GRAPHICS PROCESSES
What tools did I use?
To draw the slab, I used the slab tool and made sure It was on the setting where I was drawing it point by point.
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How did I draw it?
To draw the slab I first clicked and started dragging the slab outline and punching in the dimensions of each side to the length I wanted it to be and made sure the angle was 90 degrees then clicked enter. Then I would drag it in the next direction and repeat until I had returned to the starting position and completed the slab. To make the slabs for the second and third floors, I just copied the slab I had made then pasted it. I then went into the slab selection settings and changed each slab to be linked to a different story and played around with the height of each until it was right.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The trouble I encountered with this was that if you messed up one side of the slab, you had to start the whole slab again. This got frustrating because my lodge was a weird shape and I wanted the whole lodge in one slab so it took a lot of tries to get all of the measurements and angles right in one go. A couple of times, I had almost finished and the slab was nearly joined up and I clicked to put an edge in place, without checking it was on a 90 degree angle and had to restart the whole thing.
What tools did I use?
To draw the walls of my house, I used the wall tool.
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How did I draw it?
The walls were pretty simple to draw, I just clicked where I wanted a wall to start, dragged it into the direction I wanted, then punched in the length and made sure it was on a 90 degree angle then pressed enter and it made a wall. To make sure It joined up with the next story I either changed the height of the wall in the settings or I went to 3D and dragged the corner of the wall up to the next floor. I then changed the wall material to be made of wood logs in the wall selection settings.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The issues I had with creating the walls were the heights and elevations and making sure each wall joined up to the next story and it was even with no slabs comin outside of the walls.
What tools did I use?
To create doors, I used the door tool and to create windows I used the window tool.
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How did I draw it?
To create the doors and windows, I first of all browsed the collection to find a door/window that I wanted, then I hovered over an existing wall where I wanted the door/window to be and clicked to put it in place. To make the large back windows, I dragged the windows to the size I wanted while in 3D mode.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The trouble I faced with the windows was getting them to be the right size and in the right position in the wall, especially the large windows at the back. There was no trouble encountered with the doors as they were easy to select and place in the right position. Also, I couldn't add doors and windows to the rooftop level in the 2D view, only in 3D. I don't know why this happens, I think it might be because I had a very large slab for the rooftop so I could fit my pools up there. It is annoying because it means the doors and windows don’t show up in the plans.
What tools did I use?
To create the void, I used the slab tool.
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How did I draw it?
To create the void, I first used the Guide lines to mark out where I wanted my void to go. Then I selected the slab, then selected the slab tool. I then clicked a rectangle using all four corners of my guide line box and because I had already selected my slab, this took away that section of slab so I was left with a hole in the shape of a rectangle, my void.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The only trouble with the void was making sure the voids for each floor were in line with each other. I did this by eventually drawing guide lines in 2D to outline my void. The guide lines stayed when I changed the floor that I was viewing, so I could get all of my voids to be even.
What tools did I use?
To draw the mountain for my house, I used the mesh tool and the spline tool.
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How did I draw it?
First, using the mesh tool, I drew the outline by clicking and dragging then punching in the dimensions in. Then, using the spline tool, I made curved lines and circles inside each other and changed all the elevations to create a mountain with a peak.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The challenge/trouble with this was getting the elevations right to create the right slope for the mountain. I had to play around with the elevation numbers a lot and keep fixing them up. I also had to re create the mountain a couple of times as the first time it stuffed up and there was no way to fix it so I had to start again. Another time I had to redo it was because I had created the mountain mesh in a separate project in ARCHICAD to the ski lodge, after I had done most of the ski lodge already and couldn't copy the lodge across or merge the projects so I had to redo the mesh again in the same project as the ski lodge. The trouble with this was that the ski lodge disappeared into the middle of the mountain and I had to play with the elevations to fix it.
What tools did I use?
To add all the interiors, I used the Objects tool.
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How did I draw it?
To add the interiors into my lodge, I selected the object tool then clicked on the object selection settings. From there I could search the range of objects in the ARCHICAD library using the search bar to find the object I needed. Once I had selected an object, I clicked where I wanted to place it and adjusted it using the rotation and reflection tools.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
I had no issues with creating the interiors as they were very simple to add.
What tools did I use?
To create the pools, I used the slab tool and the object tool.
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How did I draw it?
To draw the pools and spas, I searched in the objects library for a pool, then I placed them on the rooftop and adjusted it to where I wanted them.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The trouble I encountered was that where the pools were, there needed to be no slab, or at least a hole in the slab for the pool to go in, otherwise the slab would overlap the pool. This wasn't much of a problem for the large rectangle pools, as I just created a separate slab for where they were built and made it a lot thinner, so the second story still had a ceiling. But this was a lot harder for the spas as they were a much weirder shape than the pools and it was a very hard shape to cut out of the slab.
Another thing that I had trouble with was after the pools were built, making the walls of the second story all higher so they joined up with the top of the pools. This was difficult because it was hard to get the pools to be the perfect size to join up with the walls as the node that you drag to change the size in 2D was not on the outside of the object.
What tools did I use?
To draw the stairs, I used the stair tool and the slab tool. To draw the railings, I used the railing tool.
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How did I draw it?
To create the stairs, I first selected the stair tool then as I clicked where I wanted to start creating the stairs, a box of functions pooped up. I then clicked the function 'Arc with defined tangent' to make my stairs curved. To make an identical but reflected staircase on the opposite side, I just copied the staircase I had already made and pasted it back into my drawing, then I moved it to where I wanted and used the 'mirror' tool to reflect it. To create the landing I created a slab and elevated it to the right height.
To create the railings, I selected the railing tool and outlined my stairs and void.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
There was a lot of trouble with creating the stairs as they were very difficult to make. I would have created my stairs over 30 times to get them right.
The first trouble I had was figuring out how to make them curve, then I realized about the Arc functions.
Once I had finished the first layout of stairs that I made, I decided that they didn't look right and I deleted them to start again, changing the layout completely.
I couldn't work out how to create the landing and attempted many different ways to make it. I tried to continue one of the curved staircases with a landing then somehow attach it by 'connecting' it to the second curved staircase but that didn’t work. Then I tried to continue the stair into a landing as before, but then keep continuing the same staircase into the second curved bit. The problem with this was that the second staircase went up from the landing instead of going back down and I couldn't change it.
Eventually, I asked Mr Brigham about it and he gave me the idea to create the landing from the slab tool instead of the landing tool. This made it a lot easier and I managed to complete my stairs only with a few more minor troubles like fitting the stairs perfectly between the edge of the landing and the ground floor while leaving enough space to walk around the bottom of them which involved making the 'treads' the right width.
What tools did I use?
There were a few sections on the rooftop where I used the roof tool.
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How did I draw it?
To add the roof I traced the outline of each section where I wanted the roof to go with the roof tool, then I dragged the nodes in 3D to adjust the elevation and make the roof join up with the top of the walls.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
There were no issues with creating the roof.
What tools did I use?
To create the driveway, I used the slab tool.
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How did I draw it?
To draw the driveway, I created a slab and used the 'Arc by centerpoint' to create the roundabout part.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The trouble I had with the driveway was that when I drew it in 2D, I was on the first floor so in 3D, the driveways elevation was in line with the first floor. Also, the roundabout part took a few goes to complete as I kept having to delete it and try again.
What tools did I use?
To create the lights, I used the lamp tool.
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How did I draw it?
The lights were quite simple to create, I just chose the light I wanted in the lamp tool settings then placed them around my lodge.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The only issue I had with the lights was the elevations of them, I had to select the lamp tool, then press Ctrl A, selecting all of them, and change the elevation to the height of my ceiling.
Evaluation: The plans were very frustrating and are the part that I find the hardest and most annoying out of the whole project. The most frustrating thing is that I didn't realize I should have been saving each individual plan as a PDF, as I created them so it caused a lot of unnecessary stress and work as I had to redo most of the plans to download them. Below are all of the plans I created in the order that I created them, describing the processes I took to create each plan and the trouble I had with them.
How did I draw it?
To Edit the title block, I had to edit it in the Master Layouts. This meant that whatever information I added to the titleblock, it would all appear in every single layout. To Edit, I right clicked on the master layout title block and clicked 'open in source view', there I could click on any of the text boxes with a # on them, meaning they were the ones that were meant to be edited, then I would type. I edited both the landscape and the portrait A3 title blocks as I used them both for different plans.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
The only trouble was that the first time I tried to edit the titleblock, I wasn’t able to click on the text boxes and wasn’t able to edit it. This was fixed by saving my work and reopening ARCHICAD.
How did I draw it?
I edited my elevations in the View Map section in ARCHICAD. Editing these involved firstly, opening the Elevation settings and into Model Display, then changing the 'fill uncut surfaces with' function to 'Uniform Pen color', changing my elevation plan to black and white which complies with the Australian standards. The I continued editing by labelling the windows and doors and the exterior materials using the label tool, labelling the roof dimensions using the angle dimension tool. The story level heights were already there for me but it didn’t show the roof height so I had to add that in using the line tool and text. I created two new layouts and dragged the drawings across into them. Elevation 1 and 2 on the first layout and 3 and 4 on the second one.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
To label the windows, It was as simple as clicking on each windows, but when I did, a lot of unwanted information was labelled and I had to go into the label Selection Settings to change what information is shown in the label and make sure it only showed the ID, then I had to delete the word ID in the settings as I didn't want it to show on the elevations.
The story level heights were already there for me but it didn’t show the roof height as my Roof was part of my Rooftop story. I needed to go into the Story Selection settings and create a new story for the roof that was the same height as the Rooftop, this only made the story level for the Roof appear over top of the Rooftop one. I kept the Roof story as it would help my floorplans as well but I hid it so the level would not appear in the elevation and added the story level for the roof in manually.
Also, when I started the elevations, the side elevations were section and showed the rooms inside the house. I ended up dragging the elevation marker in the 2D view to out past the side walls, on the outside of the lodge.
Another problem I faced was that I didn’t save it as soon as I created it, this caused a lot of problems. When creating my floorplan, I deleted some of the windows on the Rooftop level so I could remake them as they weren't showing up in my floorplan, then after they continued not to appear in the plan, I left them unmade. I went back into my elevation plan only to find some of the windows gone, so I remade them (which is something I could only do in the 3D plan as I couldn't add doors or windows to the Rooftop in 2D) and labelled them again.
The most annoying thing with the elevations is that I got them perfect but I didn’t realize I should be downloading the plans as I go so I left them unsaved and continued on my other plans and by the time I saved it, the other plans had messed it up and I had to pretty much redo them and the fonts and sizes didn't go how I wanted it to. I eventually decided that since I know exactly how to create them now, I know what to include and how to easily find it, I may as well just recreate the whole elevation plan from scratch because I am a perfectionist when it comes to fonts and I like to have everything equal.
How did I draw it?
To create the shadow diagram I created a new Layout with a Landscape titleblock and dragged across all six shadow diagrams from the View Map plans, making them small enough to all fit on one page and all evenly spaced.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
I wanted my north arrow to point towards the right in this project but whenever I adjusted the project's north, my shadow diagrams wouldn't change. I eventually just decided to keep north pointing up for this project.
How did I draw it?
I created my floorplan by editing the Architecture Plans found in the View Map section. To edit these, I added dimensions using the dimension tool to click on each wall I wanted dimensioned, then I would right click, press OK and drag the dimension line out where I wanted it to go. I labelled all of the rooms and areas using the text Label. All of the windows and doors were already labelled with their dimensions on this plan. After editing, I dragged the floorplans over into my created layouts with portrait titleblocks and adjusted the scale.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
I started creating my floorplan with the sketch plans and I added all of my room names, dimensions and window IDs as it didn't show them. After realizing we were meant to create them from the Architecture Plans, I recreated them, renaming the rooms and as all the window and door labels are already there on an Architecture plan, I deleted all my window labels.
My floorplan is really only to display the Ground Floor and the First floor as the Rooftop plans do not show doors and windows and I have tried to fix it by creating another story for the roof and remaking the doors and windows but my entire ski lodge got messed up so I closed ARCHICAD without saving my changes which brought it all back to how it was.
After completing my whole floorplan, I created my Electrical and Plumbing Diagram without saving the floorplan first. This stuffed my floorplan up completely and all of the electrical annotations appeared in my floorplan. I tried to go into the layer setting and turn off certain layers but that didn't work. I tried deleting the electrical stuff from my Architecture plans but it also deleted it from my Ceiling Plans. I didn't know what to do because both plans took a lot of time to create, especially the Electrical and Plumbing. I ended up finding another version of my Ski Lodge in my computer's Recycle bin from before I started to create most of the plans. I restored this then recreated my floorplan on this document. I should have saved my floorplans as PDFs before I started my Electrical Plans but whenever I tried to save my plans, It saved the whole document.
How did I draw it?
To create the electrical and Plumbing Diagram I opened the ceiling plans from my View Map, which already showed all my lights as I had created them in the 2D view previously. I then selected the spline tool and connected all of the lights to where the switch would be on the wall. I placed in symbols using the objects tool, including light switches, power outlets, smoke detectors and also created a Hot Water box on each side of the lodge with the polyline tool and labelled it HW with a text box. From this box, I drew out red lines using the line tool that connect to all of the parts of the lodge that will need hot water, such as bathrooms, kitchen, spas, etc.
After editing the plans, I dragged each of them over into my newly created layouts and changed the scale to fit the page. I created a legend in the right corner of my page, copying across the symbols from the original plan and writing what they represent.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
There wasn't much trouble with this plan but it was very time consuming as I had to draw every electrical line connecting the lights with the spline tool and as it is a very big Ski Lodge, It has a lot of lights. I had to redo the hot water lines and the legend as it didn't save properly after I had added those things.
How did I draw it?
To create the Landscape plan, I got an image from the top view angle of the 3D view. I then put this into a new layout and annotated the image and wrote some notes describing the landscape of my ski lodge. I then decided to add two more pictures below showing the actual mountain.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
I had no trouble with this plan apart from knowing what information to put in the notes and what parts of the top view to annotate.
How did I draw it?
To create the site plan, I opened the Site Plan in the View map, then I deleted all of the walls as some of them showed up and some of them didn't. I just had the slab outlines which I then made black so they were easier to see. I dragged this across to my new layout and added annotations such as the road name and direction, driveway material, proposed residence, etc.
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Was there any trouble I encountered?
I created the site plan last, even though It was the plan I had already created to submit in the second checkpoint submission. It was the last plan I created because I had trouble with it before the last submission and didn't receive very good marks for it so I procrastinated creating it again.