Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

vertical composite wall

Anonymous
Not applicable
I read large debates about "real 3d" versus 2.5 (ok 2.75). I personally appreciate many advantages of the "not 3d" plan, in term of efficiency (rather then formal coherence, but in real life you often have to cheat to get an accurate drawing...)
But as a pragmatic step to get more from the "plan section", I would first ask simply for wall plan representation to be separated from section representation (pens and hatching) so we can draw hidden walls in plan, regardless of the section representation (like other tools like slab, in fact)
Then... COMPOSITE WALLS. Not in thickness but VERTICALLY, to superimpose several walls elements in one step.
We many times have the problem of superimposed walls in one " real world story" with some half or intermediate secondary stories especially around staircases. And also many wall height that does not correspond to story height in some part of the building and small walls "not cut" in plan and variation of thickness and...
I do not know about people in this forum but the only solution we got was to multiply hidden layers in plan and/or in section and sophisticated layer combination (thanks to the navigator) so the model produce both quiet accurate plans and sections.
We also use pseudo stories (I hate that, how do you call? "not IMHO"? "not BIM"? Please, spell for me just once "IMHO" "BIM" and other mysterious coding for what you know... ).
Many of that could be avoided with composite that allow to set the representation of each part (hidden, viewed, cut) with pens and hatch. It would also solve most of the "cut plan level" ambiguity.
Vertical composite does not seem so complicate to me and typically 2.75 AC oriented (excuse me...), is it?
17 REPLIES 17
__archiben
Booster
Karl wrote:
Not sure how to vote on this one until I understand better why vertical composites are needed. If it is related to doors/windows ... then this is an alternative solution to a different (old) wish, which I'm not sure has been placed as a poll since we moved to this new forum.
karl

i think that there are two things going on here - the windows/doors thing that you're talking about is one thing, philippe's vertical stacking of composites another.

from my point of view this is more about developing the virtual building components from a documentation perspective - until matthew's 'new working environment' is implemented, there will always be the need to workaround the issue of different 'entities' (as you put it) at a higher level that those displayed on the story 'plan'. higher level (same story) walls of a different construction to the lower level currently has to be managed by way of layer combinations/'dummy' stories (i personally will never use dummy stories!).

what i see this as is the ability to build your wall both as a skin construction and vertically through different components, (this kind of preserves your method as well - except that you are building the component rather than the entity on the floor plan), and save it as a virtual building element (i.e. a composite wall+). the different wall constructions vertically could be controlled through the display options so that (for example) an RCP would document the higher levels of the wall with the ceiling plan . . . or stair core drawings of high-level landings . . . which brings me to another aspect of this:

windows and doors would then only display in the vertical sections of the wall that they are in, either in whole or in part, (and also across stories if necessary as per your interpretation of the wish . . .), which would mean, for example, that you wouldn't get to see the door in the wall at the bottom of the stairwell on the higher level landings! i speak form painful experience of complicated layer arrangements to get the desired documentation! (remember my post http://www.graphisoft.com/community/archicad-talk/viewtopic.php?t=691& ?)

rather than hotspots at the vertical intersections, i think that you should be able to dimension to the 'separator' lines that would inevitably be a part of the vertical construction.

matthew's 'new working environment' would negate the need for this at all - you would build the way the building would be built and being able to cut different plan views would document just what you need . . .

which to choose . . . ?

~/archiben
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Thanks for fleshing things out, Ben!

I understand ... but am still skeptical. If there are vertical changes, then those changes will happen at different heights (potentially) for each skin, to correlate to another wish elsewhere. Yet another wish was for the horizontal (plan) skins to have visibility control - so that sheathing/siding could be in the composite, but turned off for certain documents. That wish would then of course extend to the vertical skins, some of which one would want invisible at times. I guess I can't imagine a method of doing all of the horizontal and vertical options that would be as comprehensible as using layer management with the new and improved standard composites.

Saying that a display option for RCP would control the visibility of the higher levels of the composite requires some additional control over which levels in a multi level vertical composite...presumably a height value for the 'cut'. This might differe from story to story and so would need to be memorized as part of views. This just illustrates that a change such as this could percolate all through the user interface in ways that could make it more complex while not necessarily giving any more power than stacking normal composites.

The answer to Oreopoulos about why I prefer to model the way I build - with each stacked wall component separate - is that layer management allows control over the display of each level that has so far been satisfactory to me. Windows and doors has been my only complaint to date in practice. (Also, separate walls allow the contruction simulation tool to do its thing properly - not that I've ever used it or wanted to.)

I'm still completely open! I just still don't see that it would buy me any increased productivity yet. But the weather's gloomy here today and it's rubbing off on me. 😉

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Geoff Briggs
Mentor
This is a good one. Wether you prefer to stack walls or create a vertical composite certain other wall related things need improvement as well:
Walls must show on multiple stories-for high walls
Walls need separate plan and section attributes-for low walls
Openings must cut across wall joints-both horizontal and vertical
Walls should be capable of linking to other walls-move one and the other moves too

I think there's been at least one poll for each of these but they really all need to happen to achieve the control folks are talking about in this thread.

As for the immediate debate, I'm leaning to ward Karl's point of view but am open to suggestion.
Regards,
Geoff Briggs
I & I Design, Seattle, USA
AC7-27, M1 Mac, OS 14.x
Anonymous
Not applicable
Ok Karl, my English is limited; I'll try with an example
Let's say we have in a corner of 1st floor a U stair with a stage. From the stage level, a door to live out of the room and under it, a trap door to access to whatever technical space under the stair stage. Below the stair, a concrete half story wall and on top of the stair a brick wall to complete. A very banal situation right? And no composite wall in thickness (to make it simple).
Actually, as far as my knowledge is of AC, you can only create an extra layer to hide one of the 2 walls superimposed or create a story for the stage level.
Imagine a vertical composite.
In one step you can
- draw both concrete and brick wall
- create the trap in the low concrete part
- create the door in the top
- give a cut style (thick pen and hatching) in whatever level (below or under the stage) you decide
- give an hidden style to the other part
- get a clean section or elevation without creating a new combination of layers
I could give 10 similar example, especially with local half story (I admit some time you have to create an extra story) and facade walls. Most annoying is the style of apertures and style of viewed or hidden (not cut) part of walls
Actually, we put the 3d hidden or base walls in extra layers for 3d and sections/elevations and we redraw 2d to complete the plan.
Our major concern is to control cut/ hide/ viewed style of the plan representation of walls
But we keep on recognize that stories process is the best for 90 % of the job. Problem is to loose in the 10% all the benefit of what works fine for 90%. Never happened to you ? Happy are you
Anonymous
Not applicable
to all of you
You are to fast for me especially on Saturday
Geoff Briggs
Mentor
One thing Philippe touched upon that needs to be considered, especially in the (presumed future) case of walls showing on multiple stories, is having the plan view change depending on elevation. Two example come to mind:

A wall that starts on one story and ends as a low wall on the story above.
A wall that "shows through" like showing a wall outline on a roof plan.

Both require a composite on the lower story and a grayed or dashed outline on the story above. And in both cases it would be advantageous to model and maintain a single wall as opposed to the current practice of re-drafting the wall on the story above.

How would you handle this? On a per wall basis, via display options, or maybe with some improvements to the ghost story?
Regards,
Geoff Briggs
I & I Design, Seattle, USA
AC7-27, M1 Mac, OS 14.x
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Philippe wrote:
In one step you can
- draw both concrete and brick wall
- create the trap in the low concrete part
- create the door in the top
- give a cut style (thick pen and hatching) in whatever level (below or under the stage) you decide
- give an hidden style to the other part
- get a clean section or elevation without creating a new combination of layers
Thanks for giving the example, Philippe. Yes, I've modeled the same kind of thing many times ... with u-stairs and landings and half walls all over the place because of split-level designs. Agree, it is anguishing and it would be great to make it easier.

I don't see how what you suggest above becomes 'one step' ... in my mind, I see pretty much the same number of mouse clicks ... just that some of them will involve defining and managing these new 'cut' styles (the wish of quite a few posts in the past) and vertical composites.

It sounds to me like vertical composites may not be needed for what you're asking for, but rather that old wish of being able to specify at what level on a story a 'cut' happens to generate the floor plan?

Thanks,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
Karl, I am not very used of forums. How do you paste "Mr. X wrote"?
About the old wish, AFAIK (thanks Ben), the very basic concept of AC is 2.5d, means to me that plan representation is linked but not issued from 3d, so (like 2d works with object), cut level does not really means something for the 2d drawing. Links are more and more sophisticate, you can call it 2.99d, it is not a modeling tool. Telling GS to generate real 3d cut plans is probably like telling them "forget AC, make something like ARC+ or Allplan, but with AC flexibility, you clear up!" A choice...GS will answer better than I.
I have a much more modest (2.5) wish; give us several plan representation for a wall.
About my "one step", I do not talk about mouse click (anyway, spend more time thinking how to draw than to really click) but about my own practice of methodology, opposite to this kind of: "ok let's add a new layer for the wall I must mask – don't forget to modify the print section layers combination – redraw the hidden wall in 2d layer with an hidden style ". The tendency to multiply layers and layer combination to solve poor plan and/or section representation of the 3d building is the main (in our practice) bad reason that rush our colleagues into the 2d.
I think much better to keep the 2.5d philosophy, get an accurate plan representation that preserves the 3d. This is what I call one step even if it takes as much mouse click as to set up new layers and layer combinations.