I didn't want to talk this to death. What I like about alignment charts is they are assertive rather than argumentative. You have to just look at them and work out the relationships among the things, and ask yourself if your impressions of the things agree with the author's. I made this by instinct. The strongest notion I had
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With an assist from Brian Spears and Link Ellis, I figured out that one of my wishes for the mesh tool is already solved. So I thought I would take the opportunity to revise this overview of the tool. The most prominent use for the mesh is site modeling. I cover that in more detail in another post, but you
Some are redundant. I will probably think of more. • Use the 'Working Dims Plan' Layer combination. • Option+click on existing strings to maintain witness line justification as you move in. • To add one string's ticks to another, select the string to keep and Cmd+click on the string with the points to add. • Use the arbitrary angle setting
Zones are information elements. They represent rooms and other definable areas and volumes in the project. You don't need them to build a good model, and you don't need them to create good drawings. They make the project smarter by letting you treat a space as a thing, so you can keep track of information associated with rooms as opposed
The interior elevation tool is like a compound elevation tool geared towards presenting rooms rather than whole buildings. It creates a group of sub-viewpoints within a header viewpoint. The header viewpoint is a polygon, which is, in turn, generally associated with a room. Each edge of the polygon shows one wall of the room, in its own window. IEs can
You can think of polylines as 1) lines and arcs joined together in one element, or 2) Fill elements that don't need to be closed and have no hatch pattern. The benefit of polylines over lines and arcs isn't really in the initial placement, it's in editing going forward. The polyline can be selected and manipulated as one element. You
Hotspots do two things: 1. Placing a detectable point where there isn't one. 2. Making a point detectable in PlotMaker, for the purpose of aligning drawings to one another or to the layout. In practice, I use very few hotspots. I try only to use them where they will be permanent. A common example is a hotspot at the maximum
"Labels are text blocks or symbols optionally linked to construction elements and 2D fills. Labels allow you to identify or comment elements or parts of your design." That's from the Archicad 9 Ref Guide page 343, and it's pretty succinct so I'll keep it. Here's more: "You can use labels in two ways: • Independent labels manually placed using the
Text editing in AC9 is completely overhauled, one of the few features that is. Different. The changes to the text tool are too great for me to cover here. Generally, it is more like editing in Word. All of the typical variations in text are available, and the shortcuts for bold (Cmd+B), etc., work as they should. You can mix
What it does: • Limits the area for a Find & Select. • Limits the area for a Select All, or a tool-specific Select All. • Limits the model displayed in the 3D window. • Marquee-stretches. Elements wholly within are dragged, elements partly within are stretched. Groups off! • Limits the elements to save as a module. With heavy marquee,
As a companion to the detail window post, an overview of the detail tool.
Let's review what the Arrow Tool does-- it might be more than you think, especially in AC8. Remember: The right arrow key toggles between the arrow tool and the previous tool. In AC8, sometimes it doesn't work. Try it anyway. Update, in AC10, our single-key shortcut for the Arrow tool is '1'.