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
Haneef Tayob
Booster
mthd wrote:
Dwight,

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.
I know someone who used to draw up the plans in another program then import them into archicad and then retrace everything. Then again he did not even know about plotmaker and used to place a sheet over each of his plans in the project map. That was in AC5.


As a (power) user of a few other cad programs before I migrated to ArchiCad I can understand that you might find it slower as you are used to other ways of doing things. My suggestion is to get used to the various ways of inputting sizes, coordinates, grids, guidelines, magic wand, etc.
It's definitely not to your advantage to do as you suggested.
Haneef Tayob
Aziz Tayob Architects
AC23 INT rel 3003, OS X 10.14.6 iMac 3.3ghz i5 dual monitor, 24GB RAM
Anonymous
Not applicable
Dwight wrote:
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
The real covert wall types are for buildings that have never been seen housing agencies no one has heard of.
Dwight
Newcomer
Or in hospitals where they do the covert operations.
Dwight Atkinson
Anonymous
Not applicable
mthd wrote:
Or some other ingenious faster method that could be developed for AC14
Very fast and ingenious methods already exist in ArchiCAD.

Guidelines and numeric entry are nearly instantaneous. Locks and constraints allow precise snapping to anything very quickly. Set Extend, Split and INtersect to single key shortcuts for really fast operations.

Sure some other programs' features are marginally quicker in some circumstances, but ArchiCAD is much more flexible and adaptable to differing needs and practices. In my experience ArchiCAD rewards expertise more than any other BIM tool I have seen.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Dwight, I found your comment about using massing to build in archicad very interesting. Because Im not very confident with using the magic wand tool to draw walls around zones etc it has not occured to me to use this method, but I would very much like to try/explore this idea myself.

I feel a short article explaining this approach would be very much appreciated by many people using Archicad, submitted to either the Archiwiki or something like AECBytes for example.

Any chance Dwight? or anyone else who uses this method ???
please!

Lisa
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Hi Lisa,

This is just standard magic-wand stuff. I'm not sure that the Wiki can have an article on every tool / procedure that is part of very basic training. But, of course, if someone wants to write it up, wonderful. 😉

Be brave and experiment. There is always undo. 😉

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Dwight
Newcomer
All you need to know is that the magic wand has 2 behaviours:


Click the magic wand in the middle of a shape - get the shape with all
possible interfering trims.


Click the magic wand on the edge of a shape - get the shape.
wanding.jpg
Dwight Atkinson
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thanks for the tip Dwight,
Overlapping shapes representing the rooms and using the wand in the middle of the shape or on the edge of the shape can produce walls in the required places right?

I am aware of the marquee tool but I dont use it anywhere near to its potential.

So what else am I missing here ?
Anonymous
Not applicable
Dwight wrote:
All you need to know is that the magic wand has 2 behaviours:


Click the magic wand in the middle of a shape - get the shape with all
possible interfering trims.


Click the magic wand on the edge of a shape - get the shape.

I cant get nothing if i click in the middle of zone ...
Region not found around this object - this is mes.that i get

it works with slabs.fills etc but with zone - not . . . why is that ?
Erika Epstein
Booster
Matthew wrote:
Set Extend...to single key shortcuts for really fast operations.
Extend?
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"