How to Use ARCHICAD Hotlinked Modules for Building Model Content Plans

in this video I'm going to introduce two different methods for using archicad's hotlink modules to set up your model content plans now the first method will be all about using just a single project file and creating a module within the second will be by linking a library into an active working project file so let's jump into ArchiCAD and we'll take a closer [Music] okay so here we are in ArchiCAD and we are talking about the first method for using hotlinked modules now in this particular project file this is actually the the USA version of the C 5 D estimating pack application this is really the the default graphisoft template from the USA and what we've done here is we've really placed a lot of different model elements from zones to doors windows walls beams column stairs railings and and so on there's a lot of stuff that's been placed into this actually from the favorites that were originally set up here and we've certainly gone through and added a few extras as you can see for any peas and a few other trades but uh the the power of this is by placing all these model elements into the floor plan here and into 3d we have the opportunity of going through and assigning all the right properties so people always ask what's the first step in setting up a an ArchiCAD template um this is really what I recommend because it's going through it is placing model elements it allows you to go through and start really tweaking on the settings whether it's how it looks in 2d plan and section to get all those visual settings right you know the Pens the fills the materials all of that stuff so I always recommend having a place visual favorites file here and that's exactly what we're looking at in this particular case the problem with this is it starts to clutter up all of our different reports so if we pull up some reports here we can see that we have a lot of different model elements that have been obviously pre reported which was the whole purpose of this though we can get the settings right but the problem is all these elements are now being reported when we don't necessarily want them to so in order to separate these out and keep them from being reported on to all of these different these trade reports that we've set up we can actually use the hotlink module method for taking them and excluding them so so let's walk through that step right now it's very very simple and we can always go from having them embedded as library parts or having them embedded as a hotlinked module so all we need to do is we can simply just do a marquee around this we can select everything within it we actually don't even need to select them we can use the marquee for creating this module but what we want to do is we'll go to our file and under external content we have the save selection as module now this is the function with an ArchiCAD for taking all of these model elements here and we can package them up into a dot mo d file so this is a module file and so here I'm just going to call this this is the C 5 C 5 D estimating pack library or we can call this the model content plan and so we have one option here that's really important it's this option right here for replace selection with this hotlinked module file so when we check this and we go ahead and save out this module what it's going to do is it's going to take everything that we have selected here and it's going to embed it as a placed module which is really really powerful here now we can go into the settings and take a closer look at what we have set up here but bullets will just let this run for the moment and let this reload okay so there we go we now have a placed as a module so if we go and select things you can see the little corner icon here has changed its shape it's no longer a blot dot it's now like a tan square with an empty kind of center to it so we can tell that this is now a hotlinked module because of that notification there if we on suspend our groups you'll see that everything here is selected and this is all one group to hotlink module let's go and take a quick look at our settings here so if we go into our hotlink module and we go into our hotlink module manager we can start seeing the settings that we have here so we can actually see that this is placed now as that hot the model content plan we can we can relink this to a different one if we wanted to but we can go in and we can actually start going into our hot link selection settings and then here we can actually see that we have this assigned to a master layer called modules which is perfect I'm glad that defaulted on to that layer we can actually give it a master ID so often I like just giving it like you know three stars or something to tell myself that that is a module or you could just give it a model content plan and with the space or you could call this whatever you want really combination of the two so we'll just leave it for that like that for now of course we have other settings here we can adjust elevation two-storey project settings which is fine it's actually where we saved it from so that's not going to change anything we can adjust the height so if we started changing the height of our story settings the module elements would all xual would actually change and adjust as well so let's go ahead and hit OK and so now when we zoom in here and go into one of our walls for example and we suspend our groups we select this we can see that now this wall has that prefix that we had set up here but the important thing to note is if we go back into our schedule here we can see that all those model elements have been cleared out and the reason for that is because we have embedded into all of our different schedules here to exclude any hot link source we could also go in and specify to exclude just that single hot link source if we wanted to have other modules being displayed and reported in our schedules versus having but you know all of them being just excluded from our schedules so now we can click through here we can see that all of these reports are going to be cleared but anytime we go back here we can go in and say grab you know pick up the settings from this hot link module and then we can go and start you know placing columns we can you know do like a matrix on them let's just do increment and spread we'll go like I don't know 20 feet this direction we can spread it we can go 15 feet in this direction and now we have a bunch of different columns here and we can see that we can add a lot of different columns here so there's all of our different columns that are all set up with all those properties that we had defined and that's an easy way to then use this hotlink module for grabbing all the model elements with their appropriate settings that we've already you know gone through and dialed in for our reporting purposes as well as our visualization purposes and so that's just that's how this is intended to work is it it becomes an easy way of just going through picking up settings here starting to model picking up walls you know we can click around have those walls set up we can pick up roof elements here and go through and just quickly start building a little structure here and of course we need to make a few little adjustments but by doing this we can start reporting content through and now we are only looking at model elements that have been placed that are excluded from our hot links so pretty powerful stuff here ok so that is the first method of taking a hot link module or taking the contents of our project file and linking it in just to show you again how that works and we can actually go the other direction here we can actually take this and we can break our hot link and embed the elements so by doing this what it's going to do is it'll instead of having this as a hotlink module it's now kind of reversed that same process and so now all of these they're still grouped we can ungroup them but now they are back to normal and they will be reporting just as they were before so we can we can set these up we can break them we can go back and forth and there's really no consequence of doing that at any point in time we can just simply go back through select them module them up again and it's quite simple so save selection is module we'll save it override that one we'll replace it again and there we go so we'll replace it yes and now we're packaging it up once again and it will be excluded from our reporting so so yeah once again this is really kind of the starting point that I always recommend people that I'm consulting to to begin with just by laying out all their model elements and really start defining their their office standards in this type of format because you can see it's really easy to go back and forth from a module to a placed element and by doing so we can exclude all those elements from our report so okay so that is method 1 method 2 is really a similar workflow but we can actually take this one step further so what I'm going to do here is I'm pulling up the contraband and you'll notice this is you know as I start to zoom in here this is just a massive library of a lot of different model elements that have been placed so here we have a range of different wall foundations column foundations perimeter drainage and insulation so this is all set up based off systems we have special foundations slab on grade we just have a wide variety of different types of model elements that have all been predefined for reporting for multiple different purposes here so this is what a full library really looks like that has really been fine-tuned and set up for a number of different wall types you know kind of spanning lots of different types of materials and finishes and so this is really how I've set up my own system but it becomes kind of massive when you start thinking about linking this entire thing into an active project file so that's where the model content plan really comes into play and becomes really useful because we can take the contents from this you know this massive library that has way more in it than what we'll use in any given project and we can start taking this content and really start loading it up here so that we can dial in exactly what we want to have included in a project file so this is what I call my model content planning or a module builder and within this really it's it's this is really set up the exact same way as the larger library here you can see the headings are the same where we have foundations basement construction superstructure exterior enclosure so here you can see the specific wall types I want to use on this particular project file you can see our roofing types that we've gone through and pulled out our interior partitions for basement walls typical interior framed walls so this is really where we go through and we kind of massage the model content plan to match what we are trying to deliver in the project file so how this looks in in 3d here if we just pull this up you can see it's a very much just kind of refined down view of the larger library if we pull this up here and we select all we only have what like just under 300 elements here versus over like 2000 elements in the full library and so this is just a way of kind of bowling boiling down the content defining the scope and making sure that we have all the settings correct and similarly here we can actually leave this not as a module but we can leave this as just place model elements but the workflow is the same here so we grab this we can select it we can do a file in external content save selection as module and so now I'm actually going to back out here we'll go to training contraband 2020 example project we have our open BIM and our modules here so here we have our tutorial module for french-inspired you can see that's exactly the you know what we were working with here is our french-inspired 2-story split-level so we can in this case we would want to uncheck this where we just want to override this particular file we can save it let's replace it and then as soon as this is done saving out we can jump over to that active working project file here so we'll jump over to this project file I've made just a few little changes here so we can zoom in I'm going to select this and let's just hotlink module let's update the module and so it's running through updating it I think I've added a few extra labels here so you can see that now we've added those labels in and there we go so with that it's quite simple to just you know add content into this new module and once again all of our reports here they're all going to be separated out where like if we go into our reports are estimating our cost reports go to concrete again because that's about as far as I've gotten on this particular project but here we can see all the content we grab it all we can pull it up in 3d and okay there we can see our active working project file but then again we are not using any of our concrete elements coming from our library so it's just a way to move content from one project into another in this case it is moving from our working library where we can continue to go through grab more content add it to our model content plan and then we just save it off and link it in to our active project file here and what's nice about this once again is we can have this set up as a module for our library and so most of our views here like if we go back into like our construction modeling view we can go into like a foundation view we can pull this up here and it's really going to be excluding all of that content from our module and we can just turn it off and just only be working in our project file but at the same time we can pull this up in our model content plan as a worksheet and we can have this set up so that we can really go back and forth where if we wanted to I don't know just for the sake here if we wanted to go in pick up a you know a wall we can I drop on that wall we go back to our foundations and then we can start modeling with that wall so of course we got a few settings here we need to dial in but that's how it works so so yeah with that that's essentially these two different methods so just to recap one method would be having your content in your active working project file like this in this case it would be fine because it's not an overload of model content but when you start building your libraries to the point where you have so much content in them that you don't want to link all of this through that's when you can use these modules as like an intermediate means for packaging up your model content plan saving it off as a module and then linking it into your working project files here so so yeah that's really how it works if you have any questions on this then definitely leave it in the comments section so just one quick note this would be kind of an alternative to using the the favorites here but in my opinion it's like in order to setup all these favorites it's really worthwhile placing them first so you can go through tests make sure that things are being reported correctly and then go back in and resave the favourites that way you have them as either option the nice thing with with having them placed is you can visually see them before you go and grab them and pick them up of course we get a little bit of a preview here in our favorites but there's really pros and cons of doing it both ways but in order to really test the model elements to make sure that they're being reported correctly you got to place them because you can't report favourites directly onto your different reports so okay well that's about it for this this workflow here so again if you like this type of content then please subscribe to this channel we continue to put out new content every week covering a wide range of different topics and if you have any questions on this particular workflow using modules for model content planning then leave it in the comment section we'll get back to you right away and I hope you enjoyed this video and learned a little something and stay tuned for another contraband video coming soon you

Channel: CONTRABIM

Views: 17,574

Keywords: GRAPHISOFT, ARCHICAD, Hotlinked Modules, CONTRABIM

Id: G1q5rP4u0Nw

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020