Architect Special Interest Group April 2020

In this session, we demonstrated how to discover what the elevation is of any point on your site model, how to handle using a wall style with a framing component and using trusses, making cladding lines line up by using the Use World Z for Origin fix, creating exterior wall panels by using extrusions, getting tags to work with walls and to say what you want, reporting tag data, and working with record formats.

Topics Covered:

• 00:11    Even if you have your site contours, have your building design, and know that you want the southeast corner of your building to sit between two contour lines, it can still be a challenge to determine what elevation that is. We showed how to use the Stake tool with the Set Elevation to Site Model setting to discover the elevation of any point on your site model. We added this to Story 1 and asked Vectorworks to as well move all of the stories above it. I like to put my site modifiers in my floor or foundation—so that if my building elevation changes, the site modifier automatically moves with it. This method can make you more productive and keep you from making mistakes.
• 13:52    Someone had the challenge of using trusses with an exterior wall, so they wanted most of the components in the wall to extend to the roof, but not the framing component. The way to handle this is to turn off the Follow the Wall Peak setting in the wall style for any component that you don’t want to extend up to the roof. The cladding lines weren’t lining up at the corners, but we changed the walls’ Render options to the Use World Z for Origin setting and that usually fixed it. We reviewed how to get cladding lines to line up with windows by creating extrusions that we then used as cladding panels.
• 25:43    We had the challenge that we wanted to add tags to our walls in a drawing, but the Data Tag tool wasn’t finding any “eligible objects” for the wall tag, even when we passed right over our walls with the tool. For one thing, the Data Tag tool found the walls after we moved them to a new file—something was corrupted in the old one. But we also had to go into the wall style and add something to the Mark and Description fields under the Data tab—certain tags would show this data when attached to the wall in the drawing. We could also change what was shown in the tags by going into the Edit Tag Data dialogue box. In a viewport, we could duplicate the same tag but type different data—for example, various insulation values—into the various tags without having them mess each other up.
• 40:15    Next, we experimented to see if a report could find the notes that we added to the wall tag—we couldn’t find how to do it, although we could make it report the wall style name and other. It can be a real challenge to find what things are called in order to make them report properly! Is it the DataTagField or an IFC-something-tag or something else entirely? This can’t always be done quickly. Remember that you can always add a record format, which you can easily direct a report to find. We finished by reviewing how to work with record formats.

Architect April 2020

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