detail drawing that you’re going to place on a sheet and say that these are my details, then use the detail viewpoints. If you are creating any other 2D information such as a survey or an enlarged wall section, or you have some other reference materials - .pdfs, all of those sorts of things can be put into worksheets, and we also use them for some supporting tools like Interactive Legends, components that you can eye drop.  So, worksheets can be used for that.  [0:11:27]

So, to create a new worksheet, I right-click.  I have to be in the Project Map, not the View Map. You have to be in the Project Map, and then you can right-click on the worksheet folder or on any existing worksheet and chooses New Independent Worksheet. So, you say New Independent Worksheet.  You have the opportunity to give it a number, and this is going to help you to organize in groups, like whatever your first letter or two or three will group them, and then sequentially – 01, 02, etc.  [0:12:01]

This is arbitrary.  You could even leave that out, but it does help to organize it.  Now, I had already imported the survey, and I named it with Daniela Reckstead Survey.  This is going to be the second time for class, so I’m just naming it here.  Now, in inherited that name because when I placed the previous one, it set the default, meaning that the last one I created had that name, and it just brings that up.  Obviously, it’s convenient here.  I can just type in for class.  When you’re creating new worksheets, it will just bring up the last name that you used in case you want to reuse that.  [0:12:41]

I’ll say to create this, so it will say Blank Workspace.  You can see there’s an origin point here with a snap. That’s where the 0.0 in the XY plane is located.  Now, there’s a scale factor here.  Right now, it’s at ¼ inch to a foot, which would roughly be 1 to 50 in metric standards.  That would be a common scale factor for floor plans for smaller projects, but when you’re dealing with a site, it probably isn’t the scale factor that you would be using.  [0:13:19]

So, maybe it’s 1 to 100 or 1 to 200 or 1 to 8 or 16, or 1 inch equals 10 feet.  I’m just going to make a guess here that 1 inch equals 10 feet.  Now, the reason why this factor is somewhat important is that when you bring in a .dwg, the text is going to be coming in in relationship to the building elements and the site information, but when you place it on a sheet, if you have this set incorrectly, the text may look funny and may be too big or too small.  So, generally, what’s important is to understand how the drawing would be placed on a  sheet and then match that scale here.  [0:14:07]

Now, this does not affect the distances between points, like if you have 100 foot or 100 meter length on the survey, it won’t affect whether that’s accurate or not, but it will affect how the text – the paper information looks.  So, I’ve set this to a guess. We can always adjust it, but it is helpful to get this right before you place it. Now, I’m going to go to the File menu, External Content, Place External Drawing.  [0:14:35]

So, this is the simplest and generally most common way to bring in a survey. You could use an .xref.  There’s another command, just in that same submenu to import an .xref, but that brings in a whole bunch of extra layers that you don’t necessarily need for this purpose and some other overhead.  So, I’m going to pick this here. You can see it says .dwg.  I’ve got this set to all available types. If you wanted to filter and say you only want to see .dwg or something else, you could basically – when you’re placing the external drawing, it will show you whatever you allow it to filter. So, right now I’m saying to show me everything, and in this folder, there’s only the one file.  [0:15:17]

So, I’ll say to open it.  Before I do that, if I click on Options here, OK, that just allows me to open or close this enabling thing. When I say Open, it will ask me the drawing unit. Now, when you’re dealing with .dwg, there is an option for setting a whole variety of different settings for translation. Generally, they’re known as the dxf .dwg translation setup or translators.  In the case of placing an external drawing, it doesn’t really ask you which translator.  All of those settings will be used based on the default or the most common settings in effect.  [0:16:07]

However, it does give you the opportunity in this context to ask what the drawing unit is.  Now, when we’re working in the U.S. with feet and inches, ARCHICAD, of course, is just talking to you in a natural way for an American architect.  If you were importing something from another architect who used AutoCAD – most commonly, if they’re working in feet and inches, you would say that drawing they’re sending is delineated in inches.  [0:16:39]

So, if something is 3 feet long, it would be 36 units – 36 inches in length.  Now, when you’re working in surveys, it’s most common that the surveys are in decimal feet because that’s the way actual site survey documents are annotated.  So, we would most typically bring in surveys with 1 foot.  Now, if you’re doing things in metric – meter or millimeter would be your choices.  Of the 3 projects that I brought in earlier today as testing, 2 of them worked fine with millimeters, and one was way too small, and I realized what it was, so I reimported it with a meter, and then everything was sized more correctly.  [0:17:25]

So, here we have a U.S. survey. I’m going to say 1 foot, place this, and you notice that I have a little indicator with drawing boundaries out from wherever my crosshair is.  I’m going to put this on the origin point here. Now, you could put it in another location, but I find that in general, placing it on the origin is a good practice, particularly if you’re bringing in multiple drawings from the same source.  Often, that will help them align to each other more easily.  [0:18:00]

I’ll click here, and we’ll see it bring in the survey in just a few seconds.  I’ll zoom out now, and you can see that as I zoom out, there’s a big empty area, and then the sheet, which we were looking at before, is in the upper right corner.  Now, I don’t believe there’s anything over here, so I can select this and crop it.  [0:18:25]

Now, just like when you place a drawing on a layout sheet, you can change the boundaries of the window to possibly excerpt what you’re showing, or at least just make it neatly fit around the usable space.  So, if I go to the corner here and use the pet palette, this option here is to adjust the frame, which essentially crops it whereas this one, which looks similar, is to stretch it, and that would actually resize it.  It would make things bigger or smaller.  [0:18:57]

I’m going to go in and adjust the frame here and bring it to where it’s just about the right size.  Now, I could move this down into the origin or leave it alone. In this case, I’m just going to leave it alone.  I don’t think we’re going to be coordinating with anything else. This is basically going to mean that what I’m tracing this to create the site, it’s going to be this distance away from the origin.  [0:19:26]

It’s optional, as I said, to move this around.  I’m just going to leave it where it is and Fit in Window using the keyboard shortcut.  So, now here we have the sheet. When I zoom in on it, we can see some information about the property – some text information, some abbreviations, and here is our actual survey, and if I look carefully here, there is a property boundary that’s got some length information, which is ideal.  [0:20:03]

A long line for a survey – in this case, 99 feet, fairly long. It’s not just a few inches on the earth.  It’s a substantial distance.  If I measure that, and it comes in correct, I know that everything else is going to be in scale.  So, how do you measure things?  You use the Measure icon here or type M, but I do M.  You can see I’m getting the feedback as I move around.  Now, I don’t really care about the initial value. That’s something arbitrary, but when I click, now it’s measuring offsets from there.  [0:20:42]

So, here’s our zero from there, and I go to the other end, which would be here, I think.  Let’s see.  Where is it? There it is.  So, you can see that when I snap to that point, it says distance 99 feet 1 ½ inches, which is exactly what that says. That says 99.12 feet, so 99 and 1/8 of a foot, and 1 ½ inches is 1/8 of a foot.  So, I know that this is precisely correct.  [0:21:14]

Now, you can see the N7258, etc. That’s the survey bearing.  Now, that’s based on where the north arrow is. Now, if I zoom out a little bit, I can see that there’s a north arrow here, and when I measure that, it is precisely up and down.  So, clearly, this map follows those conventions of being placed with the north arrow up. The buildings, of course, are on an angle.  [0:21:44]

So, if I were drawing the project from here, I would get this survey in and then rotate my orientation for the building design to this angle.  Now, because I already have this whole sheet here, I might opt for the slightly more complex situation where the survey is maintained vertically or with north vertical, and all of my drawings for the plans are set on this rotated angle, and as long as I’ve used that rotated angle in my work, then everything will be on the axes, just as you would expect.  [0:22:25]

So, let’s verify some other things here before we proceed.  What scale is this drawn for?  Here it says 1 inch equals 16 feet.  OK, so now, if I go to my scale factor, I had 1 inch equals 10 feet.  So, I wasn’t too far off.  Now, there is no standard scale factor here for 1 inch equals 16 feet, but I can create a custom one.  So, what would that be?  One inch equals 16 feet.  16 times 12 is 192, so it’s actually 1/16^th of an inch equals 1 foot.  That would be exactly the same as 1 inch equals 16 feet.  [0:23:12]

It’s 1 to 192.  Now, you notice when I did that that the text started to go a little bit funky.  So, what we generally want to do is get the scale right and then re-import with the scale correct.  So, I’ll delete that.  I’ll go and re-import this, get this here, leave it at 1 foot, place, and let me just zoom out a little bit, and we’ll place it again on the origin – not that that is that critical, but now, if I crop this and zoom in on it, now this would fit on the sheet that we’re looking at.  [0:24:03]

At that 16^th-inch scale, there are some issues like this text here is not in scale, but everything else looks sort of in proper relationship.  When I changed it from the 1 inch equals 10 feet, which is 1 to 120 to the 1 to 192 there, the text started overlapping in odd ways.  So, right now, the text is looking about as good as we could get with this.  Now, if we did want to print this out – if we did want to actually edit this as opposed to having it just as a reference, what you can do is explode it.  [0:24:42]

Now, you don’t have to explode it to create the site terrain, but if we did want to fix some of these things like that, then we would either need to cover it up and redo that area, or we’d need to explode it.  So, to explode it, we can right-click on it and you can say to explode into current view, and again, you don’t have to do this, but I wanted to show you what happens.  I’ll undo it.  [0:25:07]

If I say keep original elements after exploding, it will be this drawing plus all the linework.  If I uncheck that, it will just be the linework.  Now, right now, the layers and everything will be on the layer that the drawing’s on, which is G Drawings 2D.  So, all the linework will be collapsed onto that layer, but I could say I’d like to import all the layers.  We’ll look at that in just a moment, but let’s just say I explode this, and it doesn’t look much different, but now I have, for example, some text elements, and I could go and just take this one and move it down here.  [0:25:51]

Now, you can see that the original drawing is there, and of course, if I had deleted the original drawing, then I could easily just edit these things, and all of this is editable here.  If I go and select this – let’s see.  Is there linework?  There should be. Yeah, you can see this is a line here, and these are all going to be lines that we can potentially edit.  So, I’m not going to do any more editing here.  I’m going to undo back the drag of the phone and the explode so it’s back now to just being the original drawing placed on there.  [0:26:32]

Now, the other thing we should look at is sometimes, the information here is very hard to read in the sense that it’s just got a lot of data there, and maybe you want to turn off layers.  Well, in recent version of ARCHICAD – since about version 15 or 17, you can adjust the layers for an imported drawing.  So, how do you do that?  So, if I right-click on this and go to Drawing Selection Settings or use the keyboard shortcut Command+T, we’ll see some settings for this particular drawing, and one of them has to do with the drawing layers.  [0:27:10]

When I click on that, you can see these are the layers that came in from the survey, and I could turn off some of these layers, if I wanted more clarity.  Now, the only limitation here is that this is a setting for the actual drawing. It’s not a setting in our layer combinations.  So, I can experiment and turn off different things that I don’t want, but if I wanted to get it back on, I have to go into the same thing and turn them back on manually.  [0:27:43]

So, you have to one by one click on the eyeball to turn off things.  If I say to turn off the border, that’s going to be the border of the sheet, I’m guessing.  Not sure what else might be – let’s just say to turn off the flagstone here.  I’ll say OK, OK, and you can see the sheet has disappeared.  The sheet boundary and some of the flagstone in here – if I undo this, you can see there is some flagstone elements that just came back.  [0:28:16]

So, you can do that. I’m not going to spend much time here trying to optimize it, but I wanted to show you that sometimes, it is very useful to just simplify down the layers as you work with the drawing so that it’s easier to see and understand.  Alright, so now let’s look at actually building the site.  So, we know that the dimensions are correct, and we know the orientation of everything is correct in relationship to the north position.  [0:28:47]

It appears that the boundary lines are these ones that I’m outlining with my cursor.  So, what I’m going to do is reference this underneath my actual building model and draw a site mesh, just tracing over it because I do have snaps to it.  Now, before I do that, I’ll look at the lowest mounting point.  I think it’s down here.  This is 948 feet.  So, this is up quite a bit.  In Malibu, there’s a substantial part of Malibu that’s up in cliffs that overlook the ocean, so it’s a very beautiful area.  [0:29:28]

I mean, they do have the actual coastal beaches, and then it goes up pretty quickly to some cliffs and raised areas.  So, that was 940-something, and this one is 1040 here, so it’s going from roughly 940 to 1040.  In metric, that would be roughly 300 meters to 330 or something like that.  Now, I’ve got this drawing. It’s just purely 2D.  I could print it out, but now I’m going to start to create a site terrain model.  [0:30:06]

Now, let’s just say, what is my project zero?  Remember, I’m going to go to my Options menu, Project Preferences, Project Location, and set that, so let’s just see what would make sense here.  Let’s say it was this front building here, and this looks like it’s 1034.02, so I’m just going to make a little exception and say 1034 feet is our project zero, and that’s where this building is located.  So, I go to the Options menu, Project Preferences, Project Location – I’ll pick a city.  Now, I don’t think they have Malibu, but they certainly have Los Angeles, so Los Angeles will be close enough.  [0:30:53]

It’s close enough in the sense that if we did a sun study, the sun lighting in the city of LA and the city of Malibu, which are probably about 30 or 40 miles – 50 kilometers or something like that apart from each other. The sun is essentially going to be in the same place at the same time, so I’ll say Los Angeles.  We know that the north arrow is straight up here, and the altitude for the project will be 1034.  OK, and say OK.  [0:31:27]

So, now nothing changed visually, but when I start to create the building and the site, I can have some sense of a relationship to them.  So, now I’m going to go to the first floor here, and we’ll show the new survey that I just brought in because I had brought it in earlier with a slightly different drawing scale.  I’m going to say to show as trace reference.  Now, we’re not seeing anything behind here because it’s off here.  [0:32:00]

Now, I can either use – if I go to the Trace & Reference palette, I can either move this – for example, I can drag this down here and work with it, or I can – I just did Undo, which didn’t undo the Trace & Reference position, but it did something here.  I’m not sure what was the last thing it considered undoable.  Let’s go back to the floor plan and do the option that says to reset to default position.  [0:32:43]

So, that’s essentially undoing the drag.  You can drag or rotate the reference as you wish, but let’s just leave it in its natural position here.  If we were bringing in other surveys, possibly using the same origin point, they would coordinate, although in this case, because it’s a paper drawing, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.  In fact, you know what?  I’m just going to fix that issue here.  We’re going to say that what I really think would be an interesting, useful reference would be something down in this lower left section, like perhaps the corner of the site.  [0:33:22]

So, what I’ll do here is I’ll drag, zoom out, say to use previous views until I get out to – keeping it going with previous views, but using the keyboard shortcut, but actually I’m just going to zoom out way out here, and I know that the origin point is down in this area, so what I’d like to do is drag this down.  This is just the .dwg, and I’m putting it down in this area, and I’m going to move it precisely so that the survey corner – so, that’s the corner of the site here.  It’s on the origin.  [0:34:09]

So, that’s actually a very good way to set up your .dwg is to move the .dwg so that a known reference point is your origin. Then, any other imports that you do, as long as you align those, you’ll know that they fit perfectly with each other.  So, that is a good practice to do.  So, now, if I go back to the floor plan, you can see how it’s moved down in relationship to the origin. If I say to fit in window, we now see this here, and in fact, the origin on the plan is also the 00 point, and we’ve got the survey here.  [0:34:52]

Alright, now having done that, I’m going to go and create the site boundary.  So, the mesh – go to the Mesh tool.  It should be on an appropriate layer. The default in this template makes sense.  It’s on the L site Landscaping 3D layer.  Maybe, sometimes you have differences between landscaping and land forms or civil terrain, but in this case, I’ll just leave it on that layer.  What is it made of?  Well, let’s just open up all the settings and say it’s made of earth.  That’s fine.  When you slice through it, what it will look like is this.  [0:35:31]

We could make just a surface, or this middle one would be like a tin can – an empty tin can, but solid is what I generally recommend because when you cut through a section of the building, you’ll see earth wherever it hasn’t been excavated because it’s a solid volume.  Now, here’s where we want to set this.  I want to say that hey, the sea level is – the first floor is at 1034 feet.  That’s what we set here, but I need to set this where its top surface is below the lowest point of the site.  [0:36:08]

So, I will say that in relationship to sea level – remember, I think that was 940.  I’m just going to do 900 here, and it says that means that you’re actually 134 feet below the ground floor, so this point here is about 100 feet below this, and I’m taking this down to a nice, even number.  Now, actually, I’m going to change this and make it the 940.  I used to recommend that you do nice, whole numbers like 900 because it’s just easier to say it’s at the 70-foot mark, so just 70.  [0:36:46]

Now, we can actually put in things using sea level or other references while you’re working, so in fact, there’s no particular advantage.  You should just put this as relatively close to the bottom of the site so that you have a thin platform at that corner, and then it gets thicker as it needs to.  Now, how thick is this?  I’ll just say 10 feet.  It really is just how thick it is at that lowest point, and then everything else is going to be raised up and get thicker and thicker, so that’s arbitrary here.  [0:37:17]

I don’t think we need to do anything else.  We just need to have that set and the trace this boundary.  Now, we need to use the Polygon method as opposed to rectangle because it is not a square or rectangular site.  I’ll just zoom in on this corner. It doesn’t matter if I start on this corner or anything else.  I just need to zoom in enough to snap to it, and I can use the Pan tool to go over as I need to.  So, I’m clicking, and it will just find the black pencil.  [0:37:51]

Now, if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. For example, if I click in the wrong place, I can hit the delete or backspace key, and it will go back one or more steps.  You can also, of course, draw it, and then later come back and say I didn’t get this point right, or maybe you went between two points and realized there wasn’t an intervening point that you needed to snap to, so I’m going to go down here, and because this is a training exercise, it doesn’t matter if I have everything perfect.  In other words, if I miss a point, you’ll still be seeing the workflow, but in general, you want to be as accurate as you need to.  [0:38:29]

So, I’m not quite sure about this here – whether these are straight.  Sometimes, of course, it looks like maybe these are road work, so maybe this is the property boundary there, so I’m going to hit the Delete key, go back a couple of steps, and then we’ll zoom in on this.  Yes, so here’s a boundary here, and so, I will make a good, quick effort at getting this site in place, and it looks like there’s maybe more than one site.  I’m not sure.  There’s a dashed line across there, but we’ll go ahead and say we’re going to do the terrain out to here.  [0:39:13]

Now, this is the site boundary here. We could be modeling the mesh out further.  So, the mesh doesn’t actually have to trace the site boundary.  It could go out further to just represent the context, and then you could use that – I think I did a little trick last time to show how you could represent the site boundary in 3D by drawing an element – for example, walls, that follow that site boundary and go up above the site, and then use Solid Element Operations to basically make them just paint the surface of the site.  [0:39:51]

In this case, I’ll follow the survey boundaries here, and it looks like maybe that’s a straight segment to there, and so if I zoom in and close it, you can see that now I have a site.  If I go to 3D, we can see that we have just a flat terrain 10 feet thick, and it’s down below where the building is.  If we look at the zero point here, you can see this XYZ.  Oh, interesting.  This XYZ is probably floating at the project zero level, and so this is below that.  [0:40:32]

Once we have more context, this visualization will be a little easier to understand.  Alright, so I’m going to go now to start doing at least some of the grade.  Now, in general, what I recommend for workflow is you trace the boundaries of whatever you’re doing, whether it’s the site, the actual property boundaries, or just the boundaries of the site you want to model, and then go to each one of those outline points and set the elevation. That will give you the general lay of the land, the prevailing grade.  [0:41:05]

So, what I do here is go and select the mesh, make sure I’m in the Mesh tool.  What height is this?  Well, here’s the 950. This is 960, so this would be 952, so this would be approximately 951 – as close as we need to get.  It may be 951 and an inch or whatever, but basically, 951 will be just fine for showing the context.  So, I press down on this point, use the Z height choice, and say that relative to sea level, it’s 951.  [0:41:42]

It’s not going to apply to all of the boundary points.  I just want it on this one point, so I’ll say OK.  Now, I’ll go out to the next corner.  You can see there are only about 10 points, so it will be relatively quick.  This will be 990 here, and this is 970.  So, 990.  This would be another line, 992.  So, I’ll say 991.  It could be 991 and 6 inches, but I’ll just do 991 here, and this one will also be 991.  You can see how fast it can be once you get going because the pet palette remembers that I’m just changing elevations, and this one is – should have looked at this beforehand.  [0:42:32]

I’ll just zoom in on it, and by the way, when you hit Escape to cancel that, it puts me back into the mode where I’m moving the node.  I’ll put it back in to change the Z height, and here we have 1009, 1010, 1011, and so I’m going to say it’s going to be here. I’ll say 1011.  So, we’ll take this point, change the Z height to – oops.  Sometimes, you have to undo and make sure that you’re getting the pet palette to register here, and this is going to be 1011.  [0:43:14]

Then, go down to this one, and this is 1016.  We’ll call it 1017 there, and this is 1024 – 1022.  So, this would be roughly 1022.  1022 here, and we only have 2 more points. This one would be in line with the 1038, and this one would be 1030.  I’ll just say 1030 here.  Alright, now let’s look in 3D, and we are seeing how the site grades.  [0:44:16]

Now, it’s a little hard to see this because of the dark green color. We might find that we can just change the lighting conditions. So, if I go to the View menu, 3D View options, 3D Projection Settings, we can go and say that the sunlight is brighter.  Now, actually, the sunlight is pretty bright here.  Let me just take up the contribution to ambient and say OK.  I’m not even seeing a difference here, so that didn’t help.  [0:44:47]

Now, on my screen, I do have options for adjusting the brightness, so sometimes you’ll want to do that. Just make your screen show it, but we do have an option here under the view, 3D View Options to change the view style to, for example, a white model.  When I do the white model, now it’s easier to see the boundaries.  Now, we’re not seeing any of the details of the slope. This is sort of all uneven.  If you did want to see it, you can go to change all ridges smooth to all ridges sharp in 3D, and you’re going to see now what ARCHICAD is doing to create that shape.  [0:45:36]

Now, as we add contour lines, it’s going to be doing more of these, and those are going to get pretty funky-looking.  So, a nice one to use is user-defined sharp.  That way, it will only show when we have the contour lines.  It will only show the contour lines.  Let’s just do all ridges smooth for now.  Oh, actually, I have to have this selected.  That’s why it didn’t change.  User defined sharp here, so that’s going to be what we want.  [0:46:08]

Alright, so now let’s start creating some of the contour lines. So, we’re not going to create all of them because this is just for training purposes, but I’ll show you how to create them, both with Autotrace with the magic wand, and manually.  By the way, before we go on, let me see if there are any comments or questions here.  Alright, so Monica asked a little while ago, “If I wanted to align the survey with the building, I should place on X and do the same with the building, right?”  [0:46:44]

Basically, if you’ve already got a building model, and you’ve got a survey, and you’re trying to make sure they coordinate, you want to find a known point and move one of them in relationship to the other and snap it.  So, you can then get the corner of the building.  If you have the building surveyed for, let’s say, a remodel project, then you can say that this is the survey, and I’m going to line it up.  [0:47:11]

Alternatively, in some cases, if you have multiple drawings that come in from surveys, and you want to just leave them all in their origin point, you could move your entire model to be repositioned so it snaps properly.  Tom Downer says, “Should you check the dimension after changing scale?”  When I changed that drawing’s scale and re-imported, you saw that the text looked better.  The measurement unit – remember, which I talked about of feet, inches, millimeters, or meters? That’s what determines the measurement, so I didn’t bother looking at that, but we could have double checked it, and I’m sure, because of my experience, that we don’t need to double check that.  [0:47:59]

The distances are determined by the measurement unit. The text is determined by the scale.  The text size in relationship to things is determined by the scale.  Alright, Michael says, “I typically go to Google Maps to get the latitude and longitude and plug those in for project location, ensuring that sun studies will be correct.”  Yeah, you can definitely do that. There are resources like Google Maps that are free, and in most cases, you’ll be able to get accurate enough information for visualization, and of course, surveys may have that information as well. [0:48:35]

Google Maps is more than enough for sun studies.  OK, and so instead of saying it’s Los Angeles, you would literally put in latitude or longitude.  Alright, so let’s go and do some contours.  So, I’ll do just 3 or 4 contours across here.  Now, we see one that is a fairly continuous line as opposed to these dashed ones. These continuous ones are the major ones – 970, 980, 990, and then the dashed ones are representing the intermediate one.  So, I’ll take one of the continuous ones here. This is 980. So, how would I do it?  [0:49:19]

If I wanted to do it using the Autotrace magic wand method, I can do it with the magic wand, and before I demonstrate it, I want to point out that you need to have the mesh selected because you can’t modify something unless it’s selected.  You need to have the Mesh tool active in the toolbox because you can’t create new contour lines or adjust some of the data of the mesh without having the Mesh tool active, and it’s easy to forget that. You might be in the Arrow tool, have it selected, try to do things, and it won’t work, so click on the Mesh tool here.  [0:49:57]

Then, first of all, we’ll do it manually.  I’ll create a manual point for this 970 here. When you do it manually, if I start at the corner here, it’s going to actually allow me to reposition this point, but it won’t allow me to start a contour line. So, don’t start a contour line there. If you want to, you can add a node point and then set the elevation of that node point, and we know that this is 970 precisely.  So, 970.  [0:50:34]

Now, this is optional here, but it will mean that this contour line will come in very cleanly. If you add points here, I generally don’t add many points, if at all, on the boundary. I just do the contours, and the outside is going to be relatively close.  I’ll show you what I mean in a moment.  So, to create a contour line, I’m going to click on a series of points.  You notice that I’m being very loose here.  I’m not trying to follow this overly precisely, and I will either close it on the final boundary here or take it beyond it.  [0:51:15]

I’ll show you what happens when I take it beyond. I can keep going, but when I’m done, I’ll click another time on that point, and it’s going to terminate the input when I click that extra time.  I’m adding new points rather than creating a whole, and I’ll say to just fit to the user ridges.  It’s going to follow the grade as it currently is, and we’ll say OK, and you notice that even though I went outside it that it cut it off.  [0:51:47]

Now, I could adjust this.  Maybe I want to take this point here and not change the mesh height.  Let’s see. Just move the point down to there, and you see that now it’s a little bit confusing because I’ve got 2 points, and in fact, if I keep moving them, and it’s not letting me clean that up. Let me just undo back. We have some overlapping points here, and let’s just redo this one here.  [0:52:21]

So, this is where I’ve ended up. It’s more than close enough because we don’t have any buildings near it, and I’m going to explain what’s close enough in my general perspective.   If I look in 3D, we’re going to see that line that I just drew in space here.  Now, right now, it’s following different points. If I use the Measure tool and hover, you’ll see it says Z coordinate -69, and here’s -71, and here it is at -64.  So, these are in relationship to the project zero.  [0:52:57]

I don’t think we can get the Tracker to show sea level in this view, but we can get the information when we’re on the plan in relationship to sea level, but these are not a contour line now. In order to make them a contour line, I need to go to the ground floor and go to any one of these points here and use the Z height change and say this is 970. So, I’ll say relative to sea level, it’s 970, and in this case, I’ll say Apply to All. Alright, so now, if I go to 3D, it looks slightly different, and if I measure this and use the M thing, you can see it says -64, -64.  All of these points are -64. [0:53:46]

That’s a nice, even number 64 feet below the project zero, 1034.  So, now it is a contour line there, and I keep hitting the wrong thing.  I want to go back to the floor plan. Now, you saw how many points I did here, about 8 or 10 points going across. That’s more than enough. We don’t have any buildings near here. This is just going to give us a little more detail for this site. Let’s do the next one, the 980 here, and I’m going to magic wand this line.  [0:54:19]

So, when I hold down the spacebar, I get the magic wand. I click on the line.  So, instead of clicking on it one by one, I’m using the magic wand, and I say add new points here, and it didn’t seem to do that.  Let’s try this. Hmm, OK. It’s not actually tracing those points.  Usually, I’ve been able to trace those points, but what you would end up with is probably a whole lot of little tiny points that are close together because of the way these surveys are done.  [0:55:02]

I’m again going to do the quick thing.  This is going to be 980, and we’ll just take this along and click a second time on the last point here, and then click once and say that this is 980 there.  We’ll do one more. This is 990, so I’ll go the other direction.  Remember, I’m starting just inside the boundary rather than at the boundary, and 990. Alright, now let’s look at this in 3D, and we’re starting to see the way the grade is a little bit more precisely.  [0:56:01]

Now, do I need to get all those intervening ones?  Well, if the building is up here, who cares?  You’re not going to be doing any regrading here.  Maybe there’s a road.  Maybe some visualization will be effective, in some cases, but in general, you only need detail around the site when you cut a section and you’re doing regrading around the site.  That’s where it would matter, and you saw how few the points are. This is what I would aim for, not ones where you have all these tiny little things.  [0:56:35]

So, we’ll just go in here, and we’ll do the next one here. So, this is 1000 here, and remember, I’m going to start near the boundary but not on it, and you can see how few points there are, but yet, this is going to be more than enough. Only when I start getting up here would I really care, so set this to be here.  So, I’ll do around this building a little bit more precisely. So, we have some point elevations for the building. So, let me just do this as 1000. Yeah, everything has probably been regraded here around the building.  [0:57:30]

So, this is 1012.  Now, here’s 1010.  It gets really hard to tell because everything has been regraded, so let me do something around the other side of the building, and we’ll set up the height where these points are surveyed here, if we have that data. Let’s go here. Here’s 1020.  So, I’ll say this is 1020 here, and this building remains, so it’s actually going to go through it.  By the way, I don’t have to keep going all the way to the other side.  I can stop here and say this group of points is at 1020.  [0:58:17]

So, you can do separate groups. So, it obviously would take a while to get more of this data in here.  Let’s just look at how we would get the building on here.  If we go to 3D, the building is going to be up in this area. So, I’ll go, and I can either add a hole here for the building, and let me demonstrate how you would create a hole. Not what I would recommend for this, but sometimes you do want to create a hole.  [0:58:58]

I’ll actually trace all of these points, and you might be able to magic wand it, but those probably are some things it would get confused about, so happy to just get all of these in position. Now, if I said to create a hole here, we’ll see what happens. I’ll say OK, and now you can see that this is no longer green, and if we look in 3D, we’re going to have a hole.  [0:59:33]

It goes all the way down through to the bottom of the mesh. Don’t recommend that because you’re really not going to excavate down below the bottom of this mesh, so what I’ll do is just undo that.  I’ll go back and do the same thing, but add points. So, again, I’ll try to get this relatively precise – black pencils, and in order to create a hole, you would need to go back here.  If we were just adding points, I could finish at that other point and click again, but I’ll just connect these because these are all the boundary of the building remains.  [1:00:27]

So, I’ll say just to add new points here.  Now, if we look in 3D, we’ll see that this is defined, but these are just following the lay of the land. Now, if I know that there’s some point elevations that are specified in the survey – for example, here we have 1011.04.  So, I’ll say this is going to be 1011.04.  Now, normally, we would be typing in feet and fractional inches. We can go 1011.04, and you can see that now it says that’s just 31/64 of an inch. So, you can input things, even in the U.S., in decimal feet, and it will rewrite it.  You just have to do it quick enough that it doesn’t put the foot side in.  [1:01:19]

So, it’s all one action, and if you do get a problem, you can delete this and then .04, and then it says it’s this fraction of an inch. I’m not going to apply to all. That would make the entire boundary that, and maybe that would make sense as a starting point.  Now, these are all that height, and it could be done that way, but if I had some other elevations like this – not sure.  1013.8.  Oh, here, 1017.77. Let’s go to this one and say 1017.77, and don’t apply to all.  Say OK, and this is 1017.28.  [1:02:08]

I’ll just do one more – 1017.28 here.  Alright, so these 2 points are accurate.  Of course, this point here should really be repositioned. Cancel this and move it into the position, so you can always clean that up, and then we might have to go and adjust this 1017.77 here because when I moved it, it might have lost that data.  Alright, so at this point, I now have a site that has the general outline pretty precise.  I’ve got some of the contour lines, and you obviously can just continue with that, and I’ve got some point elevations for the building.  [1:02:51]

Let’s just look in 3D now at the building.  You can see the points that I’ve delineated here and how they work.  So, this is where we would start drawing the building if we were replacing the building with the same footprint or if these points were for a remodel, and you had surveys there.  So, let’s see.  Comments in Slack – you don’t use spline instead of the line tool?  So, I was using the magic wand with the mesh, attempting to trace the survey linework.  [1:03:37]

Now the survey linework – for some reason, it wasn’t allowing me to trace that.  It was acting like it would do the magic wand, but it didn’t give me any points. So, I actually prefer just to trace it manually.  Now, you can use the spline and draw a spline and sort of move it around until you get it to match contour lines relatively closely, and then you can magic wand the spline, but again, you’re going to probably end up with more points than you need, and by the time you’ve edited the spline to make it do something, you might as well just put the mesh points in.  [1:04:15]

So, you can do it different ways, but my preference is just click, click, click, click, click, and use your judgment.  If it’s not near the building, simplify. Just sort of do the basic arrangement.  No one will ever be able to tell in your site model if you don’t have all the zigs and zags of the survey for parts that are away from your building.  [1:04:40]

OK, and Chris says, “It might have worked if you exploded the .dwg.”  Yes, that’s possible, or if you had the .dwg in the same view.  In other words, not in a worksheet, but on the plan.  Now, why do I put it in a worksheet?  Because we can, at any point, just go and turn off the trace, and now we’re looking at just our model.  So, as you start putting in the building and dimensioning it and doing stuff, I’m looking just at the model.  [1:05:17]

When I need to, I can turn back on the Trace & Reference by clicking the trace icon button.  Alright, so let’s look at – just trying to think here.  I think this is probably good enough for this example. I want to show some of the considerations that came up from the metric context, but the basic idea here – this will get you very far.  You will be able to bring in an accurate survey, show it conveniently as a reference for building your site model. You can build your site model pretty quickly, even in a large site, to the level that you need to, and you can get all the grading points.  [1:06:12]

I guess one final thing is we – remember how I created this linework, and it was just going up to a certain point and stopping?  Alright, I can actually add points that are individual grading points.  So, for example, if I select the mesh and have the Mesh tool active, and I go to grading points – so, for example, this is not a contour line, per se, and it’s just some points that are being referenced, and maybe there’s a path.  [1:06:55]

I can go click on a point here and click again to say that’s a point.  I don’t want to draw a line or a polyline.  I just want a point. I’ll say OK, and then that point – I can go click on it, and it says 1020.89.  I just click on it again – 1020.89.  Alright, I’ll go do the same thing here. This is 1021. So, click twice in the same place. That’s just now a sample point – 1021.24.  1021.24 – alright, so these points.  If I look in 3D, what we’re going to see is that when I select it, here are those points right up here.  [1:07:38]

So, we don’t see it there, but these points are at the precise point elevation that we need.  Now, if you want to verify that you’ve got your elevations correct or do some annotation on it, you can do something – I think we did this briefly last time. We can go to the level dimension tool, and I can go on any point. If I go, let’s say, to this corner point here, it says -14 feet.  Remember, I set the zero at being 1034, so that’s exactly right.  [1:08:13]

Now, in order to change this, remember I can go and change this from remembered value to custom text, delete the to PZ value – that’s to the project zero value, and put in the to sea level, and there’s the 1020, and so you can put in these points anywhere you need to, and the only annoying thing for me is if I go and place this here, and let’s just do these contours here.  So, now if I select the text – you have to actually select the text elements here, and then we can say that no, these are not measured value. They’re not to the project zero. They’re to the sea level, and now these are all showing 980, etc. [1:09:03]

Now, I’m going to undo that and just show you a shortcut for editing these.  So, if you only had 5 or 10 or 20 of these, you could carefully select them, but you might have dozens and dozens of them that you placed down for annotation, and how would you change them all from referring to project zero to sea level?  Well, there’s an interesting little trick.  I say it’s a trick just because you’re using selection methods that are not intuitive, but they’re very easy.  [1:09:42]

So, what do I do?  I activate the level dimension tool, I go select all level dimensions.  You can see they all are selected here. Then, I select one of the text elements.  So, the level dimensions are the center points, but here’s the text element, and now let’s see if I change this here to this. You see how these both changed at the same time.  So, again, I’ll just undo the last couple of steps that I did.  So, basically, at any point, when you want to just update this, and let me just go.  [1:10:24]

I’ll select all level dimensions, just to make it bigger.  So, I’ll make it 20 points.  It’ll be just bigger on screen, alright?  So, I’ve selected all the level dimensions with Command+A or Ctrl+A and the Level Dimension tool.  I’ve made a change.  I just made the size something better.  Now, I’m going to go to select one of the text elements.  Now you can see where editing text elements, not the level dimension itself, and I can make the change here to this.  [1:11:01]

Now, bang.  All of them would work instantly.  Now, by the way, these are showing 980 feet, 0 inches, as opposed to whole numbers or decimals. The way that we would get this on this drawing is that I would using the View Map and saying I’m working on an architectural site plan here. If I double-click on this architectural site plan, what we can see is the terrain mesh, but this site plan – we want to have a view that has the settings that will give us a site plan.  [1:11:41]

So, just quick review.  A view has settings that include the layer combination.  It also includes the dimensioning settings.  Now, I’m going to change the layer combination to include those level dimensions because I want to show them on the site plans. I’m also going to change the dimensioning for site plans to show feet and decimal feet.  So, how will I do that?  [1:12:09]

Well, first of all, I’ll go to the Layer settings dialog and say that when I’m in the architectural site plans, I want the – I don’t know where it is.  It would be the annotations. I would have to see which one is the annotation.  It’s not one of these.  So, let me find out which one it is here.  So, unfortunately, I need to just turn on all layers here so I can see those because I didn’t pay attention.  [1:12:47]

So, if I select this, this is on an annotation dimensions – 2D.  So, maybe I want to put these level dimensions on architectural site plans 2D.  That would actually make sense. So, I would then go and select all of these level dimensions and put them on architectural site plans 2D.  Alright, now when I go to this view, you can see that they are showing, and they are, in fact, the dimensions here in the View setting, which are these dimensions. It’s this button here.  [1:13:31]

That’s set up to be decimal feet.  Now, maybe I only want 2 decimal places because that’s all these show.  So, now I’m in custom, and I want to update the architectural site plan.  So, I say Store As, and unfortunately, I have to type this in. This is one of the rare places where we can’t just say to overwrite. I have to type it in, and then it will ask if I want to overwrite it.  A little annoying, but we do that and say OK, and now you can see we’ve got some things that make some sense.  [1:14:07]

Now, obviously, these are showing in one – maybe it’s one decimal place. There were some that had 2 decimal places.  You could choose, but you would need to do that. In fact, if it was zero like this, I’m going to go edit this one more time.  I’ll open the Dimension settings and say that when it’s decimal feet, decimals – unfortunately, we don’t have something that says not to show decimals when they’re zero.  [1:14:39]

When we’re in linear dimensions, we can say to hide zero decimals, but the level one doesn’t have that option. So, that’s too bad because I might just want to say 1020, not 1020.00.  So, that’s a limitation there.   We could just say show no decimal places, but then you wouldn’t see these other points.  OK, so we now have in our architectural site plan view, and we turn off the Trace & Reference. We’re seeing these contour lines.  Now, you may not actually want to show the mesh in the site plan because the mesh is going to have approximations of the contours.  [1:15:23]

It’s possible that the mesh actually shouldn’t be shown on the site plan, but you’re going to be showing other things in 2D, but obviously, if you do this cleanly enough, then the mesh is going to be a useful bit of annotation.  OK, so let’s see if there’s any questions or comments before we do some metric examples here to finish up.  [1:15:48]

Monica says, “Should you move the first points of the boundary after the contour is done?”  You could.  You could move that.  I just generally get it relatively close to the corner and call it a day, but you could move it to the boundary edge.  Bob says, “I do the imported sheet in a layer and work over the top of it.”  You can certainly, instead of having it in a worksheet, you can do it in a layer.  I like doing it in a worksheet because you can turn it off and on with a single click as opposed to having different layer combinations.  [1:16:22]

Of course, you can use quick layers and have some similar effect, but there’s also more control through Trace & Reference.  You can make it more transparent or more prominent.  So, you have controls visually.  You could also, from the worksheet, place that original survey onto a layout.  Now, you could have a view that only has that one layer, but I like the worksheet because it gives you move controls and flexibility.  [1:16:53]

Ken says, “What’s the downside of beginning the contours at the edge of the mesh?”  When you click on the edge of the mesh, it will not create a contour.  It will add a new node point on the edge.  So, you can’t start it there.  You have to start it inside.  Once you started it, it can go out to the outer boundary, but you can’t start it on the edge because it won’t start a contour line.  [1:17:16]

Daniela, this is your project here. “Could you show how to rotate the floor plan perpendicular north?”  Good. I had mentioned that earlier, and we will do that.  Monica, “Does it work the same way if it’s a .pdf instead of a .dwg?”  So, a .pdf can come from 2 distinct workflows.  One is that you have a CAD file or a professional tool, and you export a .pdf.  It has vector information.  It will be very precise, and you can snap to the points, and it will be much the same as we did with .dwg.  [1:17:54]

Often, we’ll get .pdfs that are scans.  So, you have a paper drawing, and you have a service bureau scan it.  Now, when it creates this, it looks similar.  It is a .pdf, but it’s bitmap, and what that means is it’s just got a lot of dots. Now, we look at it, and we see the dots as lines because our eye just says, “That’s a black line,” but ARCHICAD can’t snap to them because it’s just white and black dots.  [1:18:25]

So, when you have a scanned .pdf, then you will not be able to snap to it, but you can zoom in, and as long as you’ve scaled the overall drawing properly, you’ll be more than accurate enough for terrain modeling, to be sure.  You always want to do the survey boundaries.  I would say, even if you could trace them relatively closely from a .pdf, I would always measure them using the survey input.  [1:18:57]

So, it’s got a certain bearing and distance, and you put that in. We will go over how you can enter survey information using north, east, south, and west in a later lesson.  OK, so let’s look for Daniela and for everybody else’s sake at how you would rotate this.  So, right now, if I go in here, this building – now, I don’t know if these are necessarily square to each other, but let’s say this face is what we wanted to use as our basis here.  [1:19:35]

So, what I’ll do is I will use the Rotate View command – set orientation, click on this, click on a snap point here, a snap point here. You see it’s at an angle of 5.34, and I’ll rotate this down until it gets to the angle zero.  Click, and now you see everything has adjusted. Of course, now the survey’s rotated a little bit.  Now, where’s the north? I didn’t set the north, or I don’t have a reference to north here.  [1:20:11]

So, let me just put this back to the previous zero degree orientation.  By the way, we can go to one that we just did – this 354.  We can go back and forth between these here.  Let’s just go back to the zero.  Now, where’s the north? If you recall, when I brought up that survey, it had the north going straight up, and when I go to Project Preferences, Project Location, we’re going to see that north is 90° on the current view.  [1:20:43]

Now, when I go to the Object tool and find north using the search and pick a north symbol, I can say to follow project north.  Now, in this case, zero is going to be just perfect, but if we had oriented it off of the angle, then this would be important.  Rather than typing in an angle here, we would just say to follow project north.  I’ll just say OK, and I’ll place it in relationship to the building. Let’s see. Choose layer, so we’ll put this on this architectural site plan layer.  [1:21:27]

Alright, so now we can see here’s our north position. So, now, if I say I’d like to rotate the view to this one that I had, you can see how north has changed with that.  Now, this is the site plan. This might be the beginning of your floor plan views. So, I can go to my plans, and let’s say that I was working on the floor plans, and we have the first floor plan set here, and of course, we’re not seeing the site model right now because the floor plan does not have the terrain model here.  [1:22:06]

So, what I’ll need to do is temporarily go in and say – where was it?  L Landscaping?  L Site Landscaping? We’ll turn that on here, and OK, so here is our site. Now, we are rotated at this angle here, and so that’s fine. We can go, then, and draw walls.  So, if I draw a wall like this, I’m snapping, and you can see a 0° angle relative to the current view, and I’ll just do a few walls like that.  So, here’s a few walls. They’re set at the project zero, which was the 1034, and I’m not sure. Maybe that might have been the other building.  So, this might be a little different elevation, but this is how it works here.  [1:23:01]

Now, the first floor plan – this is set to ignore the zoom and rotation. So, when I go here, if I’ve been in the site orientation, where north is straight up, this will be cockeyed, but if I rotate to the 354°, then it will be nice and square.  So, it ignores this, which allows me to go from one story to the next here.  By the way, this site has now disappeared because I’m in the floor plan view, and we turn off site information when we’re working on the floor plan.  [1:23:39]

Now, if we place this on a sheet – so, here’s the important thing.  If I go to the plan sheet here, and we have floor plans here, and we update this, this drawing right now has the original section markers and elevation markers surrounded, but I’m going to change the manually resized frame to fit frame to drawing.  Now, you can see that here is the little bit of the building, and the building would go up around here, so let me just go and change my cropping to include that.  The building’s going to be up in here.  [1:24:16]

So, now if I want this to be square on the sheet, then I can rotate it.  I can use the rotate keyboard shortcut and take this point here and rotate it that same angle, and so now you can see that things are rotated here.  So, basically, you can rotate your view in plan, and you can rotate the drawing on the sheet, and you just need to coordinate when you’re in one orientation and when you’re in another.  So, hopefully that is clear enough.  [1:24:51]

So, let’s look. We’re at the hour and a half mark. I just wanted to show a couple of things that I discovered in the metric context as I was working with it. So, Andy Travers.  Andy, you’re on the call today, so you may recognize this.  This is one that you sent over to me. Now, you sent a bunch of different .dwgs.  I’ll just show the file structure that you sent.  So, you sent all of these .dwg .xrefs, and we can see that some have different names.  Some say boundary line only or topo or map and contours, so different things.  [1:25:38]

Then, I imported several of them, and you can see that if I zoom out here – oh no. So, here’s one. This is the topo for site. So, we can see the site boundaries.  We’ll go to the topo contours only, zoom out, and you can see there’s now just the contours. Go to map and contours.  So, this is interesting because it is the contours, and it’s a bunch of probably site boundaries or possibly building boundaries.  I guess these are buildings – St. Andrew’s Studio and several cottages, and then these black lines are probably the property boundaries, as I’m guessing in there.  [1:26:26]

So, this would be good for doing master planning and overall site visualization.  It’s possible you might even do color coding. You might do a piece of the site in one color, another piece in another color, to show different site boundaries as well as perhaps masses for the buildings themselves, and here we have one that has more detail on clearly what the building is there.  [1:26:57]

Now, we can see the elevations here.  So, this would be a point elevation, I guess. These 137.59 – now, we are seeing some contour lines, of course, and here, this one says 34.  So, this is a contour line, and we would basically follow the same process that we did in the earlier one.  Now, I placed all of these into their worksheets on the origin. Remember, that was one of the points I made is that sometimes you have multiple drawings you want to coordinate.  [1:27:38]

So, when I import that drawing as a starting point, I will usually click on the origin, and then it will either place the corner or the center of it on that origin. Now, all of these drawings – if I go from one to another, if I choose a standard scale, like I found 50% is pretty good here. You can see this boundary outline, and I go to this one here, and we go to 50%, and now where is the origin point?  I’m not quite sure where the origin point is.  [1:28:25]

Let me fit in window here.  So, the origin point is here, and now if I do the 50%, we’ll go to this one.  Yeah, you can see they’re in the same – well, relatively the same. It may be the boundaries.  When I did a fit in window, I didn’t end up with them lined up, but let’s see how we would line them up. If I go and say – that’s the other project here.  If I right-click on this and say to show as trace reference, we can see that they’re not actually aligned correctly.  [1:29:02]

So, here is a good question.  When you do bring in multiples ones, if the origin point of all of them is the same, then they should just automatically line up, but if they’re not the same, then I may want to move one in relationship to the other.  So, let’s say that the active view, which is this one that has just this simple linework.  Let’s just say that this is the one that I wanted to use as my reference.  [1:29:33]

So, what I would do is then go to my Trace & Reference palette – Trace & Reference palette here, and I might switch the reference with the active, so now I’m going to be in the worksheet here, and you can see the boundaries of the little simple one.  I’m going to basically select this.  Remember, this is a .dwg, so I just click once to select the entire drawing, even though it looks like it’s like an ARCHICAD project plan, but this is a drawing imported, and I’ll go and drag this – take this corner up to here.  [1:30:13]

I might need to zoom in and just make sure that I’m snapping to the right points here.  Sometimes, you need to put the reference on top. I’m not seeing a visual change we made.  Sometimes, we want to turn off fills here, or this is an interesting one. This slider allows you to reveal things, and you see that these are not actually lined up.  So, this is a temporary thing.  In other words, when I click on the splitter, then it allows me to reveal it, but it won’t leave it there. [1:30:58]

So, now I’m going to take this point and move it up to there.  I moved the whole drawing up there, and we moved the slider. So, I think that’s good.  Now, you can see that there seems to be some discrepancy here with these multiple lines, but it’s actually in the CAD drawing that there are multiple lines, and so which one is being snapped to or aligned? It’s potentially different, so maybe these come from different survey measurements. I’m not sure, but ultimately, what you want to do whenever you have things to coordinate is use Trace & Reference or the actual origin as a starting point.  [1:31:57]

Actually, use the actual origin as a starting point, and then use Trace & Reference to verify things, and if you need to, just move one thing in relationship to another so that everything overlays.  Now, when you’re printing out drawing sheets for just a sort of separate thing about coordination, if you reference one layout sheet to another, you can make sure that your drawings will – when you place down a light table, it will easily line up, and I know that’s a common thing for just being able to understand multiple stories or existing versus new is to put drawings on top of each other on a light table.  [1:32:41]

So, similar way with Trace & Reference.  Alright, now with Andy, I’ve basically brought them in with the default in the international template.  It was 1 millimeter.  So, remember I said the measurement unit determines the scaling here, and I didn’t actually have anything – I looked in this, and I didn’t see anything that said this property line or this edge of the building was a certain length.  These particular drawings don’t say – at least, I couldn’t see it – lengths there.  [1:33:20]

Now, maybe you’re saying, “Eric, can’t you see such and such?”  I didn’t see it, but what I did verify was, say, that the distance for a door looked reasonable. So, if I measure – I use the Measure tool, M, from this corner here to that corner there.  We can see 797, so roughly 800 millimeters, which would be roughly about 30 inches.  So, it looks like it’s approximately correct.  Now, generally, when you bring things in, they’ll either be exactly on or way off by some multiple.  [1:34:01]

So, you’re not going to likely get it 90% of the way. You’re either going to get it 100% of 50% of 10% or 1000%.  You’re going to get it a multiple, so the fact that this is a reasonable value for a door gives me some confidence. Now, if I knew the thickness of the wall, we could be verifying that, and of course, if you had any dimensions, that would be what we’d want to look at for ultimate verification, but I just didn’t see any on here. [1:34:30]

Now, I also brought in from Andrej Valent, a similar one here.  Not nearly as much detail on this drawing, and I looked at some things. This one didn’t have – again, didn’t have anything related to distances that I could see.  I could see point elevations – 580 meters, I’m guessing there, but I couldn’t see any dimensions. I think I measured here.  These look like building footprints, and so if I measure from one corner to here to this corner, it’s 4344, so about 4 meters, which would be around 13, 14 feet.  So, that seems to make sense for this part of a building.  [1:35:20]

If that thing’s 14 feet, and the whole thing is 40 or 50 feet – something like that.  Now, I did find, when I brought in from Chris Sinkinson, who sent in a .dwg, that this drawing here – I brought it in as a millimeter, and it was way too small.  I had to re-import it as a meter, so again, how do you do that?  If I go to this and say that I’m going to external content, place external drawing, and here.  This is Chris’s one – the 2D .dwg, and I say to open it.  It asks what the value is here.  [1:35:59]

Now, earlier, it had said 1 millimeter, and it came in – it looked perfect, but it was a miniature.  When I measured things, they just seemed crazy, so I re-imported it with it set as a meter, and then things looked OK.  Again, I could not actually see – well, this one may be – no, these are point elevations, and I’m not seeing any dimensions, but this is a substation. I assume that’s some sort of equipment thing, maybe for electrical, and when I measured from one corner to another, this is 11378, so about 11 meters or 35 feet.  [1:36:46]

That makes sense to me. Earlier, it was like a fraction of a few centimeters in length, and obviously, this is a building scale as opposed to a miniature train set.  OK, so basically the same thing happens in the metric standards.  You’re just working in millimeters or meters, whereas in the U.S. you’re working in inches or feet, but everything else is the same. If you don’t have a precise thing like the length of a property boundary or the length of a wall that you know, measure something that you at least have a good sense of and see if it’s about right.  [1:37:36]

If it’s about right, it’s probably exactly right.  Alright, let’s see, then.  Alright, so some people saying “Thanks, got to go.”  Frank, “Earlier on, you skipped the hole in the terrain mesh.  What do you do in set up to make a hole?”  I explained this later on. When you’re going to be putting a building into the terrain, a common thing is to take the slab, and I think I demonstrated this in a previous lesson.  Take a slab and say that this slab is cut out of the earth, and everything above it is a void.  [1:38:15]

Basically, we’re going to have air space for people to walk around in the structure of the building. So, we would do Solid Element Operations with the bottom slab – whether that’s a floor or a slab on grade for foundation, and say that that is being removed from the earth and everything above it.  So, subtraction with upward extrusion. In some cases, you’re going to have foundation stem walls or piers, posts, and things like that, and you actually have dirt underneath and a gap.  [1:38:54]

In that case, I would create a slab that defines the plane where you want to excavate to.  That slab would be something that doesn’t exist in 3D. It just defines a cutting element or a cutting boundary or a cutting volume, and then you use the Solid Element Operations in the same way. That slab is then turned off, so it becomes one of those elements that you have on a layer for operators that are hidden but need to be retained in the model.  So, those would be 2 simple ways to do it.  [1:39:29]

Now, Andreas Letner demonstrated in the Best Practices 2017 course a way of using a slab with angled sides, and his point was in the real world, you don’t just dig straight down and have a flat bottom.  You actually dig with angled sides because you have to get equipment down there, and you have to do various – the way it’s going to be excavated, so if you really want to know how much was cut out, then you need to do it on the angle from whatever the boundaries are.  [1:40:09]

So, you remove all of that, and then you replace it because you’re going to fill in around the building with new material or soil or whatever it is. Maybe it’s gravel, in some cases for drainage, and you end up with undisturbed earth off on these angles, and then recompacted or reinstalled after you’ve gotten the foundation dug out.  So, that’s a way to do more precise modeling of the phasing for projects that require that.  [1:40:45]

Alright, Frank. “I did this in my project.  It’s strange, though.  I see the hole in 3D, but don’t see it in 2D.  This connects to what you just explained.”  Right.  If you use Solid Element Operations, then you do not see the result in 2D.  So, basically, you have a terrain that just extends through the space, and you have a slab, and the void is not seen in – the terrain does not look disturbed by your cutout. It just looks like the original thing.  [1:41:21]

So, in 2D, of course, the boundary of the slab may be just fine. That’s all you need to see, but you could also potentially draw some 2D information, and as a final option, in some cases, you may want to change things into a morph to be able to see the boundaries of things because morphs will draw their linework in 3D as they are in plan, but be careful.  A terrain mesh is much more efficient for ARCHICAD to deal with and easier to edit than a morph.  So, use morphs only when you absolutely have to.  [1:41:59]

I’m not saying to avoid them, but they are trade-offs.  OK, so we went for an hour and 45 minutes, covered most of the stuff I wanted for today’s session. We’ll be looking at some more about site modeling next week. We’ll be looking, for example, at how you do regrading and how you do cut and fill calculations.  We’ll also be starting at some point – possibly next week – looking at foundations and stem walls and footings and those sort of things, so what I just explained conceptually will be demonstrated on screen.  [1:42:44]

I may ask again for some submissions related to site modeling with foundations because I’d like to actually have different examples to work with.  So, I know that there were quite a few other submissions as well. I want to thank you all for doing that.  I will be using some of them to show things like working with a .pdf, and I will probably pick something for showing how you would do the survey from a paper drawing. In other words, on the drawing, it says the property line is this length, and it’s on a certain bearing.  How do you actually do that if you don’t have something to scale, and you want to actually precisely input things from surveyors’ measurements?  [1:43:35]

So, thank you, Jimmy, for colossal stuff again, Eric.  You’re very welcome. Tomorrow we have our coaching call, for those of you who want to get some help on applying all these things to your projects. Next week, we’ll be doing the same training lessons, but on the Thursday, instead of the coaching call, we’ll be having the ARCHICAD User monthly webinar, and in this ARCHICAD User monthly webinar, it will be a special celebration of the 65^th birthday of yours truly.  So, I’m turning 65 next Thursday, April 18^th, and I’m going to celebrate talking about 65 years on the planet and 30 years working with ARCHICAD.  [1:44:24]

So, more to come.  Thanks for joining me today.  Be well.  [1:44:30]