Project Map v.s. View Map

DBU,

Welcome to ac-talk, but you should do a little leg work yourself before jumping in and asking questions. You have started three threads recently - why your doors/windows cannot be seen, why your lines/fills do not show, and this question about viewpoints vs views.

All of these questions would be answered by going through the various tutorials provided by GS, even if you do not want to read the manual. We're talking basic, day one if not hour one elementary issues.

Please put a little effort in with the BIM Experience Kit, the Step by Step, etc, or simply do a search of the Help file and you should find the answers to all of your recent posts.

Thanks,
Karl

PS Your LA area reseller, Eric Bobrow, offers many training opportunities - as does the Orange County reseller, John Stebbins.

I too struggled with this issue and I guess I found out the answers for myself. I am going to share my findings here in the hope that it will help other newcomers to ArchiCAD.

The Navigator is split up into three sections: Project Map, View Map and Layout Book.

The Project Map contains a hierarchical list of Viewpoints. A viewpoint is a particular point of view of the 3D model and its 2D annotations. Think of each viewpoint as a slice through the 3D model (horizontal slices for plans and vertical slices for sections and elevations) that shows you a 2D projection of the 3D model. Viewpoints are where you actually model and draw.

In summary a viewpoint is what you draw.

The View Map contains a hierarchical list of saved view points, simply referred to as views. Views are the way that you tell the story of your building. You'll show structure in some views and not others, furniture on one and fire separations on another, etc. You accomplish this by setting various attributes of the view, such as scale, layer combinations, model view options, graphical overrides, to achieve a particular graphical representation of your overall model. While you can continue drawing/modeling over the top of a view the actual 3D and 2D items you add are attached to/stored on the parent viewpoint, or at least that's how I think of it. Sometimes it is helpful to continue drawing on top of a particular view and sometimes it is not. The system is very flexible and powerful.

In summary a view is how you see what you've drawn.

The Layout Book is a hierarchical list of Layouts, i.e. drawing sheets. This is the most straight forward item in the navigator to understand - it's a book of drawings arranged into logical sections.

Another thing that I really struggled with initially was ArchiCAD's concept of "layers". I found the word "layer" to be misleading because in my mind layering implies a hierarchical ordering of items. In every other application I have used, which also has the notion of layers, the ordering is obvious and explicit. For example, layers in Photoshop or InDesign behave just the way that one might expect: upper layers cover lower layers.

Generally, ArchiCAD's layer mechanism does not imply any ordering or hierarchy at all (this is not entirely true as there are subtle and advanced interactions between layers when it comes to how elements merge/intersect). I find that ArchiCAD's layers are best thought of as "sets". In that sense ArchiCAD's layers are a mechanism for grouping elements that logically belong together. By analogy, a set of all people over the age of 25 does not imply anything about the sex, ethnicity or profession of any of the members of the set. There is also no ordering or hierarchy. It's just a set. And so in ArchiCAD you might have a layer for all walls that are structural. There is no implication as to the makeup of these walls, their colour, fire rating, height, level or any other attributes. It's just a set of walls that share a particular function and you get to decide on the logic that governs the grouping. In this respect ArchiCAD's layers are not all that dissimilar from how Revit's worksets behave.

There are many interesting articles on how to best use layers and layer combinations. I highly recommend that you find these and read them thoroughly.

All the best on your ArchiCAD journey.

Tomek wrote:
The Layout Book is a hierarchical list of Layouts, i.e. drawing sheets. This is the most straight forward item in the navigator to understand - it's a book of drawings arranged into logical sections.

Just to add a little extra to this.
You add the Views for the View Map to your layout pages.
That way you get to see exactly what you want to see in your plans in exactly the way you want to see them.

Barry.

The way I explain it to people new to ArchiCAD is that it represents a workflow.

You create your Project, define how to View things, place these on a Layout and when done you Publish the results.

Erwin wrote:
You create your Project, define how to View things, place these on a Layout and when done you Publish the results.

Thanks for that Erwin. That is a very good way of explaining how these tools fit together. However, the workflow doesn't really tell me how to actually do the work to achieve the flow 😉

As a beginner, with 10 years of Revit experience, I still had trouble figuring out exactly how to accomplish this workflow. In particular, the most confusing thing to me was the relationship between viewpoints and saved views. The penny dropped for me today so I thought I'd update this post with my own interpretation to help others.