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• Publishing to module files

TechTip of the Month Contest Winner of September 2005

Ignacio Azpiazu and Matthew Lohden’s tip on publishing to module files!

- „I am about to embark on a project and am crossing my fingers that hotlinked Modules will help me, and I'm just wondering if anybody has any helpful suggestions/advice. This is what I'm doing: I have modelled a small street containing 9 buildings, all owned by one client. Over time they will be refurbishing or rebuilding each building on the street, and so I need to separate these buildings into different .pln files (for ease of documentation, smaller files etc...)
What I am hoping is that I can create each building into a module of the street, as I need to be able to place neigbouring buildings into some of the plns (e.g - if working on house #5, I'll need to put house #4 and #6 on either side of it.)
This all seems fairly straight forward, however there are a few things I'm concerned about, as I haven't used modules that often:

• Would there be an issue with file size? Or to put it another way, are modules intended to be used for small things (bathrooms etc...) and not be very happy with big things (like whole buildings)

• Layers - When separating the original street into modules, will all layer settings be retained? Or is everything put onto one layer?
  So, hope this makes some sense and if any body has any bright ideas or advice I'd love to hear it.
  Cheers, Tom.”

This tip proves that with the many different options to work with ArchiCAD, there is room to ’think out of the box’ – and this is a solution that does have certain advantages over the more ’conventional’ method of working with modules.

In order to be able to make use of this more ’abstract’ tip, you should understand that modules are like light-weight versions of the .PLN files, but without View Sets and unused attributes. So if you want to use viewsets with each individual building then the way would be to:

• have each building as a separate PLN file,
• in each file, set a view with only the layers visible which you want to send to the site file (e.g. using a layer combination named 'Site file export'),

• which you publish as a module file to a folder where you store the .MOD (Module) files for your buildings,

• and these will be the ones you will link to your site file; but on which you will never be operating from the site file itself.

For different versions, revisions or proposals you can have several module folders where each building (or each building story, it they are multistory) keeps its name, and redirect the links of all of them to the new folder from Hotlink Manager. (It might also be useful to have separate Site Layout Files for each proposal.)

The other conventional way would be to:

• hotlink the building pln files straight to the site file, but the advantage of having modules as the intermediate step is that you can use the say A-ANNO-FLOR-DIM layer in the building file for building floor plan dimensions that don't get exported to the site file, so that you can use that layer in the site file for overall dimensions. The same applies for notes, geometry, etc.

Hints: - Appropriate folder and file naming(e.g. that contains file version and/or date) will help you later to easily locate an earlier proposal for your client should he or she change his/her opinion. Of course this doesn’t happen that often, does it...? - The site layout might be needed in every separate building’s documentation – to avoid copy-paste hassles, it might be useful to have a separate module file just with the level dimensions, roads and plants in it that you could link into the individual buildings’ .PLN files ( - the editor's note :)

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