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ARCHICAD Training Lesson Outline
In this lesson, continuing on from the previous session, quick conceptual models are built for a variety of roof types and geometries. Some of the limitations of multi-plane roofs are illustrated, as well as a few more common manipulations.
CONNECTING ROOFS TO EACH OTHER OR TO OTHER ELEMENTS
Roofs can of course Connect to each other or to trim walls, columns and beams.
The most common process is to select the elements (walls and roofs) and right-click on one of them or in empty space, and choose Connect > Trim Elements to Roof/Shell. In the dialog box, choose to use the Roofs/Shells from the current selection, and confirm to execute.
The Trim option in the Connect submenu will cause the Roof(s) to participate in Priority Intersection Calculation based on Building Materials, and remove parts of elements that are above each Roof. The Merge option will calculate the Intersections but not remove the parts above the intersection; one may use this for parapets and other special cases.
One can Connect two Roof systems that overlap in space and get a quick cleanup of the model. However, if they have different plate heights, this simple approach is often insufficient since ARCHICAD will not "stack" roof planes, leaving an artificial, incomplete design. To wrap one roof around underneath another, one has to leave them unconnected, and manually change the contour polygon as needed.
CONNECTING SINGLE PLANE ROOFS
Single Plane Roofs have a special connection method:
- Select the controlling roof plane
- Command or CTRL-click on the edge of a nearby roof and that edge will adjust to meet the original plane
Unfortunately, this does not work with multi-plane roofs.
FLOOR PLAN VISIBILITY
Floor Plan display options are flexible in terms of story visibility and graphic display of fills and outlines. This will be discussed more in the next lesson, however there is one important option that was demonstrated in this lesson.
Overhead lines (when the roof is above the Floor Plan Cutting Plane) can be drawn with Solid lines, dashed lines or dotted lines. The control for Overhead line type is not included in the Roof Settings dialog box in recent versions of ARCHICAD. In fact, there are many settings for Roof graphics that are left out from the settings dialog and the Info Box.
To show the controls for Overhead line type (as well as other related options) it may be necessary to use the Options menu > Work Environment > Info Box then select Roofs (on the left side) and turn on the visibility (clicking the eyeball icon) for these Roof settings. This will immediately add those options to the Info Box whenever a Roof is selected, or the Roof tool is activated.