ARCHICAD Tips: Become a Roof Wizard!

hi guys this is John here from CONTRABIM and in this video we are going to be taking a look at how to generate roof framing with the roof wizard tool now you can find this tool under the design tab roof extras roof maker in there we can see we have career after multiple rafters hipper valley rafter blocking beams plate beams collars ties and then we have the roof wizard tool now obviously you'll notice that right now everything is grayed out and that's because we can really only use this tool when we're in a floorplan view so let's go ahead and jump there now and we will get started with this short little exercise so the first thing I'll do is I'll actually just select everything we were just looking at and delete it so that we can start fresh here looks like I had one that was ungrouped over there so let's delete that one and okay so first step here is when we want to use the roof wizard tool which is this option down here at the bottom let's start with that because we can add a lot of framing there with this tool first and then we'll go through and talk about some more manual ways of adding individual elements or groups of elements at a single time so let's click this and it says okay please select one roof so in order to get this to be activated we do need to select the roof that we're using and we're actually still in the tool it says down here click a roof so if we click the roof there we go we can see everything is pulled up now the first setting here I can see that everything is turned off so let's just create rafters as an option we can set our width and our height directly right here we can set our eave shape so whether it's perpendicular or vertical or has some sort of cut to it we can actually even add a soffit framing which will go which will really tie in with the rafters so if we wanted to add that that would bring it back to the exterior walls here we can set our minimum spacing so in this case we'll be doing two feet and we can add a few extra rafters had either the you know the big gaps or the corners and we can choose whether we want to join these at the corners or if we want to have them staggered really you could play with these and see which one gives you a better result but you know I recommend just go through all these settings and test them out a few times and kind of see what it gets what it does for you so okay that's rafters let's go to the next one callers and ties so this would be when we have two rafters that are tying into the same Ridge and so we can either choose a collar beam which will create two of them on one on each side of those rafters or we could do a tie beam which will just be my you know mitered at the the ends and tie it that way so this would be yeah probably a little bit more like a truss type framing and this would be more similar to a truss but it would have the framing on the outside the important thing to note here is I always like plugging these in based off project zero so I find this story two does not usually work well with the way that I have my story settings set up and so I prefer to just really pay attention to the project zero so that way you can get this in at the correct height okay once again we have our width and our height I'm using two by sixes here on all of this framing so you'll notice that as we go through the settings here okay ridge rafters so this will either create it between the the beam rafters or if we uncheck this it'll drop it below so in this case I'm going to leave it in between and then we have a create plate beam so this would be around the walls and this would add essentially a top plate beam I'm going to leave this unchecked for now because I typically like adding the the wall framing as relating to the walls and not necessarily to the the top beams here or the plate beam so we'll leave it as is for now unchecked we have some blocking to create some trimmers although I found that this doesn't necessarily work too well I haven't found where it actually even creates these trimmers so something that we can take a look at later on and then we have the hip rafter so this is along the hip and valleys so this is important to add here and once again we'll just leave the same settings for with the night and our Eve style so okay let's go ahead and hit okay oh one last note obviously we can change our surface that we want to apply here as well as assigning them to a layer so these are kind of a global setting here which will apply these to all of these different settings I don't think that we can change it in one and have it change on the other but I could be wrong nope it's a global thing so we'll set all those up just like that okay so let's go ahead and hit OK and see what it generates for us here usually just takes a few seconds and alright there we go so we can certainly look at this in in 2d here but what what I'm noticing is we have kind of a lot of you know random placement here so I can see that our it looks like our spacing on these is pretty decent so two feet all the way through but it does create some added items here some added blocking or some added rafters I should say in some areas where it looks like it was trying to match up some of these studs or some of these rafters to the corners which is good but it also creates some additional setting or additional rafters in there that kind of looks a little bit like you know it's a little bit sloppy so with the roof like this that has exposed rafter tails it is definitely one that we would certainly want to make sure that these the rafter spacing is nice and clean so that when you look at this that you can really see a nice clean spacing all the way through so something like this would create a little bit of a an eyesore when you're looking at it just from a visual perspective so we can certainly improve on this and I find that going through and and manually placing these can be a way to really control the the settings and the layout but one thing I'll note here is if we select all these what's cool about this is let's select them and I just want to show real quick how we can do these takeoffs so if we right click on our rough framing report here and we list the floorplan selection only we can see just this selection of what we created in a matter of you know seconds here we can see all of our beams collar beams rip hip rafters jack rafters and so on so this is pretty cool because that really didn't take very long to apply these and we got a lot of stuff already working here so if we want to select and see which ones are which we can just highlight in 3d and well of course I need to suspend groups in order to do that but and now it's gonna bring back all my rough carpentry so let's kind of move on from this there's all our walls so hip rafters we can select these just as an example and there we go so let's do this in the other method which would be a little bit more manual of a method so what I'll do is I'm actually going to take this entire roof assembly and I'm just going to create a copy off to the right here and let's walk through the steps of creating these with these individual tools that we have so first off let's try our single rafter so it's asking us to click a roof plane and here we can see we have a little bit different settings for the rafters the placement of multiple rafters this is all grayed out right now because we can actually access this through the second tool here that one so let's go ahead and just create a single one so we click the placement and there we go we now have a single rafter and at this point we could of course just line it up where we want to start and then we could do a increment and multiply so we could take this apply it to or copy two feet and then just drag this through and that would help get us some nice clean spacing at least but the issue here is then we got to go through and individually adjust these and the other part of the the downside of this is it's not going to be cutting those for us so we can definitely improve upon this and let's do so with the multiples tools so we'll click the roof that we want to work with and then now we have this option for creating multiple rafters so with the fixed distance here what this does is it's going to essentially set it at two feet and max but if our spacing is not exactly on two foot increments it will reduce those slightly so to point out how this may work we can click from here to here and what's nice is it's automatically creating all the spacing for us it's my Turing these for us but if we check our actual spacing here we can see that it's okay it's 1/16 of an inch less and so we're not exactly on that 2 foot spacing which in this case that might be fine like it's close enough it's really you know for the visual purposes here to make sure that we have it nice and clean on the on the eaves but that's I'm probably ok with that so if we wanted to get this exact though then we could do it in another method here by doing a fixed distance with a gap at either the start place it in the middle or at the end so I think at the end in this case would be good because we can click from here all the way over to here and we can create that spacing all the way up but it didn't complete it all the way through here which we can actually do if we input it in a little different manner here so if we do the same thing and we have the same exact settings and we start from here and we go all the way diagonally up to this point it will create it all the way through so that's one thing that I've learned recently is that you can you don't have to go exactly parallel with the plane of the roof you can go diagonally and it will fill these in for you which is nice and if we check our spacing now then that's exactly 2 feet the only place where it probably is not to feet would be this last one which still is showing two feet it would probably be this one right here where it probably cut out a little bit so anyway that's a nice clean way of adding in you know beautifully spaced rafters and we can do so very very quickly now one thing that I would probably recommend we do is well I'll show you a manual method of adding in these ridge beams so if we click on this option right here it's going to tell us to pick the roof so we're picking the roof and okay this is actually the purlins I'm sorry that's the wrong one but we can add in a purlin sorry that was the wrong the wrong setting there but you can see we've added in a purlin that's really just right at the roof line because that's where I clicked so my mistake let's just delete that for the moment and let's try this again so I want to create a roof beam sorry it's going to be this option here so let's click a roof and then we set the settings that we want and with this we can then click the the edge and that will generate our ridge beam here so that's pretty nice but this would be actually one one method that I would use if I was going to do manual placement like this I would just select all the entire roof assembly I would go to the roof wizard and I would just turn off everything I don't want to create so we'll create a ridge beam and we'll we want to make sure that we have these settings right the blocking we don't need the hip rafter so let's create these as well so now when we create this it's going to go through and essentially do all those it'll give us some nice or some better connections up here even though that doesn't look too great but at least it'll draw all those in for us and we can do all that at once so I do like that method for at least picking up all of our ridge beams and hip beams and Valley beams so there we go okay so let's quickly just go through and let's add the rest of them so let's start by we'll select our roofs I want to create this framing component so we'll click on the one we're going to be working on and in this case because it's on the edge and it's by itself I'll probably just do the fixed distance and we'll go from this point to this point there we go that looks good we'll do the same thing on this side there we go on this one here let's do the same method where we go diagonally so do the fixed distance and we'll just take it all the way to the top there okay this one here so once again we can well there's a few things here we want to consider first of all I really do want these to be in alignment with this side so that we can create some some ties so that's one thing that I'll probably want to really make some adjustments on him but let's see how close we get by I'm just trying to think about this let's try this so I wonder if we can use the exact same we're gonna click the roof that we want and I wonder if we can use this where we go the distance fixed end gap and I wonder if we can actually use the same starting point and end point and we'll create it on this side no it won't because it's not within there so okay let's try this again I doubt it's going to be in perfect alignment but let's see so clicking on that one we are doing the gap at the end and so let's just go from here to here okay so we can see now we obviously have a little more a little bit off on our spacing and so at this point we can really go through and select these what I might do is there's probably a better way of doing this I'm going to delete these I'm actually going to add a guideline in here so let's start with a fixed point which we can actually do from just adding it to the ones over here that we want to line up with and so with this I think I'm going to use this as our starting point and I think based on that we should get these pretty well lined up at an exact spacing so we'll start from here we'll go all the way to here and okay so that did the trick so we have all of these nice and clean so with that I'm going to select all these I'm going to suspend the groups for the moment and let's create those those ties or the the the caller beams here so once again I'm going to set this at a specific height we'll go say I don't know twelve feet again and we'll do the double sided and there we go we've now created all those collar beams beautiful and so with that let's just continue to close this out most of this work is in the rafter tool and so once again I'm just going to use that same method or go diagonal there we go clicking these will do a fixed distance because this is on the end so we want these to be spaced nice and clean and then we will do the same thing on this end all the way through and we got just a few more roofs here to finish out and we're almost done with this quick little lesson on the roof wizard so hopefully you're seeing how you can use this in your own workflow I definitely am enjoying playing around with this and yeah that looks much much better if we compare to this automatically generated version and it really didn't take us that much longer to do so pretty happy with that so there's a few extras here that we could go through and so just as an example if we select a few of these here we can add in some blocking so these are the trimmers so we can add this in and we just pick the location that we want so we click right here and it's going to add a trimmer I don't think we can do multiples of those at the same time but we can try so let's click down here well it added just one so there's probably a better way of doing that but at least now we're getting some of these trimmers in if we want these to be set at the exact same location I'm not sure if that's the insertion line or not it might be or it's going to be that purple line we'll see so let's click these go for the trimmer so yeah it looks like it's really right in the center is where that was so at least if we have some guide lines in here we can create those and yeah alright let's see what else we might want to work with here ok one thing to note is we could potentially use this as our ceiling framing as well and so one thing I'll probably do here is let's I'm actually going to grab all of this that was auto-generated I'm going to grab this roof and just delete it because we don't really need it let's move this entire assembly back and I think I said it evenly at a hundred feet let's hope so and so we have a section here I'm going to just move it so that we're looking at it directly cutting down the middle of one of these and so let's open this with our current view settings okay there we go so we can see our our rafters we can highlight up here our ridge beam we have our collar beams if we wanted we could use this as a framing member for our ceiling framing as well so I just wanted to point out that our top plate here would be where that ceiling member would be sitting is that eight foot one and so I don't think you know we definitely can't create any of this from section but if we go back here and we select our rafters with them suspended we could actually use this as a way of creating some ceiling framing and ultimately kind of turning this into a trust so let's try this method here of the tie beam so in this case we're using the tie beam and we're going to set this to prod or we're setting this at a full 1/2 project zero and we'll use that same width and height we may actually want to bump this up maybe we go seven point two five and make this a two by eight and so with that let's see if it created it in our section and there we go so now we are adding in those they're already cut right here which is nice and so we could continue to just either take that one and copy it through or you know we have multiple options for working with that so I just want to point out that that's another benefit of using this tool is we can create some ceiling framing with it and let's take a look at this overall here so we got some nice clean spacing we've added a few little blockings area obviously we'd want to we could probably just take those and just copy them because we know our spacing here is consistent we've added in that one ceiling framing level there and yeah so we're looking pretty good so okay last thing I want to just point out here is let's take a look at we're going to grab all of these here well actually now that I've done this it's going to select just the individual sections here so let's do this let's grab all of these I'm going to get rid of this they are all on the same layer so we will go to our model view layer and just pick up the rough carpentry so there we go we should have all of that picked up and so once again I just want to recheck our framing takeoff so I'm going here to rough carpentry we can list on the floor plan this floor plan selection only and so this will bring through just the contents of that roof framing and there we go we can see all of it there because all of these have very much different lengths it's really going to produce a lot of individuals here we can see that if we unmerge here well actually what I'm seeing is that it gave everything a new element ID so we probably do have some that are similar names and that's probably one of the last things that I would do here is let's just select them all and I would prefer to go through and have these all named the same so how we can do that is let's remove that setting and I want to add in the library part name so if we do this that'll pick up our rafter beams and I'm going to suspend the groups but let's pick up all of the rafter beams did I suspend groups I think I did yeah I did so rafter beams so pick them up so we'll just call these rafter beams now why it's kind of interesting here why this one did not hip rafter beam oh we did contain so is so that would be better so the hip rafter beams hip rafter so we can just go through here and I just want to select a few of these I'm going to temporarily hide the selection layer so I can grab these a little quicker and I'm just going to rename these for the fact that I want these to be I want this to be is first of all is in this case the beam so this is ridge beam that was a hip rafter do we have a caller beam we do so this is a caller beam call our beam and this is kind of the fun part at the end obviously we need to trim out a few things here like around that chimney but we'll deal with that later let's pick up our blocking so pick that up blocking did I get them all I think I did hip rafter do we have a valley no so that is still a hip rafter but we can pick up the valleys just manually real quick there's only a few of them there's only three of them right yeah so Valley beams okay so what this is going to do is it's really going to hopefully compress down our reports so that we get all the consistent lengths coming through as a count instead of individually listing so we have them all selected still so let's go back to our report and simply just list floorplan selections so we can see this in isolation and hopefully that's going to roll these up when we click this button and okay it did that a little bit so we still have probably some very much unique lengths here which is just you know typical based on the geometry of the roof so but if we check our quantities here we can see that we had like 14 of these 21 of these so we can see all of our common links there which is nice so okay that is it for the roof wizard tool hopefully that you hopefully you picked up a lot of good tips for how you can use this on your own projects and if you have any questions then just leave them in the comment section and I will certainly get back to you on those and yeah stay tuned for more YouTube videos just like this where we'll explore different parts of archicad and if you like this content then make sure to subscribe so thanks for watching and we will catch you on another video

Channel: CONTRABIM

Views: 49,002

Keywords: GRAPHISOFT, ARCHICAD23, Roof Framing, Modeling Techniques, BIM, VDC

Id: j9mLsDjN5z8

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020