MAX OUT your ARCHICAD Surfaces with Matching Symbol and Image Fills!

in this video we're going to create a custom tile surface texture and then max out the settings by creating a symbol fill with lines and arcs to match our pattern we'll create an image fill using graphic overrides and we'll also create some cool 3d views in both opengl and the vectorial engine plus i have a bunch of other tips and tricks to show you along the way so let's get after all right so i'm excited about this video because this is going to be a pretty fun exercise i love creating these kind of custom textures and symbol fills and it's just a fun workflow and i would encourage you before we really jump into this exercise that you can follow along with with each one of these steps here um so any image that you find online you can really do this exact same thing with it's always helpful to have an image that's you know very very square to the camera where it's not angled like this one but very flat and really you can do this with any image that's nice and flat we can prepare it in this case i'm going to prepare the image in powerpoint and then we'll bring it into archicad and start really dialing in this material but the power behind this is this can really create a value add to your clients and create a value that you can offer through your services because if you're working with your clients to go through and pick out the finishes on their project often they'll want to see how this finish will actually look as the end result and by following these steps in this video you can quickly just go through grab whatever tiles that they're looking for whatever finishes bring it into in this case powerpoint we'll prep it and then we'll bring it into archicad and then you can really give them what uh you know you can give them a preview of what that final look will actually be so um okay so that's really the power of this workflow and let's start jumping into it now so what i've done here is i was just searching online for some interesting types of tile i found one here actually on wayfair that i thought would make a good demonstration just because it's very uh there's a lot of repetition in it we can just model in or draw in certain parts of it and then copy it around so um yeah that's what we'll be doing in this case we can kind of see what it looks like as like a finished surface here and yeah so that's the one i picked uh all i did was i just kind of copied that image i brought it here into powerpoint and whenever i'm working in powerpoint like this it's great to have just an image as an option here but it's also nice to have some variations so what i've done is just gone through and just really traced over you can see here if i copy this we'll paste it here and send it to the back you can see that we've just created some basic elements really just some triangles and some lines to kind of grab that geometry and what's nice about this is now we can kind of take a look at some different variations if we wanted to and we could test out some different options of this particular pattern within archicad so it might be tough to find some of these online just for purchase such as like you know the original but sometimes you can find something and get the different color scheme uh very close and it can just be interesting to kind of play with a few different options so okay first thing here is we need to i'm going to i've actually cropped this image down a little bit because it had a little bit of a border on the outside what i'm going to do is we're just going to save as a picture and in this case i'm actually just working i've created a just a folder on my desktop for the blog custom tile material and we're just going to call this tile star one and i like saving these as a png so okay we're going to just save this now so we have that one uh texture saved um if we wanted to we could of course go through and we could save out different versions of them here but we'll go through and maybe we'll do that at the end do some different comparisons at the end so okay so we have our image let's go and we'll open up archicad here this is just a blank file that i've kind of rigged up for building objects and so this is a nice kind of simple layout here we can use for this purpose and so let's start by by bringing in that that image fill so i can go to the folder we can just take this drag and drop it because we know it's nice and square and we don't have to crop it or anything and what we'll do is i'm just going to do a control k to resize and i know this is a 10 inch by 10 inch tile so i'm just going to grab our extents here we're going to shrink it down and i'm just going to type in 10 inches and now we know that this should be 10 inches in each direction which it is so great so there we go we're going to bring it up let's just kind of snap it to our base point here and okay we now have our image in archicad and we can start working with this but i think the next step here that i want to do um is let's create a new um surface for this and before we actually do that what i think i'm going to do is let's go to our library manager and you can see i have several different libraries set up here let's just add a new folder and in this case i'm going to grab the folder that contains our blog here so we've now loaded this let's just reload and apply and so now we have anything that we save within this folder here as an option so we can see we even have some powerpoint files obviously that's not going to do as much good but we have our png so anytime we save a new version of this or duplicates we can have all of these stored in just that one folder in our library manager makes it a lot easier it also makes it easy if we want to just override this particular file that we don't have to go back and re-link as if it was part of the embedded library it's just a little bit cleaner to do it this way so okay so there we go um next step here is let's go in and actually create a new uh surface and so in this case we will let's jump over to our basic for the moment we will just create a new and we'll duplicate and we're just going to call this uh star tile okay so we'll duplicate we'll go browse and because we've added that linked library here we can just go in and find it under our blog star tile tile star i guess is what i called it okay so there we go we'll set our size 10 inches by 10 inches great and yeah we'll come back in here and we'll change some of these settings a little bit later we'll definitely go in and set our vectorial hatching but that's going to come up in the next step after we create the symbol fill so okay there we go let's do just a little bit of modeling here i'm going to set this to a basic structure we can set this to tile flooring we're just going to call this tile finish and we'll set our size to maybe 3 8 inch bottom at zero okay so let's just do say like because it's a 10 inch by 10 inch let's do 40 inches by 40 inches and of course we have a few settings here we can change let's use the fill from the surface we have not assigned the surface just yet um but let's go in and do that so our surface here we will go and find um where is it 0931 is our csi category for tile we'll pick our star tile we can override all those sides and now we can start seeing this come through but you'll notice here that our fill or yeah our fill is a little bit off but that's okay we're going to correct that here in the next step let's go to 3d there we go we can see that we have this set up we can see it's all based right now nice and clean from our origin point and okay so with that let's uh we can go ahead and let's start building on our actual cymbal fill now this is uh one of those steps that's pretty fun to do we'll have to take a quick a close look at our image here and see how well this really is set up for it i can actually see as i zoom in here our center point is not quite in the center there we can see it's off a little bit and so we'll probably just use this kind of as a guide here but the first step is i won't actually just center this up we'll just snap this to the middle if i can get those two points to meet um let's turn on some guidelines and we can see we already have some set up here because it's a kind of part of our rig that's already working let's grab some some lines and we'll just kind of start by creating a little line here and um the other thing that we can do is let's just create our outline so there we go so we have our border at least for this texture we have our kind of our line that we'll use is like a symmetry line as we're working in this direction but um okay we got a little bit of kind of an issue here that i don't necessarily like and that is our image is not really well lined up so what i think i'm going to do is i'm just going to shift our image over because we can do this kind of independent of our rig now and so that's already looking better let's create that little center circle and i want to be careful here that i'm working only with my lines and not snapping to any of the points in the image because we've now adjusted that so let's go one quarter inch um i'm actually going to take this whole thing and we're going to shift it down a little bit okay there we go so now we're kind of lined up in both directions much better so okay so next step here is we can actually just take that line and just so that we have uh kind of a nice clean one running up the middle we'll put one there as well and then next step here so i'm thinking i might actually let's see we'll just start from this point right here actually i'm sorry we're going to start from this point we're going to go straight up and we're taking this all the way to the edge we're going to bring it straight down and then we will close this out to that point so we don't need to be working 100 based off our center center point here but we just want to get this very close so okay so that's step one let's um next step here is uh we'll actually we can just take these two and actually you know what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a guideline in here directly on this one and then we'll take that guideline and we'll just kind of shift it over here we'll go 1 16 of an inch and we will be working with this guideline now so okay let's take our line and we'll just kind of trace from this point up we can see that it's not quite 100 parallel here but that's okay it doesn't have to be perfect we can kind of create our own um you know lines here so we'll bring it to maybe this point once again i'm going to take a guideline here and then we're just going to take that guideline we're going to snap it to that point right there and so we can now take our line and we'll bring this straight down and there we go so we are partially done with this let's continue on here we're going to take it from this point up to this point from here up to here [Music] and then let's close it out like this okay excuse me um next step here is i'm kind of debating i think i might want to actually keep this on the edge but we may give it a little bit of an offset so okay there we go we're going to close this one out we're going to offset these just a little bit so let's set this over 1 16 of an inch oh that's far too much let's offset it to about right there and i think i'm pretty happy with that so now that we've done that we can take all these that we are keeping and i'm going to group that section up we can group this section i'm going to unselect that so group those and last step here is i want to actually trim down this line because we have this little bit of interconnection line right here and we'll trim we'll kind of pull this one over maybe we'll just stop it kind of right at that point in this point and okay next step we got our center lines let's do a control shift n to mirror so we're going to mirror right along this there we go and we can see that we have pretty much our entire thing working now so we'll grab these we'll grab these this is our entire pattern now so i'm going to group them and this would be a good time to do our rotation so we'll do rotate a copy distribute minus one we're doing three of them we'll rotate to our path and so we're just going from our center point out or we'll go straight up and we're just going all the way around 360 degrees and there we go so now let's just pull our pattern off make sure that we are looking good we'll get rid of any other little turn off our good guidelines for the moment we'll get rid of our other little uh guidelines that we had created here and make sure that we look nice and clean which i would say we do so there we go we've now created this pattern didn't take too long we'll now just select it all and let's see how many okay i only had one there that's good um okay so we're going to grab this all we are going to copy and then it's time to create our image fill so any time that we do this here um sorry not an image fill we're creating our symbol fill here so let's create a new we are going to call this 0 9 31 star tile we're going to check our symbol fill option okay and we're just going to paste and let's zoom out a little bit we can see our pattern there we can see that we are already set with our correct size 10 inches by 10 inches our pattern here is actually not terrible but we could actually go through and just i'm just holding down and just kind of clicking these off um and we can create one that's probably a little bit closer so the main feature of this is we have let's just do a center line and another center line and doesn't have to be perfect but you can see up in this corner here that as we click these little dots it's going to adjust so i just want this to be very close okay so that looks like a star close enough to recognize we'll turn this on as a cover fill we don't really need this as a cut fill although let's leave it on as a as an option for all of them we want to make sure that we are scaling this with our model size because this is a fixed size of 10 inches by 10 inches we don't want it to be dependent on our view scale and okay with that let's hit ok and next step is let's just go in to our surface and we now just go and find that our star tile we can change our pen color here um let's just go to like a light gray and we can see our surface color is black we'll leave actually let's go white for now we'll just kind of do these opposite for the moment oops let's uh actually i'm going to cancel out i change that specular and i don't want to do that um go back in change our pen to white or a light color so we're doing white on dark in this case kind of the opposite scheme of this we'll go grab our star tile hit ok and there we go we can now see our tile is matching up next step here though is we need to actually define our location here so we can actually see that this is going to just be our default this one actually gives us the handle that we can move this around with which is really nice if we wanted to we could add this one and this would actually allow us to scale things if we wanted but that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense so let's just go with this one we can set it right here and then if we click this on and off it'll reset it to the center and because this our shape is all 40 inches by 40 inches it's nice and clean in that respect so we see this in 3d we can actually see that our pattern is off just a little bit now and so this is the perfect time that we can use our document creative imaging align 3d texture settings and we can set the origin here i also like i use this all the time so i like having this down here as part of my little work profile here if you want to use the contraband work profile um then uh all i'll post a link to the blog where you can download that um it has a lot of kind of nice features that have been pulled up here so we can always reset this we can change our direction by rotating here you can it's kind of tough to see because of the star symbol but you'll see our lines are now rotated we can reset it set our origin point and now we are kind of back to where we wanted to be so okay there we go um what's awesome with this though is now in our 3d opengl view obviously we get this coming through nice and clean but if we switch our 3d styles we can switch this over to technical drawing and now we can start seeing that pattern coming through which is just really cool because this is kind of a preview of how things are going to look um in like a 3d document as well as a you know like a section or elevation and so this 3d uh vectorial viewpoint is just pretty cool for getting these different views we can always go back into our surface settings we can switch this around maybe make this like a light gray as our surface color we can make our pen any color we want um we could go black in this case and we can really kind of switch up and get like some previews of some different color schemes with this so um this is pretty cool we can always override this with whatever settings we have in our 3d styles here so if we wanted to change like our contours to i don't know like a bright pink for whatever reason then we could do that and get some different colors coming through so tons of different options here in archicad for getting these different views um which uh yeah is pretty pretty cool so um okay so from here next step let's actually go through and we'll create an image fill for this same texture now so the way that we can do that is we'll go back into our fill settings here we can create a new and we'll do an image fill this time again i'm going to do 0 9 31 star tile does it allow me to do that i think it does because it's a different type oh name already exists so we'll call this image okay and so once again we can go through and we can just kind of uncheck these if we don't want them that's kind of the default shape by the images it's like a camera shape i think um and so with this once again we can create a little star here maybe we'll do it just slightly different if i can get my mouse working we'll give it a little bit more of like a space there in the middle okay kind of close yeah we'll leave it um okay so now we can just go into our browse and because we already have loaded this up we can find it right there star tile there we go we just need to set our size okay and yeah now the next step here is um i think we're good we just need to change our cover fill we're scaling this with our model size again not our paper size so we'll hit ok and so now of course we can go in and we can set this but whenever i do this i like having this kind of all packaged up into an image fill override which we can see right now is not working but we can go in and we can adjust our image fill for you can see these are all different flooring surfaces we can go in we can set our criteria here to be working on our star tile where anything that has that surface it will come up as our surface or as our uh as our override criteria and then we just need to go in and we can set this as our star tile image okay so we do that exit out and now we can see that coming through so um okay there we are um one thing that's a little bit uh of a challenge sometimes with using these image fills is you can see that the the base point is not really moving at all when we move this so that's one kind of limitation i've found i need to figure out a way to kind of work around that to get that not to um be moving i guess when we bring it right to our base point that is probably why um so yeah is there a setting in there i'm not sure if there is for adjusting this where it's independent keep original proportions um yeah we need like an option for an origin here i don't know if that's going to change it at all so yeah it doesn't really move for us so anyway um yeah one limitation of the overrides there but now what's cool is we can switch back and forth of course in this view we can control our uh our cover fill pen and background just right here as well so once again we have the options of going through kind of picking different color schemes and really testing out how some different views are looking so yeah we are getting close here let's uh let's pull up a wall finish so we'll do this for our tile wall finish and let's just create like a little bit of a surround here let's make this a little bit larger maybe we'll go push this out another 20 inches let's create that wall so with this we'll set our base at zero we'll set it to six feet tall let's check our surface settings where's our surface settings all the way at the bottom okay we'll set this to our star tile and let's just create a little bit of say like a shower surround okay we can take this whole thing let's uh kind of center it up 20 inches in that direction 30 inches in that direction so we're nice and centered we're going to pull this off to the side again and okay let's check this out okay so we are still in our vectorial engine but you can see that we get a nice preview coming through so at this point obviously we can start going in and just once again tweaking our settings um if we wanted to go back to black we could do it this way um we got the override that's controlling everything um we could go changes back to our normal settings here so that speeds things up quite a bit um we could even render a little preview here if we wanted so um one thing that we'll probably have to do here is we didn't match our render settings so let's go in and do that we'll cancel that one don't save go in cinerender let's update cinerender from our basic so of course there's a bunch of different things in here that we could go in we could turn on some reflection um we'll just kind of leave this as our base [Applause] turn on a little no that might be way too much i don't get into these too often but i probably should so turn this down a bit turn down a little bit more you can kind of see our preview there okay so we can render one out now and yeah it's not looking too bad so um let's let this go for a second and um say we want to mix things up a little bit with a different scheme coming through so um what i'm thinking let's do is let's pull this one through um i think there's just a few little things here i probably want to update so let's change these lines uh from gray to let's make them black and i'm kind of liking that look one thing we can do is let's just group and you'll notice if we want to save this out right now i think it would probably have a little bit of an overhang here one workaround for that and actually i'm seeing as i go into this corner here there's i feel like this one we can push down and get that right on our edge might clean that up just a little bit um one cool thing with powerpoint is if we take a square and we kind of pull this square over we can take this grouped item we can copy it we can go to this square here we can turn on our picture and texture fill and just paste from our clipboard and now we have a nice clean version of this so we can turn our line to black and now we can see that this is a nice variation of that so we can take this i'm going to do a save as picture if i over road that version there then um yeah if well if i did that then it would automatically update everything if we do the star tile version 2 then to go through we could just duplicate our surface here let's go back to our basic engine let's go new um we'll call this green duplicate browse one thing here is we just need to go and refresh our library because we have it as a link library so as soon as we do that we can see that new one popping up there let's go to back to our surface settings um then we just browse there it is okay so now we've updated this we can change uh different settings here we can make this kind of like a green on white we go to 3d here um so everything that we have selected all of our walls we just simply need to go and re-specify now so we change this to green and we get a totally different look coming through which is pretty cool um so yeah let's render one out like this after we go in and let's just change our settings there so cinerender let's match update from our basic and so that turned off our reflectance there we can go in we can add another layer we can do let's do something different this time we could try try our phong let's turn our settings down quite a bit here that looks okay um okay so you can see how quick and easy this is to just make these simple updates once you kind of have things rigged up and working and yeah we can see that this is quite a different much more intense of a reflection here but it's it's interesting um so yeah definitely much more washed out probably needs totally different rendering settings but um or yeah we just need to tone it down much much more but okay so i think that pretty much covers um the basics of what i wanted to demonstrate in this to kind of recap what we've done is we just found an image online that we wanted to work with so again this is a workflow that you can uh work with obviously with your clients so tell them to go find the tiles that they want to have as kind of their feature floor or backsplash or shower tiles go get a few different options you can see how quick this is to bring this through we can create a few different variations as well we brought this in we set this up as you know just starting with bringing in our image we then went through and built our line work so that we could go copy this bring it through and um update our or sorry just copy and paste this directly into our symbol pattern here we also created our uh image fill um what else did we do we did a graphic override by going through and just simply applying that based off the surface so we did quite a bit in this video if you have any questions on any part of this workflow then just you know let me know leave it in the comment section and as always if you like this type of content make sure to subscribe and ring the bell so you get the notifications and if you think you know anyone else who can benefit from this type of workflow or if you think this is just interesting and want to share it then uh that'd be greatly appreciated um and for now we'll end this one here and uh we will catch you on another contra bim tutorial video here very soon thanks for watching

Channel: CONTRABIM

Views: 12,681

Keywords: ARCHICAD, GRAPHISOFT, Visualization, Symbol Fills

Id: y5hL3vgHsfs

Length: 33min 44sec (2024 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020