Linking a Building to A Site Model

 
There can be a real challenge linking a building to a site. Site plans are normally drawn with North straight up the page, building plans are normally drawn so that they are orthogonal on the page which doesn’t match the orientation of the project on site.

Site plans are often drawn at a different scale to the floor plans – so if you do try to see the site plan together with the building, they do not line up and they are different sizes.

Then there’s the 3D elevation problem. You need to create site models with the correct elevation, otherwise they won’t work properly. But we tend to draw buildings with the story starting at zero.

This means that when you try to line up the house on the site and plan, they are still not coordinated in elevation.
There are two options that I have used. The first option is the one that I cover in my Vectorworks Architect course, and that is to use a Design Layer Viewport.
The concept of the design layer viewport is that allows you to link together layers from one part of the drawing onto the site plan. Because it’s a design layer viewport you can still use the object info pallet to choose what layers or classes are visible on your design layer viewport.[ms-protect-content id=”34491,34492,34493, 34494, 34495, 34496, 344927″]

The advantage of the design layer viewport is that allows you to move the the plan of the building to match the site. But more than that it also allows you to change the location of the house many many times to suit the site, the sun, shading, et cetera
in this image you can see the building placed on the site using a design layer viewport, then the building is relocated to suit the site, and then the laser edited to turn some parts of the building off.

These are the advantages of using a design layer viewport, you can change the location elevation and the look of your design layer viewport. If you have a project where the location of the building is not certain, the design layer viewport allows you a huge amount of flexibility to move things around.

The disadvantage of this technique is that a complex set of site modifiers can be difficult to locate. When you change the elevation of the building, you have to manually edit the site modifiers (because they can’t be drawn on the same layer as the walls). You could create another layer with the same scale as the site plan and use that to locate your site modifiers. That would make it easier to manipulate them.
The other alternative is to make sure that all of your design layers line up with each other.This image shows the same site as the previous one, but you will notice that the North arrow is now in a different location. The disadvantage of using the system is that you have two rotate your site to suit your house plan. This is not as flexible as using a design layer viewport and so the system is really recommended where there is a known location for the house (a renovation project for example). You can move the site and line it up of the house again if you have to, it’s just that it’s not as flexible as the design layer viewport.

 
One of the challenges with this system is that the site model may be set at a high elevation, but the building project might be set with a Z value of zero.

Now you have the challenge of what to do with the site model to get the site model to line up with the building. You don’t want to move the physical site model up and down because that will change the contours and any information that you want to extract from the site model. The solution is to change the layer elevation of the site model. For example, we might want our house to be 170 feet above sea level.

If we set the layer elevation of the site model layer to -170 feet that will line up the site with our building.

Download the File using Design Layer Viewport… (2016 file)
Download the File Where the Site Lines Up With Building Layers… (2016 file)
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