Every Stage of your Renovation within the same BIM File
The Renovation Filters in Archicad are a powerful tool to organize what is old and what is new in your project. In other words, what is Existing, what is To be Demolished and what is New in your model.
We want to explain how it works using a small renovation project of a flat renovation we made. In this simple example you will understand how easy and powerful this feature is. In further articles related to this topic we will explain how to use the Renovation Filters to categorize different design options within the same model.
For now, let’s understand how does it works..
Existing, to be Demolished and New.
As we all know in any project that involves having an old structure or existing construction we have to distinguish and document what this three types of element in order to be able to communicate and build our project.
A Renovation Filter is a way to filter the information in the model depending on two values that every element in Archicad has: Renovation Status and Show on Renovation Filter. We have to set up this two values in order to filter them properly and categorize the information in the model according to reality. You can find this two values in the Settings Dialog of every tool in the Tags and Categories menu under the name of Renovation:
Renovation Filters Options can be found in Documents>>Renovation>> Renovation Filter Options:
There are different Renovation Filters created in Archicad by default that filter the information depending on how this two values are set up:
01 Existing Plan
02 Demolition Plan
03 After Demolition
04 New Construction
05 Planned Status
We also can create new Renovation Filters if we need them or even modify the parameters of each filter.
Renovation Status
We have to add this status to any element we create in our file. Only by doing this we will be able to Filter them. By default every object we create in Archicad is set up as Existing Status. We can change this value also to be Demolished or New. Depending on which Status we define for an element this is how it will be shown in each Renovation Filter.
Show on Renovation Filter
In this value we can “force” an element to be shown only in a particular renovation filter or in “All relevant Renovation Filters”. By default regarding the Renovation Filters the elements in Archicad will behave like this:
An Existing element will be visible by default in all renovation filters except in 04 New Construction.
An element set To Be Demolished is going to be visible by default only in the first two renovation filters (01 Existing Plan, 02 Demolition Plan).
Elements with its status set up to New will be visible on the last two renovation filters (04 New Construction, 05 Planned Status).
If you think about it is quite logical way to organize the information…
How does it works?
In this example every Element of the Model is set up to a particular Renovation Status. All the elements in the model have the value of Show on Renovation Filter set to: All relevant filters.
Let’s start:
To understand how the Renovation Filters work we are going to show two images of each Filter: one showing how the model looks like in 3D with the Filter activated and another one showing the settings of the Renovation Filter Options menu. This menu can be customize so you do not need to copy the settings exactly how we show them. This is just an example to understand how it works and how it looks like.
01. This is the Existing Plan of our project. How the flat looks before the renovation. In this View we have activated the Renovation Filter 01 Existing Plan. All the elements you see have Existing or To Be Demolished in its renovation Status:
02. Here we can see that some of the elements have been turned Yellow. This is because we are in the innovation Filter 02 Demolition Plan. All the elements in yellow color are defined as To Be Demolished in their Renovation Status. In the renovation filter we selected to Override the visual attributes of the elements to be demolished. In the Renovation Override Styles button we selected to show the elements of this Renovation Status in yellow.
03. Here we see how the flat looks after demolition works. Renovation filter 03 After Demolition. The only elements that are displayed in this Filter are those with Existing in their Renovation Status.
04. These are all the New elements of our model showing what is going to be built for the renovation project. Renovation filter 04 New Construction. The only elements that are displayed in this filter are those with New in their Renovation Status.
05. And this is finally how it looks after the renovation this is the Renovation filter 05 Planned Status. Basically you can see the existing elements as well as the New elements as it would be in reality.
For this article we used an example where all our model elements had the value Show on Renovation Filter set to “All Relevant Filters”. This is the easiest way to go when we have only one Final Option for your project. We will see how useful this value will become when we have several Options or Proposals and we want to have all of them inside our model. But we will see an example of this in our next article about Renovations and Rehabilitation Features.
We hope you liked it and find it interesting!
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