William Sutherland Architect

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Apply 2D lines to Door Symbols...

This came out of a general discussion on using the Smart Symbol Designer - you can do a lot more with it than you realise but it takes a lot of effort initially to understand what buttons do what... Here we discovered how to apply a 2D symbol saved earlier to the face of a door. It seems to be applied to the Opening face only as 3D lines - but back to front(!) and is stretched to fit the door frame - here I saved a symbol with a construction line outline. The 3D lines now show up in elevations etc but are in fact in line with the door frame plane and not the doorleaf - although I doubt you would notice. Once you create your doorleaf, click on the 'get from folder' button... The view in the animation window - left clicking the door direction when placing the symbol would probably change the side which receives the lines but it would need trial and error to work it out. Remember also that 3D lines do not show up in fully Raytraced renders. Once symbol retrieved from library folder it appears in the display - but if you compare how it is shown here and how it displays on the opening side of the door you will see that the handle is on the wrong side...

Rabbet applied to multi-layer wall...

Allplan 2004 includes a rabbet tool for multiple wall layers. [pre Allplan 2004] This is something I have been trying to do for months - apply a tapered splay to the reveals of a window in a 4 layer wall. The new Building Regulations in England have made life a bit easier here as the cavity will have to go up to 100mm wide (not quite sure what we are going to do with the DPC though!) Create the window as normal, in my 4 layer wall the outer layer is a 225 mm rubble stone facing purely for appearance. I then draw a 2D diagram (as shown) to measure the width of the splay at the inner face of the cavity and then the inner face of the wall. use the 'rabbet' tool first on the cavity layer but set the internal reveal depth in the tool properties to the cavity thickness - here 100mm and the splay width to the value measured on the 2D diagram - here it works out at 57mm. Note that you need to click towards the inner face of the layer in order for the splay to angle the correct way. Click on rabbet properties again and then set the values for the internal wall layer - here they are 200mm for the internal reveal depth and 114mm for the splay width. Applying these to inside the line of the inner wall layer will make the splay or rabbet line up with that of the cavity layer. Note the cill line does not meet the rabbets - this was fixed in v2003 I think.

Text in non-standard pen colors...

The only method of obtaining coloured true type fonts seems to be to assign a pen colour to the text (using Modify format). I use pen 15 (I think more pens will be available in v17) and then set the output colour in the 'Plot Layout->Setting->Pen and Color assignments...' dialog. However, if you want a non-standard colour you can enter RGB values in the boxes next to the output colour (see left)... and if you want to know how to find the RGB values of a colour you want to copy....well, if you can open the document containing the colour you want to copy in a package, just to get it onscreen, you can then use the 'eye-dropper' tool in a bitmap editing package like Macromedia Fireworks or similar to pick the colour off the screen - and even though the 'eye-dropper' may disappear when outside its own application this usually works. From within Fireworks or other package it is normally possible to examine the details of the colour in RGB format (among others).

Colour chart location...

If you want to check the standard Nemetschek colour range on screen against the plotted output there is a handy chart (from the webboard this one). Open ProjectPilot and Right click on Path to External Buffer and navigate to \\Nem\Allplan\New (this is the \Nem on the programme files partition rather than the \Nem on the data partition). In the 'Drawings' folder there are a list of interesting files. The colour chart is No 25 on my system. Copy it into a spare drawing file, exit from project pilot, open the drawing file and then the layout editor and bring it in and plot it in the normal way. Click the chart for a larger version (32Kb)

Get projection from animation...

Another use for 'From animation' option (circled) - click the little 3D view icon at the top of the window after setting up the animation window so as to be visible alongside the isometric. For when the standard isometric view does not let you get the view you want to manipulate elements. By keeping the animation view handy you can use it as a positioning guide and then click and then 'From animation'. If the animation window is slowing down operations just use 'Tools->Options->Animation' to set it to wireframe view (yes, I know it would be nice to combine both views! :)

Rotate 3D objects to match angle...

As we all know, the Rotate tool has an option to point at a reference line and direction line after the elements and origin are selected (it allows you to align one element with another). However this does not work with 3D objects. It works with lines and Archit. elements only. In plan view, if you try to use it with a 3D object when you point at a reference line, when prompted by Allplan, the selected object goes into 'free rotation'. (Archit. elements only do this if you click a point here) One way around this is to use the Measure tool when Allplan asks, 'click reference line or enter a rotation angle' Measure the angle between an edge of the 3D object and the element you wish to align it with and when the value appears in a little box, click the 'A=xxx ' value which activates the rotation (measure the angle in the direction of the rotation).However you cannot align two 3D objects this way (nor an Archit. element or line to a 3D object) - the measure command gives an error message 'Lines are slanting'... well, not always!.. sometimes it does and sometimes it does not - for those times when it does... Unless someone knows of a better way, in this situation I just draw a construction line along an edge of the 3D object for Allplan to 'see' and then either method works. I also notice that the 'Angle' value remains in the command line and can be reused later. It gets more interesting if you use the 3D option in Rotate (or just use 'Rotate 3D elements' in the 3D modelling module - seems to be the same tool) to rotate 3D objects in the elevation and isometric view when the measure tool returns 3 values you can use 'A2D, W3D and DHA' - but I have not really worked out how to implement these - nor the 'rotate 3D entities' tool despite the diagram in the Help file.

Arched window in gable...

This is an 'old chestnut' but it still catches me out... :) In a gable wall controlled by planes Allplan will object if you try to insert an arched opening crossing the plane boundary as arched openings have to be wholly contained within a plane - and gables are actually 2 planes meeting on a line under the junction of the roof slopes. The answer, (I looked it up in the webboard archive) is very simple once you know - just set BOTH top and bottom levels of the opening to absolute levels - i.e. use the icons 3rd from the left in the Setup dialog - the triangle shaped ones.

Copy & Paste...

Here is a neat trick - on work to existing buildings I like to mark alterations to construction in red and put the new elements on a separate drawing file. However this means that copying any items from the existing construction in the 'edit' mode drawing file leaves them in the original drawing file. Instead use the Copy to Clipboard tool - Click on the element or draw a selection box around the elements you want (here I have copied the door from top right to the new wall at bottom left), click on Copy to Clipboard and then on Paste from Clipboard -notice that you are now offered the Dynamic Toolbar and you can use the '+' and '-' keys to rotate the elements to be pasted. When pasted the elements copied are now in the active drawing file and thus will interact with the Archit. elements (here drawn in red).

Join Wall with Line - by Layer...

The Join Wall to Line tool comes with a dynamic toolbar (pictured) with the option 'By Layer' when dealing with multi-layer walls which when clicked allows you to selectively trim construction layers to lines. Incredibly useful... (I wish I had noticed this months ago!) The strange thing is that the dynamic toolbar does not appear* until after you have pointed at the line and trimmed the wall(!) The 'By Layer' option works similarly with Join Walls as well. Update 05.02.02  *We think this may be a bug - the 'By Layer' dynamic toolbar appears correctly when the command is invoked from the relevant toolbar, it is only when accessed from the right-click shortcut menu that the dynamic toolbar does not appear first - in fact if you look carefully it does appear for a fraction of a second and then disappears until you have first used the command whereupon it reappears correctly for the next use.

Text orientation settings...

A recent discussion on the webboard reveals that this option highlighted below is what controls the clever way Allplan flips text to be readable even if you rotate or mirror it. Uncheck the option to leave the text upside down or mirrored. The option is available from 'Tools->Options->Text' The other options are also useful and fairly self-explanatory. I like the 'Add angle to system angle' option as this allows text to be input at an angle without having to set it in the text editor - just by using the 'System Angle' tool I have never quite got the hang of the 'Auto-select pen...' option - I prefer to choose my own pens and for TT fonts I don't think it makes any difference.

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