From the course: Archicad 24 Essential Training

Slabs - Archicad Tutorial

From the course: Archicad 24 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Slabs

- [Instructor] All right, welcome back. So we're going to talk about the slab tool now. So the slab tool is similar to the fill tool in a lot of ways, especially in the floor plan view, but let's go into that setting. So in the toolbox, I just double-click on this little flat plane object and that's the slab tool. So when I open it up, it gives me a few different options. So we have the composite style or the structure of the slab. And so we have either basic which means that there is no composite associated with it. And so that means that there's no different materials that are sandwiched together to kind of make the element itself. Or we can select the composite which is the sandwich of different materials that make it up. I'm going to use the composite. So let's select the floor generic 10 inch F01. And you can also select where the reference plane is. So that means like if you're placing this onto the first floor and zero is the reference plane then the top of that slab will be at zero, versus if you select the bottom of that reference plane then the bottom of that slab will be at zero. Or you can select the top of the structure of the slab. So if you had like carpet or some other material that wasn't actually something that needed to be at zero but your not finished floor but your slab or your wood deck was at zero, then you might want to choose this. I'm going to choose this one just because for me that makes the most sense. I'm not measuring necessarily the finished floor zero. I'm probably going to manage to structure as the core of the structure at zero. And then you can select which floor it goes on. So if you wanted it to be on a different floor than the one you're working on for some reason you could select there. And then you could also adjust the height. So if you wanted it to be two feet above your current floor, so say if you had a mezzanine or some transition in the horizontal plane, then you could adjust it there. And then you can also adjust how it shows up. So if you want it to show up on multiple different stories even though its home story is the first floor you could do that here. So you could say show on all stories. So for instance, again, if you had a mezzanine or some interstitial floor that was between two floors but it needed to show up on three different floors then you could do that here. And then you can override the cut fill. So if you wanted it to look differently than what the element itself or the building materials were showing, you'd do that here. You can also give it a cover fill. If you want it to show up with concrete or carpet or something of that nature, you could do that here. So for now I think what I'll do is I'll choose concr, well, it's actually wood. So since it is wood, it would be a little confusing. I'm just going to not use a cover fill at this moment. I'm going to deselect that. And then it already, with the model, the surface elements itself you can adjust what the top surface is, you can adjust what the side surface is or the bottom surface is. So that's helpful if you're creating a rendering and you wanted it to show up as carpet but it was actually this generic floor material. So it just gives you a little bit more options. Then you can select the layer. So I'm going to choose, I think this makes sense. So it is a floor, so I'm going to choose floor and then we'll say okay. Up here it has a few different geometry methods. So you can use the polygon method, which we talked about before. You can use a rectilinear construction method or you can use an angular rectilinear method. I'm going to use the polygon method because I don't think that this is a perfect rectangle. And again, similar to what we had worked on before with the fill and the zone, we can just go over and I can select my space bar and I can use the space bar or the magic wand, and I can click and let's see here. So there it is. Just by selecting, using the magic wand by pushing the space bar, I'm able to create that slab. And let's look at it in 3D. So if I go to view and let's look at show all in 3D, and there it is. So that is the slab that we just created. So let's go back to the floor plan. So if I just click up here and go back to the floor plan. So that works, let's create a slab for this sidewalk. So I already have my slab tool selected, or I did. And so let's put this on a actual slab instead of a floor 'cause that's more appropriate. And now let's change it from this composite and let's just choose a simple volume and let's just give it a concrete site work. So I'm just going to choose the building material concrete site work, and I'm going to do the polygonal method but I could also just use the space bar. And one thing to be cognizant of is if you push the space bar and you see that blue line around, that is where it's to create the slab. But if I move it up, I'm still holding the space bar, I can see that if I get on the edge that it's going to make a slab around the entire fill itself versus inside of this area because this line here is causing it to want to stop. So let's just quickly make that sidewalk. So I'm clicking each of the edges or the nodes or the intersections there. And I'm just going to make a mistake on purpose here. Whoops, I just, nope, that's not exactly what I wanted to do. So what do I do to get back without losing all of the work that I just did? I just push the delete button and it allows me to go back one node. And maybe I made two mistakes. I could push delete again and I've just gone back again. So very useful, very helpful. Especially when you're doing things that have lots of clicks to execute. And now I can just finish that and click and there we go. So let's look at that again in 3D. So if I go to view, elements in 3D view, and then I go show all in 3D and now I have my sidewalk and I have my first floor plate. So that's slabs.

Contents