2020 | 026 – Site Modeling – Importing A Site via PDF or Manual Drawing

Hey, welcome, everyone to the ARCHICAD Best Practices 2020 training course.  Today is Monday, April 15^th, 2019. That’s Tax Day.  It’s also 3 days before my 65^th birthday, so it’s my birthday week, and today, we are going to continue on our study of surveys and sites and focus a little bit on importing .pdf versions of surveys as well as manually inputting the boundaries of a site using survey measurements.  [0:00:40]

Let me know that you’re with me, that you can see my screen and hear me, and we’ll get going.  We’re using the Slack communication media here.  If you haven’t been using Slack, and if you have been missing previous sessions, then go to Bobrow.com/Slack, put in your email address, follow the directions, and you’ll be connected up.  When you get here, you’ll be in the general channel.  You click on channels in the side bar, then pick 2020 for the discussion during our 2020 training course lessons.  [0:01:20]

OK, so Tom says, “Happy Patriots Day.”  Yes, I understand that Paul Revere did his ride on the 18^th of April, if I’m not mistaken – my birthday, so always remember Paul Revere and Patriots Day.  Alright, so I see some other greetings from Ken and Zlatko, Gestur.  So, Chris, you have a question.  Did I make that adjustable foundation available for download?  I can’t see it anywhere.  I may have to double-check that.  I may not have gotten around to it.  So, thanks for reminding me.  [0:02:02]

OK, so bunch of greetings.  Diane, Tom, Jimmy, Taren, Ken, Bob, and birthday greetings as well.  OK, let’s get going.  Let me turn off my heater here and make the sound a little bit cleaner.  So, let’s just talk a little bit about .pdf import for survey drawings.  Now, surveys come in a variety of forms – certainly, .dwg is a common one, and that’s what we focused on in the last lesson.  [0:02:35]

You may also get them in a text file – xyz, and I’m not sure if there’s some other possible endings for those, but you can bring in survey information as a series of data points provided by the surveyor that basically elevate different points in the XY plane to a different Z height, and that is actually for topography.  [0:03:01]

Now, that can be overlaid with site boundaries that can be input just as 2D linework combined in different ways.  Now, we also, of course, have more of the modern 3D surveys with LIDAR scanning, point clouds, and things like that, and we will take a look at that as well later on, but today we’re going to focus on – we could say a classic method for the early CAD days, and still very viable as a bridge between old and new methods of communicating survey information, and that is .pdf import.  [0:03:46]

So, .pdfs actually have 2 different variations, just in general.  You could divide them into raster and vector.  So, raster .pdfs basically are raster images, meaning that they’re line by line across a field, and as each raster line is drawn on a computer screen, TV screen, or a printer, there’s a dot or different levels of color that are indicated.  So, basically, a scan that you might get of a paper drawing will give you something that looks like linework, and you can certainly follow it along visually and with your mouse, but it’s not snappable because it’s just a whole bunch of dots.  [0:04:35]

So, you can bring the scans in, whether it’s an as-built record, an old drawing set, or simply a survey that’s been provided on paper.  If it is a raster version, you can bring it in, make sure that it scales correctly within a certain level of accuracy.  Certainly, you can get it as close as you need it to be if the original output is carefully made, but you won’t be able to snap.  [0:05:07]

Now, on the other hand, when a .pdf is created from a CAD program like any of the surveyors might use, then it could be snappable.  It could be a vector-based .pdf, and if you remember, the definition of a vector is, I believe, a point of origin, a direction, and a distance.  So, that is a vector in space, and of course, that also defines the end point of the vector, and then, of course, there could be vectors that are curved as well, but all of these vector-based methods do have the ability to be snapped.  [0:05:48]

In ARCHICAD, this started to be possible from .pdfs – I think around maybe ARCHICAD 18.  Somewhere in there, we started to have the ability to snap to contents of a vector .pdf, and even in some cases to explode it, if you wanted to get the linework and text to be editable instead of just contained within the .pdf file container.  [0:06:18]

Alright, so that’s the concept here.  We’re going to be bringing in some .pdf examples and looking at how you can make sure that they scale correctly because that’s one of the first things you want to do is say that it looks good, but does it actually measure properly?  You don’t want to rely on something that’s out of scale.  [0:06:41]

So, it turns out that with .pdfs, in general, a .pdf, because it represents a paper drawing – because it represents something that could be printed, it does have inherently a sense of how big it is when you print.  Now, ARCHICAD will bring in .pdfs and initially put them at 100% of the print scale.  So, how does it know how big that is?  Well, if you think about the scale factor in an ARCHICAD drawing or any drafting window – the plan section, elevation, etc., there’s a scale factor that says this is what I’m likely to place it on the sheet using this scale.  [0:07:31]

That’s, of course, your translation from the real-world distances.  This is 50 feet long or 15 meters long to how big it will be on the sheet.  So, if you set the scale factor in the working view to match what the .pdf was designed to be, then when you place it in ARCHICAD, it will actually be precisely correct.  Now, how do you know what scale factor a .pdf is?  Well, if it’s a scan or a product of a layout sheet, usually you’ll have a scale factor associated with the drawing – either labeled in the title block or labeled underneath the drawing in the title.  [0:08:16]

Now, sometimes you’ll have .pdfs that don’t have that scale or that were scanned and maybe somehow have lost their scaling, or sometimes people will just produce a .pdf from something on screen, and it isn’t necessarily to a precise scale.  You might take something that’s intended for a big chunk of a layout sheet and print it or output it as a .pdf that could be done on a letter-sized desktop printer sheet.  So, now it’s no longer to scale. It’s still very precise, but you need to sort of work with ARCHICAD if you are bringing that in to get it so that it measures properly.  [0:09:02]

So, we’re going to be looking at how you do that.  You can easily resize the .pdf after you bring it in, and if you can snap, you can precisely get the scale, and even if you can’t snap, you can get it very, very close in terms of the level of accuracy.  So, let us take some examples from what was supplied.  We’re going to be looking at some of the submissions that were supplied by course members here.  So, I want to thank all of you, again, who did submit some survey examples or projects with sites or some site drawings that were separate from your ARCHICAD model.  [0:09:51]

So, today we’re focusing initially on .pdfs, and I believe that we have – I’m trying to remember which one.  I know we’re going to be looking at Gestur’s, but there’s another one.  Let me see here.  Which one did I have here?  So, that’s from Chris Ellis.  That’s from Gestur, and there’s another one that I wanted to bring in.  So, those are all original submittal sets.  What about this one?  Ah, OK, so this one – PS18171. That one is from Andy Travers.  So, we had looked at Andy Travers’s file.  So, let’s see if Andy’s on the line right at the moment.  Let me just see here.  [0:10:55]

So, go to my attendees here.  So, yeah, Andy’s on the line. Thank you, Andy.  I don’t think we’re going to open up your line necessarily, but I just wanted to thank you personally. We had looked at these.  I think we had this file.  I think this was the Lazare house.  Let me see if I have that open or if I had imported it.  I think we had imported your thing, so if we go back to the topo contours only here – so, this was one of the files we looked at last time, and I’ll just bring these up here.  [0:11:47]

OK, so we had been looking at this site here in different versions of that as .dwg.  Now, let’s look at a .pdf that you supplied here.  So, I’m going to go, first of all, and bring back the .pdf viewer.  So, you can open up .pdfs, of course, in any of the standard .pdf readers.  The Mac has its preview application, and Windows – I’m not sure if you have a native one there, but definitely Adobe Reader is available.  [0:12:25]

So, right now I’ve got it in the Mac preview, and you can see that this is the footprint that we had.  Now, if I zoom in on this a little bit and scroll over to the side, we’ll see that it says the scale is 1 to 200 at A1.  So, basically, if you print this on a A1 sheet, it’s going to be 1 to 200, which is, for the U.S., a rough equivalent would be 1/16^th inch to a foot – 1 to 192, so roughly that scale that we’ve got.  [0:13:00]

Alright, so if we look here, and we zoom in on these dimensions, we can see some dimensions here – 34.18.  Oh, I guess those are point elevations here.  I think we had some dimensions along here.  Actually, no. These are all point elevations. I thought that we had some dimensions on here. Let’s just see if this lines up, since we do know that if we have the .dwg, we can compare it to that when we bring it in.  [0:13:37]

So, it’s PS18171.  This can be an issue sometimes when you have output that literally does not have anything that you can measure.  Of course, if you know the back part of the house here and the roof, and that’s 8.5 meters or whatever that is, then you can use that as a guide.  So, let’s just see if I’m in my ARCHICAD here, and we want to bring this in.  Then, of course, we can use Trace & Reference to coordinate it.  [0:14:04]

So, I’ll go create a new independent worksheet here, and we’ll just call this Andy Travers.pdf. We’ll just leave it at that here, and now it was 1 to 200, so I’m going to change my scale to 1 to 200.  Now, I’m manually changing the scale. There’s nothing on the screen, so we don’t see anything, but when we create a view from this, we’ll want to make sure the view settings use that 1 to 200.  [0:14:46]

To place a .pdf, you simply go File menu, External Content, Place External Drawing, then go and select that drawing.  So, this is in my site modeling submissions, and it is Andy Travers, and it is in – I think, other refs, surveyor drawings, and here is the PS18171, so that one.  We’re going to open this up.  Now, I’ll just put it on the origin point. We can always move it around, etc., but let’s see how this looks.  [0:15:18]

So, it came in just like we saw before.  We can zoom in and out on it.  You can see that it is intended to be a layout sheet.  So, it’s essentially a drawing on a sheet.  Now, we could literally go, and I want to demonstrate this right now while I think of it.  Now, that was A1.  I’m not sure what size these sheets are.  Let me just create a new layout sheet here, and we’ll just call this site here, and we’ll say that it is an A1 sheet, so that’s a particular size of paper.  [0:15:55]

Now, I’m going to the A1 sheet.  We’ve got a title block here that just came from the Graphisoft standard template, so obviously that’s not correct.  Let’s go and place the same drawing.  External Content, Place External Drawing, and we’ll go get that same .pdf here, and I’ll just place it with the center point here, and it looks almost perfect.  It’s slightly off because the center of the .pdf was not centered on the sheet, but I can select this .pdf, and I can drag this over to match the sheet here.  [0:16:38]

Now, if you were doing this, and certainly this can happen when you’re bringing in .dwg files from a structural engineer.  Maybe you want to bring in your structural drawings, even though they’re responsible for it.  You want to be able to print them out, so you can literally create a blank sheet and place them on there.  Now, if you do that, of course, we don’t really want to have the drawing title, wherever that is. This here is not very visible, but you can see the linework.  [0:17:09]

I can basically say that this should not even have a title.  Let’s see.  Turn off the title, and then you see that goes away.  Alright, so we know that this fits the A1 framework precisely, and of course, it actually has a title block here.  Now, this is opaque when you bring in a .pdf.  It can be set to be opaque, and I believe it can also be made transparent.  Let’s go to the drawing settings here. I have the drawing selected.  You can see it’s highlighted in green, and I can open up the drawing settings here, and let’s just see – size and appearance here.  [0:17:54]

Do we have – I thought there was something about being transparent.  Oh, here it is – transparent backgrounds.  So, sometimes that’s available.  I don’t know why, in this case, it’s not. That’s fine. In this case, we don’t need to be able to see through it, but that is something to be aware of that when you’re bringing in external drawings, if you want them to be overlaid, then you can often choose a transparent background.  [0:18:24]

Alright, so this is certainly fine here, in terms of using it directly for output, but let’s look at it in terms of the worksheets.  So, here’s the worksheet, and yes, it has a sheet image, but we’re going to focus on the actual drawing and see if it scales properly.  So, if I zoom in on this, first of all, can we snap to anything?  If we hover over a corner, we’re not seeing any snapping.  So, this appears to be a raster type of image.  [0:19:02]

We don’t see any checkmark there.  Now, if I go and look at this with trace reference to one of the .dwgs that we know scaled properly, then we might be able to compare and see if it is really going to scale.  In fact, let’s just measure.  Even though we can’t snap to it, we use the Measure tool to measure from this point.  I’ll just click on it and go to the other side.  It says that it’s 3585.  So, that’s 3 ½ meters or about 10 feet, 12 feet – somewhere in there.  So, that looks like it could make sense.  I don’t really know about this building.  [0:19:44]

So, let’s go and take the topo site plus ground floor plan.  I’ll overlay that as a trace reference, and when I do that and zoom out, now we have a little bit of an issue, just in terms of coordination here, and that is that the – what do you call it? We can’t see behind this.  Now, when we have a trace reference, we can choose to make the foreground fade away. So, you can see how, with the Trace & Reference palette, I can make that fade away.  [0:20:30]

We can sort of verify what that is.  In some cases, we can say to turn off the fill here. That isn’t working, in this case.  We’re not making this particular .pdf have a transparent background, but that can be useful in other contexts.  Now, this option here for the splitter can be useful.  We can pull this back and see where we are.  [0:20:57]

It looks like it’s pretty much in scale.  You can see the center part that is matching there.  Now, in order to be able to coordinate these properly, what we could do is we can – let’s see. We switch the reference on top.  So, now you can see that the reference, which was the .dwg, is on top, and we could zoom in on this and say to try to line up where things are.  [0:21:26]

Now, the .dwg here – trying to make a little head or tail on this.  OK, so yeah. You can see the building footprint here, and this one here – this is the .dwg, and this is the .pdf, and so, sometimes you might want to move the reference over.  Sometimes you might want to move the actual placement of the .pdf over.  I’m going to go move the .pdf over.  I’ll just grab it and move it until it’s approximately in the same location, and now we can sort of see some references, and I’ll drag this up to there, and you can see that the .pdf is now overlaying very cleanly on top of this.  [0:22:29]

I’ll just zoom back out there. So, when you’re bringing in the .pdf, if you have it set to the correct scale, like 1 to 200, then you usually will find that when it comes in at 100%, it matches.  Now, what does it mean to be at 100%?  If I zoom out a little bit, and I select the drawing.  Here’s the drawing, and we look at the settings for the .pdf, there is a percentage magnification.  So, as needed, we could make it 200% of 50% or some other value, and it would just get bigger or smaller and measure differently on the sheet.  [0:23:12]

Now, we’re used to zooming in and out all the time in ARCHICAD.  That’s different than making something bigger or smaller.  They may visually look similar on screen, but in one case, you’re changing the size, and in another case, you’re just changing the visual scale of what you’re looking at. So, this 100% is important.  Alright, let’s take a look at another example.  So, I’m going to create a new worksheet here.  [0:23:38]

This one is going to be from – I think it’s Gestur.  Let me just check here.  So, Gestur.   Yes, Gestur Olafsen.  So, thank you for sending this in.  You have a survey here that I’m going to bring in.  So, we’ll get that in a moment, but let me just say Gestur Olafsen PDF here.  Now, if I open up this survey here beforehand, and we look at it, this looks to me like a hand drawing.  I don’t know whether it is, but it certainly feels like it’s a hand drawing. You look at the lettering on it, and it does seem like it’s an older style.  [0:24:32]

So, it’s probably not going to be snappable, but it is set with a 1 to 500 scale, and we do have some measurements.  If I zoom in on this, you can see some measurements – 20.5 meters across the front of this, so that would be about 65 feet – something like that.  So, that’s what we’re looking at.  Now, let’s go and import that into just the same file. It’s just for a quick study.  [0:25:05]

So, we’ve got this Gestur Olafsen PDF worksheet. We’re going to set the scale – instead of 1 to 100 to 1 to 500.  By the way, if the scale isn’t on here for some reason, you can always go to custom scale and just type in a number here.  We’ll set it to 1 to 500 there.  Again, we don’t see any change here, but let’s go and place this drawing. So, this is here in Gestur’s thing, and it is the survey, and I’ll place it here.  So, looks just like what we saw in the .pdf.  We don’t have anything to really trace.  I’ll turn off Trace & Reference.  [0:26:03]

Let’s just see how this measures.  Again, there’s no snapping.  I’m hovering my mouse, and I’m not seeing any checkmarks there, but I can zoom in a little bit and just measure by hitting the M key from this point to this point.  Oh, well, distance is 16762.  Hmm, that’s a little bit odd.  So, what’s going on here? We brought this in at 1 to 500. Maybe it wasn’t saved at true size.  So, let’s just verify.  I’ll scroll up here and see that this says 30 meters, and it says 24551.  [0:26:46]

OK, so I don’t really know what that ratio is.  Maybe it’s the difference between 1 to 500 and 1 to 600 or something like that there, but let’s just look at how we can resize this so that it measures properly.  So, let’s look.  If I zoom out a little bit, what is the longest distance that’s being measured?  Don’t see any really long things.  There are just some summation ones here, but let’s say that it’s 60 meters from this point to that point.  [0:27:24]

So that’s probably about as long as we’re going to get on screen right now.  So, what I would like to do is size this so that it measures 60 meters, and if that measures correctly, then everything else probably will as well. So, I’ll select the .pdf by clicking on it. We’ll go to the Edit menu, Reshape, Resize, or there’s a keyboard shortcut Command+K or Ctrl+K.  I don’t know why K, but that’s the shortcut that they’re using.  [0:27:58]

Now, you do have some controls with resize if you’re resizing a real building.  For example, if you had a building or a part of a building like a unit plan or something like that, or a room, when you make it bigger or smaller, you could make the walls thicker or thinner, or you could say that you want this to be a bigger size generally for this room, but the walls are going to stay the same framing.  [0:28:25]

So, you can turn that off.  Same thing with library parts.  Are the elements going to get bigger or smaller together, or are they going to stay fixed?  If you’re resizing it, you don’t want the toilets to change size.  On the other hand, if your library parts are sticks of wood or a part of a design – let’s say, then maybe you want everything to just sort of get bigger or smaller together.  So, that would affect resizing in general, but here it doesn’t matter.  We just have a drawing.  None of these really matter.  [0:28:58]

We don’t even have arrows or markers in here. We just have a picture of a drawing with some lines.  So, I’ll just say OK, I’m going to resize it graphically.  Now, if I knew what size I wanted it to be, like I wanted it to be 120%, I could do that, but I’m going to do it graphically because I just don’t know.  When you do that, you’ll see the prompt says to enter resizing center point. This is the point that’s going to stay fixed in the world, and everything else will move out or closer to that.  So, it helps to zoom in really as tight as you can.  Now, of course, you can see the scan is pretty low resolution, but I’ll take a point as close to the center point as I can right here.  [0:29:46]

Then, I’ll zoom out because it’s asking me to enter first vector of resize ratio.  I’ll say that up at this point is the first vector.  I’ll zoom in on this, and again, I’ll zoom in as close as I can, and you can see the Y coordinate.  This is taking it in a straight line.  Technically, probably wouldn’t matter that much if I was slightly off because it’s just going to resize uniformly in all directions, but this is interesting.  You can see it’s just maybe a hair off.  [0:30:25]

So, I’m going to just make sure that I pull this down, and I get to what appears to be the center of that line there.  Now, you can see it’s at 49091, and I’m going to zoom out now, and you can see down at the bottom left of the screen, enter second vector of resize ratio.  How big or small do you want the original vector to become?  So, I’m saying that measured – whatever that is from here to there, I want that to be 60 meters, so I can just literally type that value into the tracker.  [0:31:02]

60 – I guess this was 60000 here for 60,000 millimeters, and then hit Enter. So, you see everything just blipped on the screen and got a little bit further apart, and now, if I measure, and I just go use the Measure tool again from down here to up here, you can see 60 meters.  It’s 60.037.  So, of course, if I zoomed in, it would be as close as I can get by zooming. So, I have now got something that I could use for a massing study.  [0:31:44]

In fact, what I enjoyed seeing were some of the – let’s see if we have the massing study that Gestur did here.  He indicated that this is for a redevelopment, and they have different proposals and things that I’m not quite sure what’s context and what is actually being designed, but he said that they had to go through some exercises to show different shadow studies because that was a concern. This is in Iceland, by the way, in Reykjavik.  Not sure I’m pronouncing it right, but in any event, this is obviously helpful for people to visualize how the buildings relate to each other and if the sun at different times of day will be blocked by a potentially new building.  [0:32:42]

Now, how are these masses done? Well, you can see that some of them are just as simple as extrusions – maybe rectangular.  I can guess.  Some have a little bit more definition to match the design or just the existing context, and then some have a little bit of a slope put in. Now, this is all a simple shape here with just a center line, and I’m going to demonstrate something that I’m not sure how Gestur did it, but I’ll just show you how I might do that if I sort of generally knew how the slope should be.  [0:33:22]

So, we’re going to go back to ARCHICAD here. So, this in here.  Now, this particular one – let’s say here’s what looks like the one that I was pointing at here. Not sure whether it is.  So, I’m going to go to the plan.  Now, remember, the plan – actually, we haven’t even been drawing anything, so that’s fine.  I’m going to go now and say to show the .pdf as trace reference, and now, if I draw something, and let’s just see what happens if I draw even just an arbitrary slab from this corner to this corner.  [0:34:04]

What does it measure?  OK, you can see that the dimension 2 is 30 meters.  It’s 29859, so it’s just about 30 meters, and across, it’s 20596.  So, basically, this is totally in scale.  I can rely on it for this type of purpose.  Now, if I’m drawing something on an angle – of course, maybe I’m going to go and use the option to draw a rectangle on an angle, and then I can go perhaps from here to there and then create that box.  [0:34:38]

Now, how thick is it? Well, obviously, if it’s set to be a composited – maybe something like a floor or a ceiling, I’m just going to make it a simple building material, and we can say concrete – structural. That’s fine there, and what are the elevations and thickness? So, it’s basically saying the top here is at zero, and it’s 300 millimeters thick, which would be roughly a foot here, but let’s say the top is up – I don’t know.  I’m going to guess that those are two-story buildings, and that might be 6 meters up, so we’ll just say that it’s 6 meters.  [0:35:22]

It’s actually just sitting on the ground.  Now, of course, there’s going to be some sort of terrain, but let’s just put that up.  So, this is going to be 6 meters in thickness – about 20 feet, and 20 feet high at the top because we’re giving our reference plane at the top here.  Now, having done that, let’s just take a look – actually, let’s just draw something that would be what it would sit on, and so let me just use the original slab settings that haven’t been changed, and I’ll do, let’s say, a polygon shape here, and we’ll put this underneath it, just to give some context.  [0:36:04]

I could curve this all in one go, but I tend to like just placing the vector points like this and then curving it after the fact.  It just seems to be a rather simple way to do that.  Now, if I go to 3D, we’re going to see just the context here.  So, that now matches roughly the way we’re looking at it in terms of what was up on the screen.  So, let’s maybe make this a lighter color, so instead of concrete – structural, I’ll just do generic external cladding. Let’s see what that is.  [0:36:52]

Alright, so that’s now just a simple shape.  Now, with the slab, of course, you can create an arbitrary outline, and you can have any thickness, and you can slant the sides. There’s some options for that, but you can’t make an irregular top surface like having a little roof line.  So, what I’ll do is I’ll just select it and turn it into a morph.  So, I’ll say to convert the selection to a morph.  I don’t really care about keeping the original slab, so that’s fine because once it’s a morph, I can do some more editing.  [0:37:25]

So, you see how the outlines have changed.  Now, it’s got this little green appearance that morphs out, and I can go, and in general, it helps to be in the Morph tool to have more controls.  I select the morph here.  I selected the whole morph, and I go where I’ve got the geometry, saying that I want to draw just a line or a polyline in space.  I’ll go along this edge.  Let’s see.  There’s the snap point, and I’ll just draw this point.  [0:37:56]

So, I forgot.  How do we just draw this?  Right now, it’s looking like it’s moving that point.  So, if I go – maybe I need to switch to select just the top surface.  So, in order to select just one part of a morph, you can change your selection arrow to this sub selection option and select just the top plane, and then I think I can go and press down here, and I know what the problem was.  I hadn’t looked at the pet palette.  I could have done it in the normal mode, but I’m going to go and use the pencil and say I’m drawing a new line in space and find that intersection point.  [0:38:50]

Click again to finish it.  It drew that line, and now I can go and, in the sub selection, I can go click on this.  Let’s see.  If I deselect this and select that edge, let’s see if I can do this.  I want to take this up a certain distance here, so I’ll just go to the corner point here and say that I want to move that point.  Now, you can see this would actually move the point up on one side, so I don’t want to do that.  I want to go to the line itself and move it up, and you can see that I can snap to the Y axis.  [0:39:41]

You can see the little dashed line there, and I can say whatever this is.  So, let me just do 1 meter here, and we now have a shape.  So, while I stumbled a tiny bit in terms of just editing the morph, it is very simple to use slabs as the base point and then convert to morph and then just use some massing studies on that.  So, let’s just compare that to what he had, and you can see the basic idea there.  [0:40:13]

OK, so we will be looking later on at creating site plans with graphics.  So, today we won’t be doing that, but I just wanted to show a quick example of modeling in that context.  So, let’s see if there are any comments here.  Alright, so Frank asked a little while ago, “Is it a matter of luck whether the transparency works or not?  Where does this depend upon?”  You know, I’m not exactly sure, in terms of .pdf creation.  [0:40:45]

I know that if you were to create a .pdf from a vector line drawing or your plan or something like that, that some elements in ARCHICAD have opaque backgrounds, and some do not.  So, whatever is opaque in what you’re creating is going to be opaque in the end result.  You can also, of course, turn off fills in some viewing modes using graphic overrides, and so that would be if you’re exporting out of ARCHICAD.  So, when it was created from whatever source, it had the concept of whether there’s a background to elements and whether that is considered transparent or opaque.  [0:41:31]

So, I don’t frankly know the rule except that in ARCHICAD, I know how to control that.  So, when you’re receiving a .pdf, it depends upon how it was set up there.  OK, probably more the case that .dwg will not have backgrounds. I’m not sure if that’s uniform because I’m sure .dwg also offers the opportunity to have opaque fills behind elements.  Alright, so looks like everybody’s just been listening quietly.  So, do give me some feedback on what I’ve shown.  [0:42:09]

Alright, so Tom says, “Would each building be a separate model, then put on a large site?”  So, that depends upon your workflow.  If we’re talking about a massing model, you might as well model those things in the context, just like I started to do there.  Up to a certain point, it becomes very straightforward to just model each of those little toy houses or toy buildings in the one file.  [0:42:39]

Now, where you might find it useful to break them up into separate files – there are a few things to consider.  One is if you need to get working drawings out of the plans for each building, then having them in separate files can be useful because then you’re working on a file, and you’re adding all the notation and all the detail for that building, and you can deal with it in essentially isolation and see the context when you need to.  So, then that can be helpful.  [0:43:16]

If you’re doing a full set of drawings for the building, you could do that within one file if the stories coordinate.  So, let’s say you have two buildings side by side, and they’re really pretty similar structural relationships.  Maybe one is taller and one is shorter. They have different shapes, and maybe you do want to have a separate set of drawings.  Maybe one is going to be built first and needs to get permitted, and the other one is later, but let’s say they have the same story structure.  [0:43:50]

Then, you could easily manage that within one file, but if you have buildings that are different story structures – one has got a taller ground floor, or their just sort of story spacing is different.  Then, as you go up stories, you’re going to find that the second or third or fifth floor may be at very different heights, and that can cause issues in terms of creating plan drawings.  [0:44:15]

There are ways to compensate, even within the same file, using different cutting planes and other settings, but overall, it starts to become more useful to separate them out, if they have different story heights.  If you have very different base elevations, like a sloping site with buildings sort of scattered around on it, then it definitely would be recommended that you break them out into separate files, each one having its own frame of reference, and then those would be brought into the main site plan file for overall views – maybe overall elevations or sections that are cutting through things, overall schedules, and things like that.  [0:45:03]

So, those are some thoughts that I have.  Now, when you do put them into separate files, you’re going to be linking them into the site using hotlinked modules, and therefore, they will stay up to date as long as you manage those linkages and the updates properly.  So, I think that’s enough said for this context here.  [0:45:28]

Alright, so thanks for giving me another little question to answer.  If there’s any other comments, please let me know, and I’ll continue.  Alright, so we’re going to go now to – let’s see. We’ll go to a file.  Actually, this is one that Chris Ellis supplied.  Let’s take a look at his file here.  So, Chris Ellis – we have Jacob Gerson must be the client name, and here is the perspectives.  So, you can see here that he lives in coastal Massachusetts, I believe. This is probably located in the Cape Cod area, and what he wrote is that it’s being relocated from one part of the site to a different part.  [0:46:25]

I guess it’s a little bit too close to the cliff.  Maybe there’s roading.  I’m not quite sure, but let’s take a look at the plot plan here.  Alright, so here we have one that does not have a scale factor.  So, it’s not placed on a sheet.  It’s just a drawing that’s been output there.  Now, it’s very possible that Chris actually output this, and so it came from his file, but I don’t think so.  I think this is one that he’s brought in.  [0:47:01]

So, I’m just going to take it as a working example, just to scale, and we’ll do the same thing that we sort of had before.  So, I’ll go into this file here.  Remember, this is the one we were working on in the last session for just creating a site model with some contour lines.  So, I’ll just use this as a very simple context for doing this.  [0:47:26]

So, again, I’ll go to the Project Map, create a new independent worksheet here, and we’ll just call this Chris Ellis, and I think it’s Gerson PDF here.  So, now we don’t know the scale factor.  There’s nothing written there.  Well, last one that I was working with was 1/16^th inch to a foot, which is about 1 to 200. That’s probably as good a guess as any, given that it’s probably a fairly big site, relative to the building.  It’s not tight around the building like in an urban context.  It’s much bigger, so I’ll just start with that as a starting point, and we’ll go File Menu, External Content, Place External Drawing, and I will go here to the Gerson working plot plan .pdf, and I’ll pop this in here.  [0:48:24]

Now, let’s just measure this and see. This one does have some distances.  I know that.  So, we can see here that this 244.04 looks like it’s going from this top here down to there. So, I’m going to measure and just hit measure from here to there, and it says 130.5 – whatever, so it probably doesn’t have a real scale like 1/16.  Actually, I don’t even know what it is. I just know I can resize this.  [0:49:02]

So, let’s go and resize it.  Let’s just select it, edit, reshape, resize, do it graphically, say OK, and I’ll zoom in on this point here.  Now, do we have a snap?  I don’t have a snap.  I thought maybe we were going to get a snap here, but we’re not getting a snap, so I’m just going to click right in the center of that thick line, and I’ll go drag this up and then zoom in right here and get it right to about where the center is, and now I’m going to zoom out a little bit because I need to see what the distance is – 244.04.  So, I’ll just type in 244.04.  [0:49:46]

So, even though this could be set to be feet and inches, you could type in decimal feet, and if you do it quickly enough so that ARCHICAD doesn’t convert and put an apostrophe sign there, it will accept and convert it to – what would that be?  1/25 of a foot, so it would be about a half an inch.  244 feet and a half inch.  Anyway, I’ll just hit Enter, and you can see everything shifted on screen, got a little bit bigger, and now we can go and measure here.  [0:50:21]

So, measure from this point to here, and it says 244 and a fraction.  So, we now have it in scale.  So, as close as I could zoom in would be what we’d be working with.  Now, let’s actually take a look.  I think I did open up the Gerson project file that Chris supplied.  Now, let’s see. We have a 3D view.  Here’s a 3D view that he had sent in.  [0:50:58]

So, we can see the building here, and we can see some path or road going up to it.  So, let’s look at just one related question, which is if you want to move an entire building in relationship to something like the site, how do you do that?  In this particular case, the building is moving, and I’m sure that in addition to moving, there’s some other structural stuff that’s going on. He said that it’s built in 1800-something, I think, and the framing is nowhere near meeting current code.  [0:51:47]

So, I don’t know what’s happening with the engineering, and I guess the project is in process, so that remains to be seen – how they’re going to make sure it’s viable in the new context, but how would you move this building?  Now, Chris may have already put it in the new location, or maybe it’s in the old location.  I don’t know.  I’ll just take a look and go to that .pdf.  Now, let’s see if he’s got a worksheet.  God knows.  [0:52:22]

Here’s something that’s a general suggestion for Chris and for others.  When you save a 3D view – and I’ll just go here and double-click on this 3D view.  Here’s one.  Here’s another.  OK, so of course, when you’re in the middle of working, and you just go back and forth, you can say it’s the bottom one or the third one up from the top or whatever, but what I would generally do is, if this is a saved view, go and name it.  So, give it a name like the back exit or something like that.  [0:52:59]

I’m assuming that’s – whatever this is called here.  So, just give these names so they don’t just all fit in there. Now, let’s see.  Do we have any that are with the site plan?  I don’t think that he has gotten that far.  Well, here’s site.  This is interesting here, just as a general comment.  So, here is the site, and the site – if I turn, let’s see. Oh, here’s the Trace & Reference.  OK, so that’s interesting.  So, I have the Trace & Reference icon.  I can click on it, and it will show or hide whatever is being referenced. [0:53:39]

If I want to see what the reference is, you can see choose reference. It’s saying the reference is the foundation footing, so it’s just another story here.  So, he’s got the site on a negative story there, and then he’s got a surveyor story. If I double-click on that, well, I’m not seeing anything, but if I zoom to fit in window, we can see some stuff.  So, this looks like this is – I don’t know exactly what it is.  It doesn’t look like the site survey.  [0:54:17]

Now, maybe there’s some layers that are turned off here, but let’s just see.  If I go back up to the site here and fit in window, depending upon the layers, if I double-click on a view, it may jump me to a saved reference point.  In other words, zoom out or zoom in to a particular area, which can get confusing when you’re going from one story to another, just – hey, where am I here?  [0:54:47]

So, if I look at the surveyor one here, and I say settings, and I say to ignore zoom and rotation when opening this view, then what’s going to happen is it’s going to take me to the other story, maybe change the layers, but it will leave me zoomed in the same place, and then it’s a little easier to see what I’m looking at.  So, you can change that temporarily, or you can use that as a preferred setting.  I like that in general more of the time than not.  [0:55:14]

So, I double-click on surveyor, and you can see that it really does correspond to here, and the same thing when I just did this.  It went to a different zoom.  Now, I can go back to the previous zoom here and have that as a reference, but I’m going to go and just change the settings here to ignore the zoom for now, so now I can go back and forth between these two stories to do it.  [0:55:45]

Now, if I wanted to move the building – I guess I noticed that in the .pdf at least, it says existing house to be relocated.  Proposed relocated house, and some information about the elevation of the pilings, etc. here.  So, how would you move it?  It also says regrade areas formerly occupied by garage to match existing adjacent surface conditions.  OK, so how would you move it?  I just want to make sure you’re all aware of how you would do that.  [0:56:19]

So, we’ll go back to the file here. Now, let’s just take a simple guess here.  I want to – I’ll just go up to the first floor here, and again, I’ll go back to the previous view, where we can see it in relationship to everything.  I’m going to go to the Marquee tool and draw a box around this.  Now, when I draw a box around it, I could go and say to give me a 3D view.  So, I just hit the 3D shortcut, and you can see that is actually a 3D view that’s cut just in that little area.  [0:57:03]

It looks like I got everything pretty clearly in there, and the layer settings that I had on the first floor here – right now, this has clearly got the layers for the model.  In other words, at this point, this group of views – the studio stories here are set up with what look like model information. Now, if I wanted to move this entire building, just as an example, what I want to do is make sure that all the layers are turned on and unlocked because I want to be able to affect everything all at once and not have some stuff left behind.  [0:57:53]

I do want to lock anything that shouldn’t move.  For example, in this case, we could say it’s unusual. We’re going to move the whole building but leave the site where it is.  So, we’re not moving all layers. We’re just moving the building and leaving the site.  So, I would lock either the element like the site or the layer that it’s on. Then, also, if there are any type of remodel condition, I would make sure we’re showing all types of remodel elements.  So, in other words, existing, demo, and new, because I don’t want to just move existing elements and have the new ones left behind or vice versa.  [0:58:29]

So, here is what I’ll do.  I’m going to go and see, in terms of the layers. I’m going to make a little assumption here because I don’t know this file, and I want to do just a quick demonstration.  I’m going to make the assumption that anything that’s visible right now needs to be moved. However, some things that are turned off – maybe like the hidden SEO should be.  This is Solid Element Operations.  That should probably be moved, so I’m going to turn that on here.  [0:59:10]

Now, trim foundation. Actually, it looks like almost everything is on here.  What I wanted to show you is if I click on the top of the eyeball column, we’ll see that it sorts it so that anything that’s hidden is, at least in the current layer combination that I was on, sorted.  So, you can then possibly lock. So, I’ll just demonstrate. If I selected these ones here – maybe they’re ones that aren’t quite part of the model and should be moved.  I could go lock them.  [0:59:50]

Now, I don’t really want to do that in this case.  I’ll go ahead and unlock, but that would be a way to very quickly take group elements and say that these should not be affected in the next move.  Now, I’m going to assume that the site information here should be locked.  So, that’s as good an assumption as I can make right now.  It’s that if things are drawn on the site layer, they’re not going to move when I move the building.  So, I say OK, and I don’t really see any change here.  [1:00:23]

Now, with the marquee around here, I’m going to go just drag this and move it.  Now, of course, I can know exactly where it’s going to be. I’m going to snap this point here to this measure there, but I’ll do this as a little example and click.  Now, you can see that a bunch of stuff moved, but we have something that was left behind.  What is that? That’s the Trace & Reference.  [1:00:52]

So, basically, the things that are on that other remote story that we’re looking at probably move just as well, but the reference hasn’t been updated.  So, I can go to the Trace & Reference menu and say that I would like to rebuild the reference.  You can see virtually everything moved.  I’m not sure what this line in space is here, and it looks like there’s something in terms of the stairway, which, of course, maybe that stairway is actually going to have to be rethought in the new context, but I don’t know.  [1:01:26]

Alright, so that’s a useful thing to know is that the reference won’t instantly rebuild when you do something like a multi-story move.  Alright, now let’s just take a look in 3D at what we have, and we can see that the building looks fairly intact. It looks like it’s floating above the new site, and of course, we may want to just grab everything and just move it in a different elevation, and then we may also change some of the way that it’s standing on these supports – the pilings and posts and things like that.  [1:02:04]

Alright, so those are some examples of working with .pdfs and getting them imported with a known scale or with a scale that you have to resize on the fly.  We’ve also looked at just some side notes, in terms of moving an entire building while locking certain information.  So, let’s see if there are any questions before we go on.  So, I’ll take a sip of my tea, which I’ve been ignoring.  [1:02:37]

So, seems like today, everybody’s pretty quiet.  I don’t know if that’s because you’re bored or what it is.  So, let me know how you’re feeling.  Am I going too slow? Is this stuff all obvious?  Just let me know. Alright, so I see a few people typing.  Alright, Jimmy says, “Extremely informative.”  OK, that’s a relief.  Oh, Tom says, “How do you take all the renovation versions?”  Good question.  I mentioned it, but I didn’t show how that would be done.  [1:03:25]

Alright, so thank you all for your feedback.   I do appreciate it.  Even though you may see me as someone with magic powers, and I’m a fine teacher and all of that, as a human being, it helps.  I can’t see your faces or you nodding, or I can’t see you nodding off to sleep, so thanks for your feedback.  OK, so how to take all renovation versions.  So, when we’re in the renovation palette, this is one way to get the renovation filter palette is from the tab bar down below the quick options bar.  [1:04:11]

I think that’s what it’s called, or there is a shortcut here, or it’s under the Window menu, palettes, and then renovation.  Yeah, we’ll bring that up. Renovation filter options – there may be just a handful of filters, or in some versions, like the latest version of ARCHICAD in the U.S., they’ve got literally 20 different filters just so that you have a different filter for each view type, and I think it’s crazy.  I get the idea, but it basically means it’s very hard to manage if you did want to make a change.  [1:04:51]

Regardless, you may have one that says to show all.  Show all here, in one way or another.  Now, with show all, you can see that visually it looks simple.  Show All Override.  You can see some different colors, so whether they have overrides or not, show all will mean that it’s showing all of these, whereas for example, after demolition, it means to show the existing ones and hide the demo ones, and don’t put in the new ones yet. [1:05:28]

Project completion shows the new ones but hides the demo, so what you want to be is in one of these ones that shows everything – either with overrides or without, and when I say OK, something just came in. I’m not sure if something came in there that blinked.  Let’s go here and say Project Completion. Ah, there was something here that showed up there.  So, in general, just like turning on all layers, showing all the renovation statuses is the way that you’re going to be able to control, edit, move elements together.  [1:06:23]

OK, so let’s look at a different question.  I’m just guessing it comes in less frequently than it used to, and that is how do you create a site from survey drawings that you don’t have in a digital format, and you need to have a very precise representation?  So, where you’re reading off the meets and bounds or the survey dimensions.  How do you do that?  [1:06:52]

So, in the original Best Practices course, I taught this.  If we go here to the original Best Practices course week 12, you can see here a demonstration of it, and I’m going to repeat this because I think it’s worth doing in the current ARCHICAD environment, but really, the steps are exactly the same, and they’re just a couple of setting things that may be a little bit in different places.  So, how do we create this?  [1:07:26]

There is a site survey ,pdf that I’m going to be working with, and I will put that as an attachment to this lesson.  So, if you wanted to practice with it, you could, or of course, if you have your own .pdf with this, then you could use that.  Now, if I go to look at it, just as a .pdf here, this was supplied by a course member.  Trying to remember his name.  He’s retired, I think, so he’s not part of the current course, but he supplied it.  You can see it’s a very, very simple site.  [1:08:05]

It just has 4 straight sides, including one on an angle, and then one curve. It’s sort of ideal because it is odd. It’s not necessarily square.  I don’t think that this is necessarily square here, and certainly, it has a curved side, and we do have dimensions. We have bearings or south 60, 32, 6W, and a distance of 47.24 feet.  So, these sorts of things – whether in feet and inches or decimal feet or decimal meters, I think this is a common measurement standard that would be used in other places beyond the U.S., but let me know if this is really only done in the U.S.  [1:08:50]

Alright, and then, of course, we have this curved part with an arc and a radius and a bearing here.  So, let’s take a look at that.  So, I’m going to bring this in and use it as a reference on screen.  So, we can put it behind our building, but let’s say we wanted it to be precise.  We don’t want it to snap based on the closest dot.  We want it to really measure precisely, so let’s go into this little sample file here.  We’ll go and create another worksheet here, so we can right-click on any worksheet in the project map, and we’ll say new independent one.  We’re going to do this as survey pdf for measurement input here.  [1:09:45]

Now, I don’t know what scale.  I’ll just leave it at 1 inch equals 10 feet.  That’s 1 to 120 here.  I don’t really know what’s appropriate.  Let’s just see, if I look here.  Does it have a scale? It says 1 inch equals 30 feet.  Alright, let’s just take that as a starting point.  So, I’ll go change this to 1 inch equals 30 feet – 1 to 360, and we’ll then import this drawing, and this one is week 12 survey there, and I’ll just pop it in here.  [1:10:31]

Now, in this case, I’m not going to be doing anything on the plan yet. I’m going to just work with getting the linework here to match the right scale and be totally precise.  So, first thing is I’m going to double-check if it came into scale because that’s at least helpful. I don’t want it to be huge and the real scale be something different.  So, let’s just measure something here. We’ll use the Measure tool M and go from one corner to the other here, and yeah, 76 feet and something.  So, it did come in nicely to scale.  [1:11:09]

You can see the 76.64 indicated there.  So, where is the north position? If you’re going to be doing meets and bounds in survey dimensions, then you want to know where north is.  It certainly looks like it’s straight up and down here. If it wasn’t and was identified on a particular angle relative to the site, you would want to input that, but clearly it’s designed to have the north straight up and the site just is what it is.  [1:11:40]

So, I’m going to go to my options menu, project preference, project location, and make sure the north is straight up.  Alright, it is.  If it had been rotated, well then I would want to rotate this drawing to match so that the north was pointing in the same way that I wanted to make my project work because in fact, you can see the front face of the project here is slightly off, and I might want to make that the zero, but right now, I’ll just keep it at zero, and then we can talk about adjusting it.  [1:12:19]

So, in order to be able to put in lines or polylines with meets and bounds, you have to switch your measurement input in the tracker.  So, if I’m clicking to draw a line, you can see it gives me a distance in either metric or feet – feet and inches or decimal feet, and an angle.  Now, an angle in the most common usage in ARCHICAD is straight to the right is zero, straight up is 90 and so on. The X and Y axes are on the 0 and 90 and 180 and 270.  [1:12:55]

Now, when we’re working with survey measurements, we’re talking about where north is and what bearing we have.  So, ARCHICAD is happy to talk survey measurements with you by going to the options menu, project preferences, working units.  Now, dimensions and working units sort of are confusing because they both talk about level of accuracy of how many decimal places you’re talking about and other things that relate to distances and angles.  [1:13:29]

Dimensions are used when you are placing annotation.  Working units are used when you’re using the tracker.  So, they have 2 different functions, and of course, you need to know when to use one and when to use the other.  So, we’re going to switch our working units for inputting and measuring things and seeing them in the tracker from feet and fractional inches to decimal feet because this is like saying 132.75 feet instead of 132 feet, 9 inches here.  [1:14:04]

Now, I’ll put it into 2 decimals because that’s what it’s going here.  You could do more, and of course, if it was metric, you would choose what would be appropriate.  I don’t need to worry about any of the square feet here, but I do need to talk about the angles because I know I don’t need to worry about areas or volumes, but I do need to talk about angles, and instead of decimal degrees, we’re going to switch this to surveyor’s unit.  [1:14:30]

If you switched it to degree minutes and seconds, then you’ll see things that look sort of like surveyor’s units, with 45 degrees, 30 minutes, 30 seconds, but it doesn’t have a bearing – southeast, northwest.  In order to use surveyor’s units, you have to choose that, and then you can see that this would be the representation – N28, 45, etc.  Now, you notice that it has a letter, a space, then the first number, which could have – well, I guess in general, these are whole numbers because you don’t use decimals.  You use the degrees, minutes, seconds to divide it.  [1:15:13]

You have a degree mark, and then you have a minute mark and a second mark.  Now, ARCHICAD doesn’t insist that you type in degrees.  In fact, it’s pretty hard to even remember for me what the keyboard shortcut to get the degree symbol is – the little tiny zero that’s raised up like a superscript.  So, what it assumes if that if you’re using surveyor’s units, if you just put in a space, you’re finishing whatever it is – the degrees or the minutes or the seconds, and so you’re basically going to input information with N space 28 space 45 space 58 space E to get something that looks like that.  [1:15:58]

So, now that we’ve changed this and just discussed how the input is going to be, I can say OK.  Let’s just draw a line.  Let’s take this line here.  Now, I could do this right on top, but I’m going to do it off to the side just because it’ll be a little bit easier to see what the tracker is saying.  So, here we have the south 85, etc.  – this top one here.  So, I’m going to draw a line and do it in the approximately right place.  [1:16:27]

Now, you can see that it says distance 81.85.  So, now it’s decimal feet, and the angle is S 86 10, etc., and that’s very close to what it should be.  It’s supposed to be S 85 and something.  So, I know that when I go in this direction, a line like that is going to be a good match for what I’m seeing on screen, so what I’ll do is type in the distance I want – in this case, 76.64.  It fills in the highlighted dimension in the tracker.  In this case, it’s distance.  Hit the Tab key, and it’s now saying that you’d like to input the next thing, which is the angle.  I could also type A, and that would jump to that input field.  [1:17:14]

Now, I’ll type in S space 85 space 34 space 19 space E, and then hit Enter.  It looks like it drew a line exactly where I had it, but now let’s measure it because it was just more precise.  So, I’m going to measure from this point here, and I’ll hover over the corner, and you can see it’s 76.64, and it reads off as 85, 34, 19 E.  So, that’s exactly right.  Yay!  Alright, so I’ll hit Escape to finish the measurement.  [1:17:52]

Let’s just do the next one.  It really is as simple as this here. So, now this is going to go 132 feet, and it’s south, etc.  So, let’s just do 132.60, and then Tab, and we’ll do S space 06 space 19 space 33 space W and hit Enter.  OK, good.  Now, we’ll do one more here, and this is going to be 47.24.  Tab, and S space 60, 32, 06 W, with spaces all in between there.  Now, this next one is a curve, and it’s input a little differently.  [1:18:37]

What I’d rather do is actually get this other straight side, and then I know how I’m going to close that.  Now, here’s where you need to understand the bearings on the way you see it on the drawing and your input.  Sometimes, you have to compensate or know when to reverse them or how to deal with this because for example, if I draw a line down here, you can see that the line is saying S 9, 13.  So, it’s going generally bearing south whereas in the drawing, it’s saying N 07, etc.  [1:19:16]

So, you could type in numbers there with the S and W rather than the N and E – in other words, the opposite coordinate ones, but sometimes it’s good just to say that I’m going to draw something with exactly those numbers and then move them into position. In fact, I might even do it just arbitrarily in space – just somewhere, because sometimes you need to be able to do it and then move it into position.  So, now that I’m moving it up at approximately the right angle, you can see the N is the right thing, so let me just go the distance – 132.75.  [1:19:54]

The angle is N space 07.  Alright, so you can see that it went up in this direction, but I can drag this to snap.  Now, if I measure from here up to there, what do I have?  It all matches exactly what it should.  Alright, so now, how do we get this closed?  Now, I haven’t done this for a while, so I forget a couple of things that we may need to do, but let’s just say that if I drew a line from here to here, we see that the distance is 48.73 feet, and if you look over here, that’s what it’s saying. That’s the distance, 48.73, and then it’s got a bearing.  [1:20:47]

Now, it’s saying N, and I’m going S, but look at the numbers. They’re actually not quite perfect here.  So, something is slightly off, but let’s go the other direction and see if I go here up to this corner.  We’ve got the 48.73. We’ve got 52, 49, 34, so something is just slightly off there.  Now, I’m not sure where this is.  There might be some little stub – some other tiny measurement that is put in there, and I’m not seeing it.  I don’t know.  For now, let me just say that I want to do this, because the distance was correct.  The bearing is not quite right, and of course, we haven’t considered the radius.  So, how do you get the radius?  [1:21:34]

So, if I go and select this and use the pet palette option to curve it, then one of the options is to specify a curve on the fly.  What is its radius?  So, the radius is 27.23, so I’ll just type in 27.23.  ARCHICAD will fill in whatever is the highlighted field in the tracker.  In this case, there’s only one field – the arc or radius, so I’ll hit that.  Looks pretty darn good to me.  It looks like a very good match.  Now, there is information here.  Arc is 60.34 feet.  [1:22:13]

So, that, I believe, is the distance that if you followed that arc, you would be going as opposed to the straight line.  Now, let’s see if I go to the corner of this, and I say that I want to change the angle, you can see that the arc length is one of the numbers that is shown there. It says the angle is a certain – how much of the circle is being subtended. There’s a chord that’s the 48.73.  That was the original distance, and then the arc length is 60.34.  [1:22:46]

Brilliant.  It matches exactly what it should.  So, we do have an exact match.  The angle here did not match quite right.  It was 52, 49, 34 or something like that, so it was half a minute off – 25 seconds off.  Well, I think this is good for me.  I’m guessing that they made a mistake and that ARCHICAD is actually getting these numbers, or maybe I missed some other thing, but everything else checks out.  So, we have it.  [1:23:25]

Now, if we were wanting to dimension these things – in other words, we could type in these values just as text, but how would you get ARCHICAD to dimension it?  Well, we can go to the Dimension tool, and I can go dimension from this point.  Let’s just show the layer here, to that point, and then when I’m doing this, it’s saying we can dimension it horizontally or vertically, but right now, it’s not letting me do it along this angle because the dimension setting was set to only allow on the orthogonal axes.  [1:24:07]

I can say that no, actually, I would really like to have more flexibility here.  So, I want to measure that way, and you can see that we have different options.  If you haven’t worked with dimensions in this fashion, just look at that circle, and as I move around the circle, it’s proposing different orientations.  You can see it’s just barely highlighting one part of the circle, just so you can see what it’s doing.  [1:24:34]

So, this is now the one that’s parallel to it, and I’ll click.  Here’s a 76.64.  OK, brilliant.  Alright, now what about the direction here?  Well, I could select this and change it from measured value to custom text.  It will actually have measured value as an option that’s still contained, and then I can put text before or after it.  So, if those points, for any reason, were moved apart, then the measure value would update, but I can have something before it.  [1:25:07]

So, I could just type in S 85, 34, 19 E here and either put a line break or just have them straight.  Now, I didn’t get the degrees, minute, and second ones, so I’d have to figure out how to type in that degree, and it is a little bit annoying because while I’m reading it off of here, I’m not getting it from the real data.  So, how would we actually get that data there?  [1:25:40]

Well, let me just put in another dimension here, and again, I’ll just have that.  Now, how would we get that data?  Well, here’s a really interesting shortcut.  If I use the Measure tool, and I go measure from here, and I hover over this, you can see that the angle has the data that I want, and what I’m going to do is either tab or hit A to highlight the angle.  Now, if you were drawing a line, you could type in a new angle.  In fact, that’s what I was doing for all those dimensions.  [1:26:16]

I was typing in the desired angle, but you can also copy this because it highlights it.  So, I can do Command+C or Ctrl+C to copy that.  So, I’ve copied it to the clipboard.  Now, I hit Escape.  So, I’m out of the Measure tool, and then I’ll go in here, and I’ll actually select the text and again, I’ll switch from measure value to custom text, and before, where it says measure value, I’ll just paste, and you can see that I pasted in the value.  I might need a space or 2 to give it some space, but now, it’s actually got all that put in perfectly.  [1:26:56]

So, the 76.64 is live. This one was copied.  So, how do you do that again?  Just a quick review.  If I were measuring, I do measure from here to here, and now I don’t click because I want to just leave the angle measurement live.  If I clicked, it would go to zero because we’d be ready to measure the next distance.  So, while it’s hovered, I just hit the A or the Tab key to highlight the angle field, copy, and then hit Escape to get out of the Measurement mode, and now I can go into anything.  [1:27:37]

I can even go to the Text tool and place this text here and paste.  So, that’s the information that came directly from the Measurement tool. So, it’s a great way of doing that.  Let’s see if there are any questions on this here.  Alright, OK, so some thanks from Gestur.  OK, thank you for supplying your sample.  Appreciate that, and Tom, your comment was rather cryptic.  So, let’s see if there’s any final questions before we finish because I think this is a good stopping point.  [1:28:27]

We’ve brought in .pdf and scaled it.  We’ve brought in a .pdf and measured and placed things precisely.  So, Ken says, “All the times I laboriously calculated all those values…”  Yeah, this makes it easy when you do it with ARCHICAD’s built-in tools.  Now, I will show you one very simple thing.   These lines here are independent of each other.  What I’m going to do is just select all of them, including the arc, and turn them into a polyline.  [1:29:05]

So, I go to the Edit menu, go to Reshape, Unify. So, Unify allows you to take multiple lines and possibly arcs that are connected to each other.  In other words, each endpoint is touching, and you can unify them into a single polyline.  Now, if you have a line selected that’s off to the side, it won’t be unified because it has a gap, but if they are touching, and I say Unify, we don’t see a visual change, although we actually saw the dimension go away.  Why?  Because the dimension was referencing a single line, and that line has gone away, and we now have a single polyline.  [1:29:46]

Of course, we can also go in and make this have whatever line type we might find useful.  So, that’s what I would do.  You could, if you were very skillful and practiced with this, go and create this whole boundary as a single polyline to begin with, but because of this thing where the directions sometimes are being written in reverse order, sometimes I find it easier to work with individual lines and just make sure they all snap.  In addition, the curve one here – I’m not quite sure how I would do that.  [1:30:27]

I guess if we were coming around here to this snap point, and then I said I’m going to go with this particular bearing with that distance, I could do the polyline with the straight segments.  I’m not sure how we would do the arc.  If you were to do just a quick thing – even if I did it as a line, if I go to the Line tool here.  We don’t have a pet palette here.  What am I going to do with the line? Let’s say I do the Polyline tool, and I go straight here.  No, there’s no pet palette.  I guess if I do this here, let’s just see.  I could go three-point method here.  So, that’s an arc by 3 points.  [1:31:17]

I could say that the three-point method – the second point is going to be this point there, so I would be typing in the distance and the bearing, right? That would be the second point, and then I’d be defining this.  You can see that well, what is that distance?  That is the radius. Well, no. You see, we can’t get the distance.  We can’t get the radius when we’re doing this because it’s going to measure the distance from the previous point, so I don’t think there’s a direct way to use this in a single step to create that U.  [1:31:54]

The best way to do it is just to draw a line or polyline segment and then stretch this edge.  So, here we can stretch it, and you can see the arc radius is something that you could verify or put in.  Anyway, so you could show a single polyline if you wanted and then do the arc after, but because going up in this direction, or depending on which way you go, you may have to reverse these.  I tend to like doing it in isolation and moving them into position.  [1:32:28]

OK, let’s see if there are any final comments or questions here.  Alright, so thank you all for joining me today. We’ll be back on Wednesday with some more development of the site.  I think we’ll be looking possibly at regrading the site and doing cut and fill calculations and depending upon how the timing goes, we may start looking at just some more visually interesting site plans – how you can get some of those really satisfying graphics that are important for presentation.  [1:33:05]

So, thank you all for joining me.  Please send me any feedback, comments, or questions here in Slack, or of course, in the Support email.  On Thursday, we’ll be having ARCHICAD User webinar, and it will be a special edition for my 65th birthday.  I’ve had a couple of chats with some important people from my past that relate to the reason why I’m doing ARCHICAD.  One of them was my boss at a Mac dealer who said, “You’re really good at this architectural stuff.  I want you to actually head up my new department that we’re going to be doing services for architects.”  I said, “But Neal, I’m not an expert in that area.”  He said, “You will be.”  [1:33:53]

So, interview with Neal Wainwright who was my boss 30 years ago when I started working with ARCHICAD, and he also chose ARCHICAD among all the other CAD programs to be one that we would focus on.  So, interesting to get his perspective, and then I’ve also got an interview that I recorded a discussion with David Marlap.  Some of you who have been around for a long time remember David Marlap was head of the Graphisoft U.S. office for about 7 years, I think, in the 90s, and he was the head of the office when I started working in the U.S. in 94, so we’ve had contact over the years.  [1:34:30]

He is a practicing architect.  A 7-person office still using ARCHICAD, went back to being an architect after being a software executive.  He had gone from being an architect to being involved in software for architecture, and then back again.  So, we had some interesting discussions there, and I’ll also be doing some recollections of ARCHICAD over the years.  I hope you can join me.  It will be recorded, of course, but if you can, join me.  It will be fun to have a little stroll down memory lane about ARCHICAD over the years, and some of the important people and turning points in my life related to ARCHICAD.  [1:35:11]

I will be sending out some more emails this week with some news.  Going to be announcing the ARCHICAD jobs board on the ARCHICADuser website.  Hopefully later today, I’ll get that out.  I’m going to have a tutorial that I created recently that I think really provides some useful workaround for common problems that I’ve seen people have, and yeah, I’ll be back in touch a few times this week.  Be well. Take care.  Thanks for watching.  [1:35:42]