ArchiCAD 25 Tutorial NEW Mesh and Luxury Home Design in 30 Minutes

i live in an incredibly undulating place it's basically a series of hills and valleys that continuously go on for miles and miles miles so i thought i'd take the opportunity today to go through an incredible sloping site design with you guys on arcade 25. [Music] what's going on guys my name is david thomage and welcome back to the channel today we're talking about a steep undulating sight that basically drops off the side of a cliff i've taken a reference image straight off instagram i will credit them as we walk through this design today but basically i wanted to showcase exactly how you can model a steep site mesh and then build your impressive castle on top of it so in today's design we're going to be using the australian select template feel free to use whatever template is available to you this is just the basic example to make sure there's no trickery no fancy plugins it is the bare essentials that you have available to you in arcade 25 so straight off the bat we're going to be starting with our foundations and because we're going to be creating this design over here which to me is on the left screen but for you it's probably either going to be above or below me just for a continuous reference throughout the actual tutorial looking at this design to me it seems like there is a three metre first floor a three meter second floor and then potentially about a six meter drop over something like 20 meters so we're going to start by pressing ctrl and 7 or command and 7 depending on what type of system you're on in this design our first floor is actually our ground floor and we're working our way down so instead of going upwards we're going to go down in this situation so let's delete the roof story and delete the first floor now we're just simply going to start with our ground floor next we're going to go insert below i'm going to make that only about 300 millimeters because you don't need too much in there i'm going to insert one more below i'm going to call that just straight basement and that will be three meters to the next floor so then we have our 3.3 below our ground floor i'm simply going to insert another one above that and call that ground ceiling and again just make that 300 millimeters so that everybody is on the same page we have a ground ceiling we have our basement ceiling and we're working our way down so clicking okay we can exit out of that and yes we can delete those stories which you'll see rapidly changed over here so we can actually continue working on what we're designing today the main focus is really going to be on the side itself and then we're going to work towards a quick replication of this building here we're not really going to focus too much on the actual design we're just going to replicate it very quickly at the end if you want to know more about the building feel free to jump along it is stamped in the timestamp so starting with our mesh straight away we have our mesh site i'm going to draw a simple box and all my layers appear to be correct so let's start at the intersection of zero zero zero on archicad let's draw a relatively big square so we know what we are working with so if i press the tab key it's going to activate my dimensions and let's say we want to have that at 50 meters wide and we probably want to have that at about or 60 meters long so we have a nice rectangle starting straight away what you'll see is i've mistakenly made that on the basement layer so i'm going to press ctrl c delete that by tapping the delete key come across to our ground floor plan and paste that back in there with ctrl v finally i'm just going to tap off that come into 3d to showcase what we've created so at the start we've created nothing but a flat box and we're going to continue to basically emphasize these steep hill on the left so if i click on this mesh i'm going to simply make it 30 meters deep so that way i can actually start cutting down the side of the hill basically looking at it from a very simple point of view if i take this fill tool just to be able to actually create some shapes and some general ideas of where things belong let's say we have our long emphasized shape here we'll make it 30 meters by 10 meters that seems about right and then by holding the alt key clicking on that again we can draw our secondary square which is probably about there they look exactly the same length so let's go 10 meters by another 30 meters which in all honesty is probably a bit of an overkill so i'm going to tap on that edge drag it back let's drag it back 10 meters roughly here is where the edge of those retaining walls is on that image so basically what we're going to be creating is a stepping site from this point here going further and further and further down now like i said before it looks approximately like three meters on the ground floor three meters in the basement and then another six meters to the bottom of this retaining wall maybe a little bit where we see the edge of the photo so that means it's a 12 meter drop from the top of the house to the bottom if we lose that three meters of the basement probably about a nine meter fall so if we do some simple maths by pressing the m key we get our measuring tool we can search that it's 30 meters approximately from the edge of where i've started my mesh to the line that i've drawn so now if we open up our calculator tool we can simply go 30 meters divided by 9 meters and you'll see we get a 3.33 recurring contour line now i do want to make these a little bit undulating and a bit challenging and not just a steep drop so what we're going to do is we're going to select our spline tool and i'm simply just going to click anywhere and draw my first curve so that's going to be my first curve holding the alt button again i'm going to draw my second curve now by pressing ctrl d i can move this across control d again i'm going to make sure that is 3 3 3 3 minus button and then enter which makes it exactly three meters 333 millimeters away from that original line i'm going to repeat that process a couple more times until i get to this edge and i'm going to show you what the finished product looks like of just these simple 2d spline lines okay and there we have most of those spline lines created just basically freehand clicking and sketching wherever we want what i do want to just simply do is make sure none of my lines are overlapping the previous line that we drew so if i fix that one up everything should be relatively perfect now what we want to come in and do is select our mesh tool go to our mesh hold the space bar over that spline line that we drew and click on it and then while still holding the space bar click on that line and select okay you want to repeat that same step for the rest of these spline lines now that we have all those points created we can simply select all those splines delete them again delete that spline there and then start manipulating this entire surface here so if we click on that mesh again and let's pick our first corner which is going to be a dead flat line across the front we're going to click on this corner and then we're going to come across this elevate mesh point which looks like a line with a z on it so clicking on that i'm going to change that to project zero and that is going to be project zero zero so basically for me that is the top of my boundary that is my ground floor of where i enter which is zero zero i'm going to click ok on that line now because i made nine identical lines that ended roughly at the edge of this building i'm going to lower them by one meter each so if i click on this line line that i created and then once again click on that point there it's automatically going to jump back to our mesh adjustment so we don't have to keep fiddling around with that which is really good then i'm going to come across to here project zero apply to all which means it's going to apply to all of these little dots here minus one meter clicking okay next i'm going to repeat that step on the next spline again minus two meters so every single line we're dropping one meter further so if i continue that pattern all the way down let's go three meters and then we're going to go minus four meters and i'm going to continue that pattern all the way down till we get to the end of our sight mesh now that i've got minus 11 on this final line i'm simply going to go to this corner here and go minus 12 meters and minus 12 meters on that corner as well if we come back into our 3d we'll see that our site has completely changed and there's two simple errors in our mesh here which we can simply click on the edge and align with the nearest points to it and there we go now we have our sloping mesh site that replicates what we see roughly on this diagram over here i quickly want to point out if you are an architecture student or somebody in the architecture profession the first link down in the description below will take you directly to my website where you can download a series of construction drawing checklists and even sketch design checklists these are fundamental for anybody starting out that wants to make sure they have everything on their plans every single time i still use these checklists every single day to make sure that any document that leaves the office is 100 perfect so if you do need some assistance with your construction drawings or even your sketch design plans that are going out to clients and you're trying to impress make sure you check out those checklists now that we have our contours created we can start modeling and manipulating this house over here so we've got the foundational building blocks of what we're going to be creating i'm simply going to click on all of these elevation and section markers ctrl d and just move them out of the way because we don't need that for now what we do want to be creating is a nice big thick slab on both the roof the ground and everything in between so we can actually mimic this building but let's start by simply replicating the actual perimeter walls so if we start with our wall tool wall external we'll just change that to a 90 millimeter stud partition because it's predominantly glass what we can see is the back of this building on the ground floor plan runs all the way across the perimeter by tapping the p button it'll flip that wall the way we want it to go then i'd assume this wrap around corner goes about three meters so i'm going to hold the shift button and press the d key that i can type in three meters again shift d let's go back one meter and then i'm gonna again hold shift come all the way to the edge of this i think that's sitting back in approximately two meters so what i'm going to do is press that d button again go two meters and then tap the minus key so it's automatically doing the maths for me two meters away for the purpose of this seven minus two is very simply five but it's more so about teaching you those shortcuts now i can't see the rest of this photo so i'm literally just gonna assume that it runs all the way back there and ties into that first wall that we drew if we come into 3d to see what we've drawn so far you can see that we've started to draw the basic elements of this house now if we come back to our ground floor plan i am going to take the slab tool go to my generic slab i'm going to make a 250 millimeter suspended concrete with timber finish then i'm going to press control up right click on my ground floor show as trace reference simply duplicate that space there ctrl down down once again duplicate that entire roof section there and if i tap escape key go back to my 3d we're going to see that we've started to create what we're looking at in the image now the basement i do want to click on that once go control d and lift that to our ground setting and then i'm going to start mimicking my actual materials whilst we go through this process so this already has a timber floor this is upside down so if we go ctrl t i'm simply just going to change that to a generic concrete structure so changing that to concrete and then all three materials actually aren't concrete we're just going to simply make them a nice black color i'm going to click ok reopen those settings by pressing command t so i don't have to go through all of them and change the bottom of our wood to wood walnut horizontal so now if we look at our actual design it's starting to look very similar to what we see in the picture i'm then going to click on my base concrete floor control t open up those settings replace them all with the same black color we selected ok control t unlink and change the top to a walnut horizontal again so now we have the black edge of that concrete slab we have the black roof we have this concrete section over here that we need to manipulate so if i click on that all those walls were linked as one by pressing alt and g we're going to be able to unlink those so selecting those two walls ctrl t adjusting just the outside layer to some sort of concrete let's make it concrete light 23 for the time being and press ok now we have the first floating section of our building we're going to come back into our ground floor plan and we're simply going to start adding some windows so coming into our palette on the left hand side let's go window open up the window settings either there or by pressing command t and then personally i believe the easiest way to do it here is to just simply go okay drop it into our project where it needs to be go to 3d and scale it as we see fit so that first window as you can see basically spans the whole way of that entire perimeter wall we're just simply dragging it all the way up it is a full height extremely extremely large panel of glass and looking at that it's probably half the size of that so what i've done is maybe overkilled the depth of that building so instead of reducing everything i'm simply going to reduce that window here one meter and make it four meters in total then control d allows us to move that wall one meter holding the shift button i can select all three of those walls control i joins all three of those walls together and then we can continue to replicate what we need around the side of the house coming back into our ground floor plan let's open up these window settings here by going ctrl t and we're basically going to click our way through until we get to the corner sash settings next we want to click the custom corner one 90 degrees click ok and we'll see we've created this corner over here we simply want to drag that back to the edge hold our alt button and replicate that window on this side so as you can see it isn't the right section so we're going to use one of our three starting nodes over here clicking it where it needs to be pushing it back the other way then going back into 3d to see what we've created i'm going to simply click on both of these windows now control t open up these floor settings and overwrite everything with a black pen because i can't stand that orange personally next i'm going to drop down my basic menu go to my model attributes and change all of those window frames to a nice gloss black clicking okay you'll see that drastic change between the two i do need a mullion transition in this window so ctrl t allows us to open up the settings again going to sash options changing our hv grid going to our front view vertical one horizontal two gives us that single one in the middle it looks like a very thick commercial frame so we're going to go 100mm 100mm clicking ok gives us that look that we are looking for now it looks like it repeats a very simple pattern of two panels one large panel two panels one large panel for the rest of the house so what i'm going to do is come back into my ground floor plan hold my alt key and click on that window replicating it over here going into the settings command t coming down to our corner settings unticking my custom corner 1 because it's no longer required control or command d and then bring it back in line with that other window i do again want to go ctrl d tapping the control button a secondary time and aligning it third time on the edge so if we come back into our 3d window we'll see we've created a repetition of the same window clicking into this middle window control t opens our settings once more scrolling up sash options no grid okay and there you have that first little look that we see on top the big panel the two panels the big panel the two panels and in our ground floor now we can simply repeat that pattern by clicking on this window here holding the shift button and clicking on that secondary window by tapping control d and then control and alt at the same time we can duplicate that multiple times to the edge of that building coming back into 3d you'll see that we've replicated that pattern of 2 1 2 1 all the way down and because i can't see what's happening on the edge of that building i'm not really too fast now if we go back to our ground floor plan and hold the alt button i can duplicate the settings of that wall going control down down brings us to our basement level as we can see our basement level does actually replicate above of what's happening there and then it appears to go back in another maybe two meters over that so if we type in 5 meters back there we can once again hold shift go to the top tap d go 2 meters minus enter run our wall all the way back run it all the way in and again because i can't see what's happening on the other side i would assume it would repeat a similar pattern like that does there if we come into our 3d we'll see that we've started to create the foundation of that secondary floor again it looks way way way too big again i'm going to come into my basement floor plan go ctrl d and i'm going to move this wall back another five meters holding the control button i can click on my additional walls and basically just cut them right off that definitely looks a little bit better than what we were previously looking at and it's starting to look like we are creating the same shapes as what is seen up here now we are missing the roof of this basement floor plan so if we go to our ground ceiling and tap control minus once so if we tap our alt button we can duplicate the settings of that slab right click basement show as trace reference and then we can basically assume that our roof does that go back into 3d just to double check on the actual roof we've created control d let's just drag that and the entire ground floor down 300 millimeters as that is exactly what it does over on this diagram we're then simply going to drag and extend our entire roof plan all the way to the back over here and alt g ungroups all of our walls by lifting them to the ground floor we can actually finish off what they've created as an intersection point over here now we'll point out that the story settings aren't 100 correct on this situation we really would have to go into it a little bit deeper but the fundamental basics are there to actually understand what we're trying to create now we'll also note that the basement ceiling does extend two meters so just like we did a second ago we're gonna click on that blue line and extend it two meters here extend that two meters there so we're starting to get that foundation of this building stacked on top of another building coming back into our basement plan i do want to extend this wall an additional two meters so by holding shift and pressing the d key we can type in two meters that appears to be plasterboard all the way through in that image so we don't even have to cut that wall to be able to actually give it a second texture but what we do need to do is press control up click on that slab we've created control c control down control down we don't have a basement floor so i'm just going to do a footings layer that is minus 300 below and click ok and then ctrl v and click off so we create our actual ground floor element that ties back into our actual boundary walls now what we do have is again a series of glass panels on that basement so if we come back to our ground floor scroll up scroll into our large panel of glass click the alt button and click on that window control down control down we can start basically creating those windows all the way from here so if i wanted to just simply replicate them all the way around we could do that simply repeating the same process until we make it all the way around coming into 3d we'll see that we need to lift our actual slab to the proper basement height so that it aligns perfectly as we wanted it now obviously this is incorrect we do want to basically just change that to black and change the underneath to wood so that we repeat the same look that we have above over here what you will notice is now that we need a retaining wall basically cutting right into that panel of glass and wrapping back around this house to basically create some sort of planter so we're going to come into our basement floor plan i'm going to select my wall tool and i'm going to select a nice big chunky brick wall so let's go block work of 270 millimeters and then i'm gonna start at the edge here go one meter out hold the shift key go one meter past that so five meters maybe let's go six meters actually and then return back into our window over here if i come into 3d you'll see that they are way way too high and linked to that top floor so alt g will connect all of those control t will open up the settings and then we don't want to link that and it appears that it's only about 1200 height so we'll click ok and you'll see that we're starting to actually replicate what's seen in this photo now before we leave this section i do want to change all of those settings so ctrl t to open up the settings overwrite all of them at once and let's select a nice stone so let's go stonework 12 for the time being and click ok you'll see some nice big chunky stone right there and then we're going to come into our basement alt on that section there of that wall control down to our footings layer and what we are seeing is basically that retaining wall all the way around the edge of this building i'd assume it wraps all the way back over here as well but that is a little bit unknown because we don't see it coming back into 3d we'll see that we've drawn our basement wall control d allows us to move it down to where it needs to go i'm going to continue extending that wall much much further alt g allows us to ungroup which then allows us to basically drag it out i'm going to extend that another three meters and then all of these contour lines aren't dropping fast enough in my opinion so we're going to come back to our actual ground story and we're going to start adjusting them so they drop significantly quicker so this line over here if we click on one of those nodes and edit the mesh it's at about three meters so let's drop that to four and then continue to drop this two meters at a time so this is going to be minus 6 minus 8 minus 10 minus 12 and i'm going to repeat that till we get to the bottom now that bottom line is minus 20 so i'm going to make both of these minus 22 so that it continues to fall away instead of coming all the way up coming back into our 3d to make sure we've done that correctly absolutely we've just got these little errors on the side like we had before so i'm just simply going to drag and drop them to adjust them to roughly where i think they need to be they're not overly critical but you'll see we've now mastered that drop significantly better than what we had before so once again let's come into our footings layer and we're then basically going to continue these additional planter boxes around the edge of the bottom of the building so if we take that approximately somewhere in the middle of that wall let's go out one meter wrap around past that one meter further and wrap into the edge and then finally we're going to repeat that same step p to flip the wall all the way out to the edge all the way back it looks like that just continues to go and go and go so i'd assume that basically snow is covering the entirety of that retaining wall clicking it to the edge showing in 3d to see what we've created and alt g allows us basically to create what we need ctrl t not linked we only want to make that about two meters tall control d let's drag that to the base so if you see these bottom lines go from solid to dashed so if we're looking at the right side where it intersects with the mesh it slowly goes dash the further we drop it down so if i know that it's dashed it's hidden below all of that mesh secondly i can do the same thing with the retaining wall that's slightly above it that retaining wall only looks about a meter high it doesn't look as drastic as the last one i do want to simply drop it just to where it needs to be and then i'm going to alt g ungroup and extend that all the way down so now we have that sheer drop off of building very elegant very dramatic on the edge of a cliff there isn't too much more to this tutorial guys it is relatively simple it was just the fundamental building blocks of what we need to do to create something on an incredibly steep site there is a numerous amount of architectural details engineering consideration that would go into something like this but that video would take months and months and months to explain so this is more so a fundamental basic guide of how you can create this mesh and then simply model something just as steep and just as beautiful on that block anyway that's all for me today guys thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed the video i hope you learned something today and i hope you can apply it to the real world if you have noticed i have been posting a ton of shorts lately and only one of them has started to take off because the youtube algorithm is a complete guess to me when it comes to shorts but i thought hey let's get on the bandwagon let's start creating some shorts and let's pump out some high quality content so you guys can learn more do more and achieve more every single day but like i said that is absolutely all for me so like always i'll see you next monday

Channel: David Tomic

Views: 6,309

Keywords: video, sharing, camera phone, video phone, free, upload, architect, architecture student, architect student, building architect, david tomic, Archicad

Id: wM3SX7oGMtA

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021