Interactive Workshops January 2015 (1501) – Stories, Layers, and Levels

Cover ImageThese sessions followed the online manual and covered the topic of Stories, Layers and Levels. Design layers have been around for a long time, stories have been around for a few years, but levels are new to Vectorworks 2015. The purpose of these sessions was to cover the topics in the manual and make sure that the attendees understand the concepts. 
The first session covered the concepts of design layers and classes, but the other sessions did not. Design layers and classes have been covered many times before, so for the other sessions I didn’t think we needed to cover these concepts again.
Levels and Stories are not used to help create the drawings – they are used in building projects to control elevation of components. So where the layer might be the foundations, the levels might control the bottom of the footing, the top of the footing, the underside of the slab or even the bottom of the cladding. Accurate control of these levels will dramatically improve your Building Information Modeling (BIM) with Vectorworks.
While design layers are like containers (they store all the information related to layer), classes are an attribute (assigned to an object to control graphic style or visibility), levels and stories are used to control the 3D location of the building elements.
Session 1 (January 12th 2015 pm)
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[FMP]https://s3.amazonaws.com/vectorworkout/SST_Sessions/SST_1501_Session_1.mp4[/FMP]
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Session 2 (January 14th 2015 am)
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[FMP]https://s3.amazonaws.com/vectorworkout/SST_Sessions/SST_1501_Session_2.mp4[/FMP]
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Session 3 (January 14th 2015 pm)
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[FMP]https://s3.amazonaws.com/vectorworkout/SST_Sessions/SST_1501_Session_3.mp4[/FMP]
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Session 4 (January 16th 2015 pm)
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[FMP]https://s3.amazonaws.com/vectorworkout/SST_Sessions/SST_1501_Session_4.mp4[/FMP]
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Comments

  1. Jonathan,
    Hi, in your video the discussion regarding the levels.
    I think the Datum Level that he was talking about is set in the Storey Elevation. RL12660 (He said)
    The storey levels in the storey are relative to parts of the building.
    When you set the building RL12660 and you set your site model you set the RL’s in your site to the data RL the surveyor provides that way all your building and site is set to real survey levels.
    You can design your building and still move it up and down by adjusting the storey elevation.
    This sets all your building and site model all in world co-ordinates.

  2. Hello there,
    Thank you for the interactive workshops. Kindly show me how to delete an entire story?
    I have tried by going to the organisation dialog box, clicking on the stories tab, selecting my story to delete then clicking the delete button. However, my story name does not update and my corresponding design layers do not update. My Story elevation do not update as well. So I am left with a gap in the numbers.
    Please can anyone help? Thank you.

    1. if you delete an entire story, Vectorworks will not re-arrange the remaining stories for you. What you have to do is edit the name and suffix for the remaining stories. Don’t forget that you also have to edit the height of the first story above the one you deleted, and let Vectorworks change the elevations of all the remaining stories for you.

  3. Many thanks for that information Jonathan. We sincerely appreciate the interactive workshops and videos that are provided by archoncad.com.

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