In this session, we looked at the function of stories and levels compared with design layers, as well as how to easily create elevations.
In this session, we looked at how to set up design layers and stories for a project with a complex building design.
In this session, we looked at three main topics. We looked at how to create a car park area that slopes in two directions, we looked at creating a building project that does not use stories, and we looked at how to control the graphics of wall components.
This is a new technique in Vectorworks 2017. You can use a level to control the insertion point of a symbol. In this example I have a symbol for a power outlet with a 3D component. If you create a level for this symbol, you can set the height of the symbol using the level. When you need to change the elevation of all the power outlet in that story, change the level elevation. All the power sockets on that story will update.
In this session we looked at what information should be stored in a tempalte file and what should be stored in Default Content.
Levels can be used to control the setting out of your slabs (the Z reference level). If you set this up carefully, it can be a very powerful setting to automatically control the height of your ceiling relative to the structural objects.
Vectorworks 2015 has the ability to tightly control the the settings for walls and slabs by using Stories and Levels. This does require care planning and setting up in the Stories dialog box and in the wall and slab style dialog boxes. This session looks in detail at setting up the walls, slabs, classes, levels and stories to make sure that the walls and slabs are linked to the levels, and to each other. Continue reading
The questions for today focussed on how to set up wall styles for a renovation project. When you are creating the walls from a survey, you often have several different wall thicknesses, but if you use wall styles, you will end up with several wall styles, so it is better to use unstyled walls. This will make it faster to draw and faster to create demolition walls for the project. When you change wall styles, you can choose the alignment of the exiting and replacement wall. Using Stories in a single level project can be productive, allowing you to link parts of the project to levels, making it easy to change the setting out of the project quickly. It can be useful to sketch out the structure of the project, it will make it easier to work out the Stories and Levels for the project.
If you do not like the names of the standard design layers and levels in your story set up dialog box, you can edit them by clicking on the Edit Default Levels… This dialog box allows you to change the default layer names, level names and level elevations for the current project, but these do not change the overall default layers and levels for every project.
In this session we looked at setting up Design Layers, Levels, and Stories. There is always some choice about the elevation of Design Layers. The setting out of the Design Layers can be related to the top of the slab, and I usually set the elevation of the top of the ground floor slab to 0. Using a sketch section thru a project, we can set up project Design Layers and Levels to replicate the settings from the sketch. At the end of the movie we look at how to create a window that spans two floors.
Complex Wall Style
When it comes to creating a more complex wall style, it is very important that you have already created all of the levels that you need. This image shows a more complex wall style already created. You can see the components in the classes I have used to control them.