2020 | 030 – Site Modeling – 3D Site Plan Presentation Drawings

Hey, welcome, everyone, to the ARCHICAD Best Practices training course.  Today is Wednesday, May 8^th, 2019. We’re going to be continuing on with site modeling, site plan drawings, and presentations.  Let me know that you can hear me and you can see my screen.  We’re going to be communicating in Slack, in the ARCHICAD Training workspace. If you haven’t been using that, please go to Bobrow.com/Slack, put in your email address, follow these simple instructions, and in a minute or so, you’ll be connected with us in your browser.  [0:00:41]

At some point, you can go and download the Slack app, which can exist on your phone or on your computer, and you’ll be able to manage multiple Slack workspaces. It’s a great tool, and it’s free to basic use.  Anyway, I see we’ve got several people all ready to go – Tom, Andy, Sherry, Steve, Zlatko. Excellent.  Let me just check to see if anyone’s using the other.  OK, so no one’s using the older GoToWebinar messaging, which is fine.  [0:01:19]

So, we are going to be continuing on with what we did last week or last session.  Now, this whole section has been on site modeling, of course, and I want to show you that I’ve revamped the course structure to make it a little easier to find things.  So, what do I mean by that? Well, the Best Practices 2020 course – now, if you’re at the top level, you’ll see some sections.  So, for example, under Site Modeling, if I click on the little triangle here, you’ll see it drops down to indicate the different sections and the different topics.  [0:02:01]

So, the last one we were on was Site Plan Drawings, and if I click on that, it will take me to that particular page, and you can see now that this is highlighted to indicate we’re in this particular module.  So, each one of these has got a few – or in some cases, more than few different sections or different lessons.  So, it’ll just make it easier to work with as we go on because obviously, there’s going to be a lot of individual lessons and putting it into a little bit of a hierarchy is good.  [0:02:36]

So, this may get reorganized a little bit further, but I did this earlier this week, and I hope you find it pretty clear and easy to navigate.  Now, if you did go and click on the Mark Complete button – I think there’s usually a Mark Complete button when you’re in the course, which gives you green outlines on this.  Let’s see. I’m not sure why.  I thought this should have – no?  [0:03:12]

OK, maybe because I’m logged in as an administrator.  I’m not sure, but if you have been clicking the Mark Complete button and seeing green dots or green colors here, then those you may have to go back and mark it again to indicate that you’ve gone through it.  This is just purely a way to help you keep track of what you’ve looked at and what you haven’t.  [0:03:38]

Alright, so we’ll go on, then, with site modeling, and I’ll just put this back to the most recent one.  In the most recent one, we’re looking at site plan drawings, and we ended up with some different color coding here and some different ways of doing some 2D shadows, and ultimately, something that has a little bit more graphic appeal than just the simple black and white drawing, but still purely 2D.  [0:04:15]

Now, we’ve been working on plan views, so these are literally like a floor plan. There are 2D representations. We’re now going to be shifting focus a little bit and moving on to look at 3D views and how they can either be used directly as a site plan for some type of output, whether it’s on a sheet or simply as part of initial planning to be printed out and marked up.  We can use them directly, and we can also do hybrids where we combine 3D information or graphics from any other source with our 2D drawings.  So, that’s what we’re going to be looking at today.  [0:05:05]

Alright, so let me go, and we’ll take a look at how we take a view from the desired angle. It should be pretty natural for all of you, but just in case, we’ll go back through the basics.  So, here I am in the same file, where I’ve just developed a little bit more graphic controls and visual niceties.  If I go to 3D, we’ll be looking at the AXO view.  Now, how do we get a top-down view?  [0:05:40]

Well, I could go and orbit and move until I get sort of a top-down view here, but this is never going to be very precise in terms of being a pure straight-down view similar to the plan.  To do that, I go to the View menu, 3D View Options, 3D Projection Settings, or use the keyboard shortcut.  On the Mac, it’s Option+Command+F3, and on Windows, I’m guessing it would be Ctrl+Alt+F3.  This allows us to switch between parallel projections, axonometric style, or perspective projections where we’re saying we’re looking from a particular vantage point towards something for shortening.  [0:06:30]

Now, when you’re in the parallel projections, you can switch from some arbitrary view we’ve got to some presets.  So, for example, this will be a top-down view from a certain orientation.  Now, you notice that this little house is rotated.  I’m just going to say OK, and we’ll see that everything looks clean top-down, but it is not actually aligned the same way as our plan.  [0:07:01]

In order to get that the same way, let’s see if I can do this here with a keyboard shortcut.  I can move my camera reference down to 270, which would be from the bottom of the screen, and then when I say OK, this will match our view that we have on the plan.  Now, you notice that the shadows are being cast here, and they’re actually a different orientation than the ones that are in the site plan.  So, ARCHICAD will cast shadows if you request it, and the sun position can be moved around manually or based on a heliodon or sun shadow calculation.  [0:07:51]

Now, let’s go back to this here, and let’s look at the sun position.  So, I can move the sun position around just manually.  I can also change the altitude of it, so one is the azimuth. You can see it’s the rotation that I’m doing.  The altitude would be how high it is in the sky, so if I just move it arbitrarily like this, we can actually see a slight change here, but it’s really actually in the 3D view that we’re going to see – let’s see if I go back here, if I make the change when I’m in the 3D view here, then we’ll see the sun shadows instantly change.  [0:08:42]

Now, to get a heliodon to be able to have it calculate precisely, we need to make sure, first of all, that we’ve set our project location correctly in the project preferences.  So, the project location includes latitude and longitude, which of course you can get from a variety of sources, including your survey.  If you’re doing some initial studies, you may actually look at something.  So, a web browser like Google Maps, and you may be able to derive that.  So, when you pop that in, it will determine where it is on the surface of the planet.  [0:09:24]

Of course, your north position is something that’s going to affect the orientation of your sun, and we can type in values like this, or we can rotate it to get it approximate.  The altitude in terms of sea level really probably doesn’t affect the way that the sun is cast, but it would affect how your grading elevations or point elevations are defined and your contour lines.  [0:09:53]

So, for the heliodon, we need the latitude and longitude, and we need to make sure the north is set.  So, I’ll just put it back to the 90° and leave this alone here.  By the way, if you want to get just an approximate latitude and longitude, you can use the predefined city list, and you can see this is set to be a city near where I am.  I’ll just change it to San Francisco, which is slightly closer than San Jose, and we’ll see how much it changes – probably very, very little.  If I say OK, yeah, it was very, very close to the same numbers there.  [0:10:29]

By the way, you can say to show in Google Maps.  Let’s see.  This will be interesting.  So, where is that particular one that I typed in?  So, that particular one here is shown in Google Maps.  If I wanted to move around and say that this was in a different location – for example, where am I located?  Let’s see.  I am located up in this area.  Here’s my home.  I can click on it, and you can see that here is the Google Map position here, and I can copy this.  So, we’ll just do this.  [0:11:15]

We’ll say to copy this number here. That’s the north, and we just go here and there.  OK, 3759, 49, 6. Let’s go back here and take this one and pop it in here, and you can see it takes out the W.  It just will put it into the end result there.  Alright, so now I’ve actually got the latitude and longitude up where I live, so this is a great connection to Google Maps.  [0:11:54]

You can also import or export a list of cities.  So, for example, if you have put in some specific project locations into one of your projects, you can export that out, and you can import these things back into another project.  So, perhaps you’re doing a number of different projects in similar areas.  You can pull from those, or if you have certain cities that you work in regularly, you can pull from them.  [0:12:20]

So, I’ll just say OK.  Now, in terms of the sun position, now that I’ve determined the heliodon, I can go to the 3D projection settings, and I can say that I’d like the sun position to be based on a date and time.  So, here is a date and time. So, a common one might be the spring solstice or the spring equinox, and we’ll just do it this year.  Alright, so we can say that on this particular year, date, and time, and what time?  7 in the morning? Obviously, you pick that.  9 in the morning would be an interesting one to show, so let’s do this.  [0:13:06]

Daylight savings time, I think, actually is in effect there.  So, this would be the sun position at 9 in the morning where I am, if this project was here.  So, you can see there is what we’ve got.  Alright, now in terms of seeing the shadows in a 3D view, this is controlled under the View menu, 3D View Options, and 3D Styles.  Right now, we’ve got one that says Shading and Shadows.  Let’s look at the 3D Styles and just see briefly where this is controlled.  [0:13:40]

So, these are presets that allow you to save different styles of viewing in 3D, and each one of these will have options, such as whether sun shadows are turned on.  If I go to this one here, you can see sun shadows would be off.  Now, whatever I have highlighted here – if I say OK, you can see that now this view has changed.  If I have enough space on my screen, we can see the 3D styles available in the quick options bar, and I can just switch it like this.  [0:14:17]

OK, so right now, we’ve got some shadows that are being cast based on the position of the earth, the date and time, and this is our 3D window that we’re used to working with all the time.  If I wanted to actually share this with people, one option would be to do a screenshot.  So, if you have a screenshot tool like SnagIt – it’s the one I frequently use – we can capture this, and I can go and just drag this out, or maybe I don’t need the actual roadway here other than just a quick representation.  [0:15:00]

Then I can go and capture that image, and later, that image will appear in my SnagIt environment, where I can then save it, print it, put it in a .pdf, in an email, etc.  So, that’s one way that you can output it.  Of course, from this 3D view, we could also go and just simply print it and put it on just a piece of paper for markup or study or a meeting there.  Another option is to Save As, and when you Save As, we have different options here based on what you need at the time.  [0:15:46]

So, if you say Save As ARCHICAD Solo Project, and currently this is a Solo project, then it’s just allowing me to maybe make a record copy of the project – possibly in another folder, or possibly with a new name that would indicate the date and time or the milestone that we’re at.  We can also save template projects in the previous version of ARCHICAD.  We’re in 22, so we can go back to 21, but down in this lower section here, we can save it as a .jpg or a .png. Those two would be the most common.  [0:16:24]

If you simply wanted to save a screenshot, or let’s say a view, as a graphic file that could be manipulated in some other program or included in some document, that would be the way to do it.  If I select this here, you’ll see that up above, it has that ending – the .jpg, and of course, I could rename this.  I could give it whatever name was appropriate there.  So, those are different ways that you can output it.  [0:16:54]

Now, another way that you can reuse this or make it available for output is to create a saved view.  So, just like all of our saved views, when you say here is your floor plan view or your ceiling plan view, this is a view in a 3D window, and in the View Map, we can go and say to give me a new view, and we’ll just say we’d like to give it a custom name, and we’re going to call it Spring Equinox 9 AM Shadow Study.  OK, so just give it a name here.  [0:17:30]

It remembers all of the things, like what layer combination is on there.  Obviously, you want to have certain layers that are most appropriate for your needs here.  All these other settings are included.  Now, notice that it says date and time is set up here.  So, that means that this particular saved view remembers where the sun is, based on the image settings here.  So, I’ll just say to create this.  [0:17:58]

Now, it put it into the folder that was currently active in the View Map.  Of course, I can drag this down into a different place.  I can put it into renderings and presentations here, for example, like this.  So, we can reorganize those things.  Now, if I wanted to have a different date and time, I can go right here to the View menu, 3D View Options, 3D Projection Settings, or again, the keyboard shortcut, and then change it.  [0:18:32]

Let’s say we’re going to do it at 3 PM.  So, you just type in the numbers and hit A or P to get the PM, and you can see the sun is now going to be in a different location. We can say OK. There’s the sun there.  So, now I’m not going to redefine this one.  I’m going to save a new view, and we’ll just call this Spring Equinox 3 PM Shadow Study.  Alright, so now if I double-click on the 9 AM one, we’ll see how it switches, and here’s the 3 PM one by double-clicking on it.  [0:19:15]

Now, we are looking in an OpenGL view.  What I mean by that is this is our most common viewing style for the 3D window, where we see textures like the sort of grassy texture, the asphalt, the tiles on the roof, and we see shadows cast in a fairly naturalistic way here.  Now, if we want to be able to work with the shadows on the floor plan, we can copy the shadows directly if we switch our view style.  So, the view style – if I go to the View menu, 3D View Options here, while I could switch to a perspective or some other AXO view, I’m going to switch from the lower section here, which are all with OpenGL, to one of the ones in the upper section.  [0:20:11]

Now, let’s just look at them for a moment.  We’ll go to 3D Styles, and you’ll see that there’s a line here.  These are all done with the OpenGL engine, whereas the ones up above are done with the vectorial engine. Those are the only 2 choices you have.  If you create a new one of these presets, depending on which ones you choose, it will go in the upper or lower section.  Now, hidden line vectorial is just going to have linework here and no shadows, no contours, and no shading, actually.  [0:20:44]

No hatching.  Let’s see.  It’s trying to figure it out here. If we go to Hidden Line with Hatching, there we go. The vectorial hatching is available.  If we go to Simple Shading with Shadows, this is one where the sun shadows are going to be cast, but in this case, without the vectorial hatching.  This one would have hatch lines. So, for our purposes right now, I’m going to say just to give me a simple view with the shadows because I would like to work with these shadows in a different way.  [0:21:28]

So, I’d say OK, and you’ll see it takes just a little bit of time to reconfigure.  Now, the orientation of these shadows is based on whatever the heliodon was set to, or the manually placed sun.  In order to get it, let’s just say we wanted it at the 9 AM one. Then, I’m going to go to the settings here, and we’ll take this at the – so, this is 3 PM.  Let’s do the 9 AM here, and it will regenerate with the shadows here.  [0:22:17]

Now, what I’d like to be able to do, and I’ll just go back to the site plan here – you can see how these shadows are in a particular orientation.  Now, these shadows?  Right now, you can see that if I click on the area of the shadow, it is a fill.  Now, for our purposes right now, I’m going to actually just delete this, and we’ll see in a moment that it clears the area.  Of course, I could put this on a layer that I could hide, but for now, let’s just say I delete it, and we go and put in the shadows that are coming from the other view.  [0:23:00]

So, right now, it’s spinning the beach ball because it was the first actual change to the model file, and ARCHICAD always takes a little longer the very first change you make.  Now, I’m going to go to this view here, and let’s say that I wanted to copy these shadows.  Well, how can you copy shadows without copying all the information?  [0:23:24]

Well, you use the Marquee tool in the 3D window, draw around this like here.  Now, I could include more, but this is where all the shadows are that I’m interested in.  I then go to the Edit menu and say to copy.  So, when you are in this vectorial style view, when you copy it, you have a choice of scale to drawing.  If you were just in a normal OpenGL style 3D window view, you could save a screenshot and use that – place it somewhere manually or copy it, things like that for putting it out in another document outside ARCHICAD.  [0:24:07]

When you’re in a vectorial mode, you can copy a scale drawing.  A scale drawing will actually lay into other views inside ARCHICAD exactly at scale.  So, in other words, it knows how big things are, just the way everything in ARCHICAD has a dimension.  Now, we don’t really want to copy the construction element, so this would be the roofs and slabs and terrain mesh, etc.  So, I’m going to say no, don’t copy those, but I do want to copy the shadows.  [0:24:42]

Now, the shadows have a polygon shape.  They also have edges, and if you wanted to have the edges so you could maybe do some graphic highlighting of how far the shadows went, you could do that, but most commonly, for shadow copies, I would just want the polygons – just the literal area that is shaded.  Now, this lower section here – I’ve tried different things.  You can do it either way.  I’m going to go here and say to calculate split polygons. That way, where things are overlapping each other, it simplifies it, and I’ll say frameless because we really don’t want the shadows to come in with outline lines.  [0:25:27]

We want them as fills, just the shading.  So, I’ll say OK to copy it.  Now, we don’t see any change here because all I’ve done is put it on a clipboard.  Now, if I go to the plan view here, and I say Paste, we’ll see that it’s come in exactly lined up on the building.  Now, we do need to do some editing on it, but it is perfectly in relationship to the building.  [0:26:06]

Now, in order to edit it – in order to make it less stark like this, I need to first of all paste it, and then revise it.  I can’t change it before I paste it.  So, I’ll click outside the marquee so that it drops it in.  Now, it is there. Now, if I select something here, you can see that as I select it, it’s selecting some fills, but they’re not all unified. They’re a bunch of different shadow fills.  It’ll be much easier if we were to combine them.  [0:26:42]

So, in order to do that, we’re going to use the Undo/Redo trick. So, I’ll undo the paste.  That will disappear, and then I will redo the paste. Now, you can see there’s a whole bunch of dots on screen.  I’m not exactly sure why we have all these dots over here, but you know when you have curved edges or curved elements, there are going to be sort of centers of the curvature, and I think that’s what these are, but the main thing is I want all of the shadows that are incorporated here to be grouped so that I can then easily select them.  [0:27:23]

So, having undone and redone, everything is selected, and I can go to the Edit menu and say that I’d like to group them.  Now, you can see that the handles all change here. Right now, we’re in a suspend group.  So, that means that if I go and select one of these shaded areas, it’s still selected independently, but if I have groups active, I can select all of them here.  Now, while there are some things here like shadows that are underneath the trees that I really don’t want, the simplest thing right now is to just consolidate these shadows.  [0:28:05]

So, basically take all the separate little pieces and have ARCHICAD do its best job of combining them.  So, to do that, we have them all selected.  I think we probably want to have groups suspended here so that the individual elements can be modified because when you have groups suspended, you can actually move around or change the elements. [0:28:31]

I’ll go to the Edit menu, Reshape, and use a command that’s very, very powerful called Fill Consolidation.  When I do a fill consolidation, we can have it trim overlapping fills.  We can have it merge identical adjoining fills regardless of their outlines, so there are different things that we can do here, and let’s just use the default fill consolidation settings and say OK.  [0:28:56]

Before I do that, I’ll just look.  It says 1,071 fills.  So, there’s just a whole lot of little pieces.  Basically, each piece of element – each wall, each roof piece, each tree leaf, is creating a single piece of shading.  So, that’s why it’s 1,071. I’ll just say to go ahead and do your best to consolidate this.  That will take a moment, and now you can see 843 – a little bit less.  [0:29:24]

We may need to go here.  We would benefit by saying that the merge settings here – select attribute to ignore.  We don’t really care about layers or categories.  I don’t think that’s really going to make a difference here.  We can say to merge them regardless.  I think we’ll just do here.  Alright, well, we’ll just say OK.  I don’t think this will actually change anything.  No, it’s still got the 843.  [0:29:56]

Now, at this point, these are all a group that could be put on a layer. Right now, they’re on the ARCHICAD layer. Typically, you’d want to put them on a layer, just for the site, and maybe for presentation purposes here.  So, I’ll just put it onto this layer here that’s related to the site.  So, it would be turned off when we’re not showing the site.  [0:30:28]

Now, in addition to just putting it on that layer, I want to change the way it’s depicted. Now, you notice that these fills actually – instead of having a pen for the background, they have a color.  This is unusual in terms of ARCHICAD when you’re drawing fills.  Normally, you’re picking a pen, but I can go to this color, and I could say to just make it sort of a neutral color here, or actually, we’ll make it transparent.  [0:30:59]

Now, we’re not even seeing them.  Now, having made it transparent so we would see through it, I’ll go here and change it to, let’s say, 30%.  Now, the 30% relates to whatever this color is.  In this case, black.  So, now we’ve got something that’s a neutral shading that is just partially translucent.  Maybe we want the 40% or something like that, slightly darker.  So, I’ll click away.  So, now you can see we’ve got shadows that look pretty clean around there.  [0:31:36]

Now, if we look on here, we may say that we really should have some shadow casting on here. Let’s just see if we were to bring this to the front, because it may be behind some things.  I’ll go to the display order, bring to front.  See, now it actually is on top of this area here, and let’s just see. Not quite sure what’s going on here, but we could manually clean this up.  [0:32:08]

Sometimes you may want to go and remove some things, like there’s some shadows in this area from the walkway, and while it technically is correct, we may want to remove that.  There may be some other things related to how it’s on the balcony. Maybe we want to remove that.  Let’s just see how we would do this here.  If I zoom in on this area, remember that if I select any of these fills and I have the groups suspended, I can delete them or edit them, so I’ll just delete that.  I’ll go click and delete a couple of these, and maybe we actually have this as a fill here that we had.  [0:32:52]

I’m not sure.  We could go in and tweak it.  So, obviously, the idea here is that you’re going to use ARCHICAD’s power to create the graphics quickly.  Do whatever editing you need, but literally, I could be done with adding shadows in a couple of minutes or within 5 or 10 minutes, if I really wanted to finesse certain things.  So, it’s a very powerful tool, and all of this information could be put on a layer that was specifically visible for one presentation or another.  [0:33:29]

So, let’s just see where I am with my notes here, and we’ll also check in on this.  OK, so Steve says, “I’m a former Navy navigator, but I have never heard of heliodon.”  Well, I’m not sure where the term comes from.  Obviously, helios is, I think, related to the sun. I’m not sure the don or how that works out, but it is a way of calculating the sun position and the shadows that would be cast based on the sun position.  [0:34:11]

So, interesting, that.  It was something I became familiar with early, early on in ARCHICAD, so I take it for granted, but let’s just go here to do a search for heliodon’s definition. There you go.  A heliodon is a device for adjusting the angle between a flat surface and a beam of light to match the angle at a specific latitude and longitude in the solar beam.  So, it’s used primarily by architects and students of architecture.  [0:34:48]

So, it’s a device, and you can see the little picture here.  Maybe make it bigger, and you can see that it is showing the path of the sun, I imagine, and you can calculate it.  So, you can see the little tiny architectural model here, and the earth position, etc.  So, this is a digital version of that.  It is projecting where the sun is in the sky.  So, here’s sun simulator, heliodon, etc.  OK, so it’s not a term I made up.  [0:35:30]

Alright, so let’s see my notes here.  Alright, so we’ve taken a view from the top – axonometric, so it has no forced shortening.  Now, you could take views from other angles and show the shadow that way. If you didn’t want to paste it on top of a plan – the site plan, then you could take any view for presentation purposes.  It could be perspective or a different type of axo.  [0:36:03]

We’ve looked at the 3D window views in OpenGL or vectorial engine.  We haven’t looked at rendering, but certainly we can do a photo rendering for something slightly more realistic-looking, and it will cast shadows if you ask it to, and it will use the sun position that comes from the 3D window.  So, we’ve looked at the output options for printing, saving a screenshot, saving as a .jpg or graphic file or as a view in the View Map that you can then place on a layout sheet.  [0:36:38]

Now, when you do it as a view in the View Map, it’s – just like an elevation or a section, something that can be updated as the model develops.  So, in other words, as you can do some initial studies or some studies at one point in time, and then later as the design changes, you’ll know that that can be updated with the shadows or the site plan information based on the current design.  [0:37:05]

So, you can enable the shadow casting in the 3D styles, or if we’re looking at the photo rendering, which we’ll take a look at briefly.  Shadows are cast onto 3D elements such as slabs and the terrain mesh.  If you have the building just sitting by itself, and you’ve never put something underneath it, ARCHICAD won’t complain. It won’t say you need a support, but when you try to cast shadows, it will not actually have anything to put those shadows onto, so you do need a platform.  [0:37:40]

Sometimes, you may need to just say that you’ll create a slab that extends far enough to be able to see the shadows, and so that is something that, for presentation purposes, you may just need to add if you’re casting shadows.  Heliodon calculation is based on the project location and the north orientation plus date and time, so we went through that.  The view settings include the settings for the sun location, so when I save each of those views – 9 am and 3 pm, spring equinox – we can have multiple sun studies – different days, different times, etc.  [0:38:20]

Now, the color coding in a 3D view is based on the surfaces seen in the 3D view, so if I go back to my ARCHICAD model here, this is a plan view, and it’s based on 2D graphics.  This is a 3D view, and it’s based on surfaces. Now, we are currently in the vectorial view, so we have simplified surfaces. If we switch back to the OpenGL view, then we have something that looks just a little bit more naturalistic.  [0:39:01]

Now, when we are doing sun studies and presentations, we can do a photo rendering, and so depending upon what you’ve done and you placed in your view, you may want to render it to get a higher quality output, so we’ll go to the document, creative imaging, and we can do photo render the projection or region here.  [0:39:31]

So, let’s just say that I want to go to the photo rendering settings to check what the settings are.  If you haven’t worked with the photo rendering tools in ARCHICAD, they have changed in the last few years, starting in ARCHICAD 18.  It introduced the Cinerender technology rather than Lightworks, which had been the case up until that time.  Now, in the photo rendering settings, click on this little preview icon.  It will give us a top-down view or give us a view matching the 3D window.  [0:40:08]

You can see it’s actually calculating some shadow stuff first, and then it’s going to be adding in the elements here.  It’s interesting what it does.  It figures out some overall lighting, and then it figures out what surfaces are there.  Now, this is a preview, so it’s very tiny, but it is pretty quick.  It’s coming up in like 30 or 40 seconds, I would guess.  It doesn’t look much different.  Of course, this is a small view, but in general terms, you can, of course, get higher quality output.  [0:40:39]

Now, if we look at the settings here – let’s see. This is preview only.  If I go to Preview and Settings in this pop-up, then we’ll be able to see all of these settings that you can adjust.  Now, I’m not going to get into doing much of an explanation of the photo rendering environment because that’s a whole separate training, but basically, you can pick from different presets, which are styles of rendering that are suitable for different purposes.  So, for example, general purpose outdoor?  Obviously, that seems like a good starting point.  [0:41:20]

Sometimes you want to have nighttime things, or you want to have views that are actually more of a sketch.  You can do that.  Now, if you have a sketch, some of them may allow shadows, and some may not.  So, for example, if I said tech pencil – simple here, it’s going to have some settings for a sketch mode rather than Cinerender, and if we tell it to update this preview, this is not actually a live preview, obviously.  It’s a different building, but this is the style, and you can see there are some shadows in this area that would be included in this.  [0:42:01]

It would be interesting to try this. I’ll just say to go ahead and render this here, and then we’ll look at what goes on here.  So, you can see this is an interesting top-down view of just the area that I defined with the marquee, and it didn’t take very long, of course, but it is an interesting sort of presentation style that you could use, and you could make the viewing size – let’s see.  That is the dimension, so here’s the size that you can create, and you can obviously make that bigger once you’ve decided that yeah, this is pretty good, and I want it a little bit more highly detailed.  [0:42:52]

So, whenever you have a photo rendering, it goes into a separate tab here, and you can, of course, leave it around in the tab bar.  If you do decide to close it, it will ask you if you want to save it because it is something that was just produced once, and it will disappear unless you save it.  So, if I said save, then it will save it, probably as a .jpg or similar file.  I don’t need to save it, so I’ll just close that up.  [0:43:18]

OK, so let’s see here.  So, I see some questions from Chris.  “I have the stair startup template.”  I haven’t gotten to that, Chris.  I will double-check on that.  I thought that that was available in the stair training area – the Stair & Railings training. I know that it was based on MasterTemplate’s Stair & Railings, and if you do have MasterTemplate, then you can just go to the Interactive Legends file, and you’ll see the same set of stairs that I reference in the Stair & Railing training.  [0:44:04]

OK, so Jimmy says, “I also use this device for photo voltaic installation.”  OK, that’s interesting.  Alright, so Chris, I will get back to fill that in if it’s not visible in the Stair & Railing course pages.  OK, so let us go back to my notes.  Alright, so we can also make changes in terms of layers. Maybe we want to generate this without the trees. You know, there are certain things in model view options, graphic overrides, and even renovation filters.  So, you can have sun studies that are based on existing versus new, etc.  [0:44:58]

You may have layers for context.  So, you may have some massing models showing neighboring buildings.  Those could be on a layer that you turn on or off, etc.  Now, in terms of the graphic overrides, this could be interesting.  For example, if I wanted to have a different style rather than in color here, instead of shading with shadow, I could do white model with shadow.  So, let’s just do white model – plain. There is one style of view, and let’s do white model with shadows.  Interesting.  [0:45:40]

OK, so let’s go and open this up – white model with sun shadows here.  OK, it says monochrome model. That makes it the white.  OK, that’s interesting that the difference here should turn on sun shadows here.  Let’s just see if I refresh, rebuild.  OK, I thought we could have the white model with shadows, but apparently it’s not working in this context.  Now, let me just take a different view. I’m just going to rotate this around.  [0:46:26]

By the way, we are in a top-down view here, but I can – Oh, OK. Let’s see.  That’s interesting.  It’s not responding to my mouse quite right.  Let’s just see if I can orbit this here. OK, so it looks like this particular 3D view is a little bit locked in, so I’m just going to close it here, and let me go back here to the view.  So, now we’re in a 3D view. Let me now switch to white model with shadows. No, it’s still not letting me do that.  [0:47:16]

It’s interesting. Now it’s not letting me rotate.  Let me put it back to the shading and shadows here and see if I can rotate this. Wow, my view is sort of locked in. Let me go to a different view, like this AXO here. Alright, and let’s see. With my cursor, I was able to select things, and I’m trying to rotate the view here or zoom in and out, and all of a sudden, my mouse is not cooperating. Let’s see.  [0:48:10]

So, go to the orbit. It’s still not letting me do that.  Wow.  Don’t know what happened to my ARCHICAD environment. This may be a good time to save and reopen this file here, so I’ll go and say to save the site plan version of my sample project, and we’ll quit out of ARCHICAD and reopen it.  So, this is the first time in 4 months of doing the course that I’ve had an issue where everything sort of got a little bit funky.  So, hopefully it will allow me to work more effectively when I restart it.  [0:49:00]

So, let’s see if there are any other comments or questions here.  Let’s see.  Alright, so Chris says, “My screen keeps freezing, and I have to go out of the webinar and back in.”  I’m not sure whether there’s some issue or if anyone else is having issues with the presentation screen not going out.  I should be on a good network connection here.  [0:49:34]

Yeah, I am connected up with a very high-speed internet connection working.  So, Lou, you said, “I think you were in a fixed time sun study.”  Just by activating a particular view in the View Map, it doesn’t fix it.  It just sets it to that point, but I should still be able to move around.  I should still be able to do work, so I don’t think that was the issue.  Let’s just see if I start up ARCHICAD 22 again, whether that works.  [0:50:09]

While it’s starting up, let’s just look at the next parts.  So, one of the other things we can do is we can cut away the building.  So, some of you have used 3D cutaways a lot.  Others maybe have not been exposed to this, but you can actually define a cutting plane or more than one cutting plane that cuts off part of the model, and then you can see inside the building, much like a section, but on an arbitrary plane, and you can have more than one cutting plane.  In some cases, that is helpful for showing things.  [0:50:49]

So, let’s look at how a cutaway can work.  So, we already did the copy shadows and pasted it into the 2D view and consolidated, so we’ve already done all of these here, so we only have a few more things in this particular lesson that I’m just going to talk about and do some quick demonstration.  So, we’re going to go to this one here, and I’ll take a sip of my tea.  [0:51:28]

So, let me know if you have any other questions or comments, and how often do you do sun studies or site plan presentation drawings?  I’d imagine that some of you do some really serious work with presentation drawings on master planning and site, and others less so.  I’d be interested if you just want to type into the Slack chat to say what you’ve done.  I’d also be interested in seeing some of the things you’ve already done, so if you are a master at this or have at least done things that you’re happy about, then I’d like to see some samples.  [0:52:14]

You can literally drag a .jpg file into the Slack window, and it will show up, or you can copy and paste.  Now, let’s see here.  I’m in 3D, and I can move around.  Yeah, I can.  Ah, there we go.  Alright, so let’s just take that top-down view here.  So, let’s go to this one here.  So, the 3 PM or the 9 AM.  Yeah, so these are all working like that, and if I switch this to white model with shadows, yeah, something had happened.  I just was not able to move around.  Now, the shadows are still not happening, so white model with shadows is just not doing its job.  [0:53:00]

At least my ARCHICAD is working again.  OK, so in terms of a cutaway, let me just put it back to our normal-style view.  To activate cutaways, we can go to the View menu, 3D Elements in 3D view, and we can turn on 3D cutaway.  You can see 3D cutting planes is grey because we don’t have 3D cutaway enabled.  Now, I’m going to turn on 3D cutaway. There are no cutaways currently active, but you may have noticed that the little scissor icons have shown up at the top, bottom, and sides of the window, and I can literally grab this and drag something down here, and you can see how I can do this.  [0:53:57]

Now, since we’re maybe doing a site plan, we’d want the cutaway, if we were to do it at all, to be something in the ground floor, and having moved it into position, I can then click the Finalize button or adjust it and then finalize it eventually.  So, here we can see this view, and I can rotate this around like that.  So, now if I go back to the spring equinox 3 PM here, the cutaway has been taken off, but let’s just see.  I think that if I turn on the 3D cutaway, no, we can’t here. [0:54:39]

Alright, so what we’re going to do is rotate this where I can see a different orientation, do the cutting plane down here, finalize it when I get it the way I want.  You can always adjust it later, and then we’ll go back to the previous view, so now I am in a top-down view.  By the way, I could have just sort of have done the 3D view orientation, but this previous view is very handy.  [0:55:12]

So, now I’m in a top-down view with a cutaway.  Well, something like this could be very helpful for certain types of presentations to show how things work and just communicate if we zoom in on it.  You can see graphically that it has a certain appeal, so keep that in mind. You can do cutaways of the building, taking it down to a convenient level like the ground floor, and that can be just printed and saved as a view.  [0:55:46]

So, if I go here and say to save this as a view, then we’ll say Cutaway of Site Plan or just Cutaway Site Plan – something like that there.  So, we can then go back and forth.  I can go to the overall view, and here’s the cutaway.  Alright, so let us look at some additional options.  So, we can copy a top view and overlay it to get some more graphic things happening.  So, let’s just say that I take this top view that I’ve got, and we want to incorporate it into a plan representation, just like copying the shadows.  We could copy something else, like the 3D view.  [0:56:49]

Now, obviously what we want to do here is we want to – by the way, we’ve got part of the land form cut into because it’s at the same height as the walls we cut down.  Let’s just say that I wanted to be able to overlay this to provide a hybrid of 2D and 3D in a different way.  So, I’ll go and use the Marquee tool.  Let’s see.  We’ll zoom out a little bit further, and in fact, let’s just turn it off.  I think if I go to the scissor icon here, I can say not to show the cutting plane.  [0:57:39]

So, right now, we’re seeing this cutting plane here, and if I press down in the view, it may think I’m trying to adjust that cutting plane.  I’ll say not to show the cutting planes. They’re still active, but we don’t need to see that.  Now, if I draw a marquee here and say to copy it, this is not even going to ask me whether to do a scaled version or a screenshot because I’m in the OpenGL style, so it’s definitely going to be a screenshot.  [0:58:12]

So, let’s go now to the plan and see how we might arrange this.  So, I’ll zoom out a little bit, and I will go paste.  Now, when I paste, it’s thinking about it for a moment. I think this is the first action that I’ve done here since I opened this file that’s modifying the actual elements in the file, so I’ve got the spinning beach ball for a moment.  So, you can see that it’s come in.  It’s not quite the right size.  You can see it’s not really quite aligning.  [0:58:53]

If we look here, you can see where it is – relatively close, but let’s just go and get this in position.  So, this is a paste, which means that there is a marquee around it internally.  Let’s just see.  Oh, OK, so I have to paste it in again. Copy, paste?  There we go.  I have to click outside it to drop it in, so I guess the marquee is right on top of the area which was included, so let’s go and get this set up to really overlay.  [0:59:31]

Now, if I click here, what am I selecting?  This is the pasted image here, and as a graphic, it is an element that I can move around, so I’ll just move this corner to where that matches.  Now, this is not quite the right size.  It’s hard to tell, but it’s not quite matching.  For now, I’m going to go and say to bring it to the front, and so you can see the 3D view with all the colors is not quite as long.  Of course, it’s snapping right here.  [1:00:10]

Let me go and resize this so that it’s very, very close to the right scale.  To do that, with it selected – remember, I still have it selected.  I’m going to go to the Edit menu, Reshape, Resize.  Now, when you do a resize of one or more elements, you can do it with a number.  We knew that it needed to be 10% bigger or twice as big.  You can type in values, or you can do it graphically.  Now, we’re not doing any actual building elements, so these choices down below don’t make any difference, but if you were to take a whole building or room arrangement or something like that and expand it or contract it, you could tell it not to make the walls thicker when the building gets bigger.  [1:00:58]

Just change the distances of the node points.  In this case, it doesn’t matter, so I’ll just say OK.  Now, when you do a resize, you’re first going to enter the resizing center point, and I will say this point right here because that point is already in the right location, and then I’m going to say this point here, and I’ll just maybe use the shift key to keep it straight.  This point here should be bigger.  [1:01:28]

So, if I take it out approximately to this location, then the drawing will get bigger so that this point stays the same, and this one adjusted.  Now, it looks like I could get a little bit more precise, so again, I’ll do the resize, Command+ or Ctrl+K, and say from this point here to this point, and I’ll take it up to here, so I basically said I’ve clicked on a point of my graphic, and then this is where it should end up.  Now look how close that it.  It’s really looking very close.  [1:02:06]

Now, I could go and check other corners or something further away, but it’s more than close enough there.  Now, if I wanted to, of course, I could leave this on top.  That may have some value, or I can put it to the back. You can see that now, we can see the actual walls a little bit more cleanly, or we can send it all the way to back here.  [1:02:40]

Now, when we send it all the way to the back, of course, now I’m not seeing any of it, so let’s just undo that, and we’ll now have it partially overlaid.  Now, sometimes you may want to excerpt some things.  In other words, say that this particular graphic – I don’t want to show it in certain areas. It looks like we’ve got part of the roof shingles showing here, and maybe we don’t want that. Let’s see. No, actually, right now we’re on the site plan.  Remember, we had these roof shingles shown, and they don’t make sense when you have a cutaway, so we’d want to have them on a layer that we would turn off or delete them.  [1:03:28]

I’m actually just going to delete them for now, just since they’re getting in the way of this particular part.  Let’s just get a couple of these out of the way.  So, I’m just going to delete those.  So, I’m getting it relatively clean here.  Now, if we did want to have the graphic actually cut out around certain things, we can do that.  Now, if I select this graphic, it has a – let’s see.  If we go here, go to the edge, and OK.  Actually, I’m sorry.  I was thinking that we could cut out a hole in the middle of the graphic.  [1:04:22]

When you have a drawing on a sheet, we do have the option of cropping it.  We have the option of cutting out a hole inside it, but with this type of a graphic, where it’s just a screenshot or a .jpg, we basically can resize it, but we can’t crop it.  So, what you need to do is just put it behind certain things selectively as needed.  [1:04:45]

So, this is an interesting option here.  It’s obviously a little bit of a mess at the moment, but it does allow you to do certain types of presentations.  This graphic would be put on a layer that you would control and turn on and off when you wanted to see it here.  So, let’s see if there’s any questions on this here.  OK, so Ken says, “I don’t know how to do sun studies.”  So, I did go over that earlier, just in terms of setting the location of your project, the orientation of the north, and then setting the sun position based on the true calculation of a date and time, and that is how you generate shadows based on the sun.  [1:05:39]

Now, there’s 2 types of sun studies, generically or from a high level.  One is where you are looking at the project and showing where the shadows are at a certain time and day, and another is where you’re looking from inside the project, perhaps, and you are changing the sun and actually perhaps doing even an animation where the sun changes with time, and that is done through a different process, but essentially, it is still using the heliodon.  [1:06:14]

So, you can say you’d like to go from 9 o’clock to 3 o’clock, and you’d like to get views every 15 minutes, and it will then show you how the sun is moving in a series of renderings.  So, Tom says, “I’ve used a sequence of sun shadows and created a video to watch where the sun came through windows.”  That’s exactly what I was just describing, Tom.  So, you had typed that in.  I didn’t see it, but that’s exactly what I was describing.  [1:06:43]

OK, so let us see here.  So, we just copied an OpenGL top view and overlaid it and resized.  We could bring in a Google Maps satellite view, so this is something that you may find useful as well.  I’m going to just demonstrate that quickly.  So, if I go to my browser here, I’m in this location. It’s actually where I’m speaking to you from in San Rafael, California.  Now, let’s go in the Google Maps.  [1:07:24]

So, here’s Google.com/maps, and you can also do maps.google.com. I can say I’d like to look at a satellite view here, and you can see that here is the satellite view, and let’s say there’s a little area over here that might represent a building lot.  So, we’ll zoom in on this here.  OK, so let’s say they were going to be building there.  Now, I might rotate this view.  I can literally go in Google Maps, I think, and rotate this, so I’m pressing down the mouse and the Shift key at the same time to do it.  [1:08:03]

I think that you can do some things here where you use either the Shift or the Ctrl key to go to 3D.  So, if I press down the Shift key and the mouse, then I can actually get something like a 3D view. Now, it’s not perfect, but Google has done a good job in many places on the earth to give you something that really does communicate the terrain there.  [1:08:37]

Now, let’s just say that I wanted to use this background of this area so I could get this approximately right.  Maybe this street edge is the edge of my property.  I can go click on 2D, and it will go flip it to where I’m looking straight down on it, and then of course I can maybe just pan this over here and get this where I want it.  [1:09:06]

Now, having done that, I’m not sure if there are some formal ways to export this, but it would be simple enough to go to do a screenshot.  So, I’ll just say to do a screenshot here using my favorite screen tool like this, and so now this has come up in my Screen Capture here, and I’ll just copy this, and then we’ll go back to ARCHICAD, and we’ll just zoom out a little bit, and I’ll paste. You can see how this has come in.  [1:09:48]

Now, again, we could resize this, so I’ll just drag it a little bit further down here.  So, we could resize this based on some reference points.  My favorite thing is to take the building footprint of neighboring buildings, if you have that information, and just do sort of a simple massing model, and the simplest thing is to draw a slab that has the polygon outline of neighboring buildings and then elevate it up to whatever – one story, two stories, etc.  [1:10:23]

You could, of course, draw it with walls and put in some type of a roof.  You know, it’s a mansard roof or a shed roof or whatever style, and you could get something pretty quickly to at least the representative.  Now, if you’re doing that with a survey drawing, then you know it’s precisely to scale, and then from your satellite view, you could go and do a similar orientation.  Let’s say I’m going to put the corner of the satellite view on the corner of that neighboring building, and I’m going to stretch it until it works.  [1:10:58]

Maybe you have a building on one side that you have a quick massing model of, and you have another building on another side, and then when you’re stretching it, if you make the 2 of them align, then you know that over the whole scope of the graphic, it’s relatively in scale.  So, that would be a way that you can combine these things.  [1:11:20]

Now, let’s look at some samples here.  I was looking at some site plans just online to see what some interesting things that you could do were.  Now, this is an image that could have been started and most likely was started in a CAD program, and so if you have, for example, a survey with building footprints, then these could be done. It’s clear that there are some of the shadows here that are based on roof lines that were at least estimated, in terms of the basic building shape.  [1:12:08]

The shadow calculation can be done.  Now, this is a combination, as you can see, of monochrome and color. Now, in ARCHICAD, because you can’t really cut things around a graphic quite like you would need to, you might actually render your top view in 2 different ways.  Now, the white model that I had a problem with – let’s just take this here.  So, if we go back to our 3D view, when I went to do the white model with shadows, it didn’t show shadows here, right?  [1:12:53]

So, that’s not working for what we need here, but what I could do is instead of a 3D viewing style, I could use a graphic override.  So, in the graphic overrides here, you can have a wide variety of them.  Well, one of them that I set up in MasterTemplate is white model, and what does it do? It says that essentially anything that is a 3D element – let’s do the uncut one.  We’ll say to edit the rules. It’s basically saying to make anything that’s 3D white.  [1:13:26]

Alright, so this is going to render it in color, but everything has been painted white.  It’s been spray painted white.  So, I’ll say OK here, and so this is a white model – shading and shadow here.  Interesting.  Let me go here.  I’m not sure what’s going on with this here.  I’m going to do just a regular AXO view. I’ll switch my override to be white model here, and why are the shadows – interesting.  [1:14:12]

So, I have to look at that because I thought that we would be able to make the model white but have the shadows turned on. If we go to the View Options, 3D Styles, of course we have sun shadows turned on. We are in OpenGL.  Interesting.  I’m going to have to think about why that is not actually showing.  Actually, we are seeing some shadows right here.  [1:14:45]

Yeah, there is a shadow, so the shadow casting right now is subtle.  So, maybe that’s the issue is that I just have the sun settings so bright.  So, let’s just take a quick look at this.  If I go to the 3D projection settings, and we go to the sunlight, I’ve got everything 100%.  So, let’s just say that the sun is at 80%, and it will also contribute here, and the ambient light – we’ll just make everything 80.  So, it’s not quite as bright.  You can see how everything gets a little dimmer.  Say OK, and there we go.  [1:15:29]

OK, so maybe that was the issue, that I had the sunlight setting way too bright.  So, now if I go back to the top view like this here, and we switch our override to white model and then go and just make sure in our 3D projection settings that our sunlight is set to be something more normal, now we’re seeing this.  OK, so it was not a problem with the graphic override or the 3D style.  It was a problem with the sunlight being too bright.  It was sort of blinded by the sunlight.  [1:16:24]

You have sun blindness or snow blindness there or something like that.  So, now we can see that.  OK, so if you do save out renderings in monochrome, they can be combined in Photoshop, so again, some of these effects can be done by rendering more than once and then combining in a graphic tool like Photoshop. In terms of the surfaces here, if I look at some of these here, you can see that some of the surfaces aren’t a uniform color.  They do gradate.  [1:17:07]

So, obviously, in Photoshop, you can do things like just use a brush to go and dab on some color. You can do that and sort of mask it, saying that I want to do it only in this area.  You can zoom in and out on it.  Other things that you may want to do is just go and find some textures.  So you can do a Google search for textures.  So, for example, a texture like this for the ground is sort of interesting and different than just an even abstract there.  [1:17:39]

So, some of these are free.  You can certainly get ones that are high-resolution that you pay for. This site here, Textures.com?  It looks like you can purchase credits so you can download things of different sizes for those credits, so if you do get into presentations more and more, then having a library of textures beyond what Graphisoft supplies could be useful.  [1:18:10]

Alright, so let’s see here.  Alright, so all of these things, I think, just provide some options when we’re reimporting something from Photoshop, it’s basically a graphic image – a .jpg or a .png or .tif, and you can resize it.  You can line things up, just the same way I did on the plan.  You can do that on a layout sheet, so you can overlay things, and of course, you can export out of ARCHICAD into Photoshop, so you can combine satellite stuff with the plans in Photoshop. [1:18:50]

One thing that I think generally is recognized is that if you want crisp linework for drawings, then you probably want to leave the linework stuff in ARCHICAD and bring in other graphic things behind it because then it’s going to have the absolute crisp linework rather than being rasterized or turned into a lower resolution bitmap image.  [1:19:19]

So, let’s see if there’s any final questions or comments.  I think I’ve covered the various options that I was prepared to share with you today.  OK, so John Dunham.  Hey, John.  “Sketch-up texture is another site with great textures at low and high resolutions.”  So, let’s just see this one here. Thanks for the tip.  Let’s bring it up.  OK, so anyway, there’s so many resources out there – some of them free, some of them modest in cost.  [1:20:12]

Alright, and let’s see some other comments here.  “Can we do a 3D plan in a way that the vanishing point will be at the center of the plan, and it shows you the heights of the walls?”  Good question.  Let’s just see how we might do that.  That’s excellent, and it shouldn’t be very hard to do.  You just have to know how to set it up.  [1:20:34]

Alright, so let me just put this back to – instead of the white model, we’ll put it back to no overrides here.  So, we’re now in a 3D view with a cutaway.  Now, maybe our cutaway should be a little higher, so I’ll go here, rotate it a little bit, go to show the cutting plane, and we’ll just take this up.  Interesting, so I’m just trying to get the cutting plane.  I’m trying to get this cutting plane to cancel a cutting plane input.  If I go grab this cutting plane and take it up higher – I’m trying to get it up higher.  [1:21:32]

Let me just finalize that.  Oh, OK, so when I moved it up, it didn’t actually give me the preview, unfortunately, but I can bring it up higher, so now we’re seeing most of the first floor there.  So, now I have to right-click on this to see the menu.  I was trying to left click, so I’ll say not to show the cutting planes.  So, they do exist.  I’ll go to the previous top-down view here.  [1:22:06]

So, right now, we’re not seeing the height of the wall.  We’re not seeing the shortening, so how would we get that?  Well, if I go to the View, 3D View Options, 3D Projection Settings, I can say that I’d like to switch to perspective and adjust the perspective settings.  Now, I’ll leave this alone for now.  This is going to give us a view from a lower section of the model up toward here. You can just barely see the line with the sun in a certain position.  Actually, it looks like the sun would still be locked in based on the date and time.  [1:22:43]

So, I’ll just say OK, so that’s a view that is interesting, but let’s say that we wanted that top-down view.  How would we do that.  I’ll go back to that same command, and I’ll move this position in.  Now, I’m just going to move it in closer, and notice that it has a camera Z or elevation and a target Z.  So, now I’ve moved it closer, so I’m still at the same 25 feet, but I’m closer, so I’m going to be looking down into the building a little bit more.  [1:23:16]

Alright, now if I move that camera position right on top of the viewing position here, then it’s going to be looking straight down.  Now, this distance here – that’s 1’-7”.  That means that my camera is just a very short distance – half a meter – from the target.  So, it’s almost straight down.  I’ll just say OK here.  Now, of course, it’s rotated a little bit because it really isn’t oriented.  Well, I couldn’t see that where I was doing it from very precisely.  [1:24:04]

Now, let’s just say that I make the azimuth 270 here.  Now you can see that I’m oriented in line – the front steps with the stair is set up to the side there, and if I go to the distance and say zero, then I’m going to be right on top.  It says you have to have a slight distance because calculations need to have something to grab onto, but let’s just take the camera up a bit.  Let’s just say about 15 meters and look down.  [1:24:54]

So, now I’m looking here.  OK, so it looks like I’ve rotated around a little bit when I did that, but I’m now getting a view much like what you had in your image there.  Let’s just see if we can go to this and say the 270 – interesting.  Let’s just try 180.  Not sure why that is.  OK, I thought that the azimuth was going to give us that.  So, the 180 camera there.  Let’s just take this one foot and 270.  Let’s just see how that works.  [1:25:40]

Alright, so it seems to be having a problem orienting it properly.  Now I’ve got it precise, and it’s just slightly off the vertical, but certainly close enough for everything we need.  Now, the view cone is something you can adjust as well. Now, this is a camera position, and we could, of course, save the view here so that we can return to it easily.  We can also create a camera and put it on the floor plan.  [1:26:11]

So, we really haven’t spent any time with camera and visualization in the course so far, but this is an interesting thing to know because you can actually adjust the position of the camera more precisely on the plan, so I’ll go to the View menu, 3D Navigation Extras, and I’ll say to put a camera into the path.  What that will do is that will actually save this current orientation and position of the camera and the target, and it will put it on the plan with a little camera icon.  [1:26:42]

When I do that, and I go back to the plan, and we ask for the Camera tool to be shown – let’s see. If we double-click on the Camera tool and say that I’d like to show the cameras – so, basically, when you double-click on the Camera, you get the camera settings, and in the camera settings, you have the path, which allows you to hide or show where the cameras are.  I’ll say OK.  [1:27:18]

You see that there are a whole bunch of camera icons that show up when I say to show it. This one right here in the center is the one that was just inserted, and if I select it here, you can see that here is the 50 feet, the 5 feet, and the 270.  So, I can zoom in on this, and I can move these around.  So, if I move this around, you can see the azimuth changes.  I don’t know if we can undo – Edit Camera.  Yeah, we can.  There we go.  [1:27:50]

So, you can place cameras that would be specifically in the right location.  Now, I don’t want to get into a whole training on cameras, but basically these are some preset views that were in this particular file. We can click on any view, like for example, here’s another view, and then just go to 3D, and we’ll get a view from that orientation.  Go back to the plan, and go to any other camera, and we’ll get that one.  [1:28:18]

If I select this camera here again, then you go to 3D, and we’ll be back at that view.  Now, it actually seems to have switched some of the other view settings, like the layer stuff has changed as we’ve been working, but the main thing is that we now have – that’s because when we went to the site plan, different layers were turned on.  So, ultimately, that is how you would get a view like what Swaro was asking, where we were looking straight down or close enough to straight down that it communicates the height of the walls.  [1:28:57]

Alright, Swaro, thank you for a good question.  I think that’s a great place to finish up today, so thank you for joining me for ARCHICAD Best Practices 2020 training course.  I think we’ll be moving on to some other topics after this one.  While there are some details I haven’t covered in site modeling such as how you would import a LIDAR laser scan and how you would import an XYZ file from a surveyor, I think we’ve covered enough that you can be dangerous.  I will probably do some supplemental lessons on those topics at a later point. [1:29:41]

So, I want to thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to getting your comments in Slack or via email, and we’ll be continuing next week.  Join me tomorrow for the coaching program call, if you want to get some help applying these lessons or any of the principles of the ARCHICAD best practices in the contexts of your projects.  Thanks for watching.  [1:30:07]