Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

Fast Way of Drawing Walls in a House?

Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi There,
What would be the fastest method to draw walls in Archicad 13 for a domestic house?

Do you think Archicad could do it allot faster?

What is your opinion?

Thanks,

Manuel Trantalis Home Designs.

22 REPLIES 22
alemanda
Advocate
Sorry ... What do you mean? What does it mean "to draw wall in archicad"?
AC 19 and AC21 latest hotfix
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Anonymous
Not applicable
mthd wrote:
Hi There,
What would be the fastest method to draw walls in Archicad 13 for a domestic house?

Do you think Archicad could do it allot faster?

What is your opinion?

Thanks,

Manuel Trantalis Home Designs.


CLick on wall tool,select size,draw your wall
Dwight
Newcomer
That's an interesting question because it relates to design methodology.

I prefer to not draw walls at all in Archicad, but to use the magic wand to surround the perimeter of assembled fills, zones or slabs responding to room planning/building masses.

Another approach is to magic wand various independent room slabs/zones/fills, push the assemblies around and together to get good massing and then split and convert exterior wall types to interior partitions.

Whenever you can find a way to use the magic wand, your work is faster.
Dwight Atkinson
Brad Elliott
Booster
Dwight wrote:
Whenever you can find a way to use the magic wand, your work is faster.
I find that to be a universal truth.
Mac OS12.6 AC26 USA Silicon
M1 Macbook Pro
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thanks Dwight,
I have tried the magic wand method and it is nice to know that others use this method.

I will try using this method of surrounding a zone as you can use the zone stamps as a house room planner as well.

It would be good if you could some how click the edge of a zone stamp and tell it that it is and external wall edge to be wrapped here.
Then the edge of the zone may go thick or dotted to indicate an external wall. If the magic wand could determine your internal wall first preference
and you first external wall preference. Then it could all be more automated and faster.

What do you think?
Dwight
Newcomer
i don't agree with that approach at all since the way zones interact as rooms means that premature determination of precise wall type slows the process down. How often would an entire zone edge be a single wall type - many zones share would share wall types along one edge.

Since most projects fall into two basic wall types [at the preliminary stage, anyways], you can easily establish the exception [internal] individually.

OR:

make all the walls internal type and merely convert the perimeter walls to external.
Dwight Atkinson
Anonymous
Not applicable
Dwight,
OK covert wall type is fine.

Going back to direct wall drawing, some other programs seem to be
faster with their click and drag auto snap approach and the adjust wall
or room size by clicking an interactive dimension to resize the room.
Shooting walls out to meet others is a bit slow for me.

Particularly with drawing houses since you need to make lots of room
adjustments when the client changes the plan.

I almost feel like reverting back to a cheaper program just to set the walls in position then import that into AC to finish it off.

Do you have any suggestions as to how it can be done even faster in AC with maybe using the right hand only on the mouse and the left hand only imputing dimensions?

Or some other ingenious faster method that could be developed for AC14
Dwight
Newcomer
Are you aware of the marquee tool?

And as to the covert wall type… they only use that at the CIA building in Washington DC
Dwight Atkinson
Haneef Tayob
Booster
I often use the drag a copy feature to get walls (mainly internal walls) in the position I want them.
Haneef Tayob
Aziz Tayob Architects
AC23 INT rel 3003, OS X 10.14.6 iMac 3.3ghz i5 dual monitor, 24GB RAM