Moving Windows and Doors Between Walls – I bet you didn’t know this trick worked
Glitch Or Hidden Magic?
When exploring ArchiCAD, I often find things and need to ask myself “Glitch or Hidden Magic?” Sadly this post about Conditional Operators is an example of a great glitch. Hopefully Graphisoft will either remove it so I stop trying to use it or make it a real function (it is a little finicky in ArchiCAD 15). I hope they make it a reliable function because it’s really cool. I guess one could create a similar solution by using Renovation Filters (assuming you don’t need Renovation Filters for their real purpose).
Same Window, Different Walls
So I’ve been using ArchiCAD since 2006 and just discovered this technique for moving windows and doors from one wall to another. Maybe it’s fairly new, maybe it’s been around forever. Right now I only have ArchiCAD 13 and 15 on my machine, so someone else will need to verify how far back this ability goes.
Not mentioned in the Video…
A window can be moved between walls in plan, section, elevation, or the 3D window. Also I only talk about windows in the video, but everything I mention in this post also works with doors. And skylights in roofs and shells. Just like walls and reference lines, roof pivot lines need to align. While roof planes don’t need to be in the same elevation, a window/door needs to move into a wall, not below it. So if two walls are aligned in plan, but 10 feet apart in elevation, the window won’t jump from one wall to the next. You’ll need to move the window over, then up. So just one extra step.
03/26/12, 10:00 PM update: I just used this technique tonight and it saved me a huge hassle. I had a grouping of 8 windows on the west wall of this project that I wanted to also have mirrored about the corner on the south wall. I rotated a copy of the west wall to align with the south wall, slide the windows over to the south wall, deleted the rotated wall and I was done. Wow. That was easy. Also for those curious about the floor plans you briefly see in this video, those are all early schemes for a project I am designing with LABhaus.
gkovacsp
This one is not a glitch, it has been designed this way.
Jared Banks
Thanks! That’s what I assumed, though I was kind of surprised when I did it accidentally for the first time. Do you know if it is a very old function that I just never knew about? Or is it a recent addition?
Dominicus Björkstam
I think it has been around since ver. 14 or perhaps 13.
Not earlier than that. It was indeed documented and advertized at the time as a “new” feature.
Jared Banks
I know it works in 13. So maybe that’s when it appeared. I skipped over v12 and v13, so I guess I don’t feel too bad that I’m just discovering this now!
Eric Bobrow
Nicely done, Jared!
There were only two things I would have liked to see in your video that weren’t there: a demonstration of how you could grab multiple windows and drag them into the new wall; and how you can drag a copy of the window(s) rather than moving the original.
I particularly liked the demonstration of the various wall types and reference lines – that made it very clear what ArchiCAD was looking for in terms of allowing this type of operation to work.
Eric Bobrow
Ian Casssley
I’m running 11 and it works. Thanks for letting us know about it!
Ian Cassley
Yaser Harara
You’re totally right, I never even thought it was possible!
Sarah Patterson
Does this work if you copy and drag? So I moved a wall to match the reference line, copied and dragged the bank of windows but it won’t seem to let me delete the dummy wall without deleting the bank of windows I just copied and dragged? In fact it won’t let me move the wall at all without moving the windows (even if out of new wall?!)
Jared Banks
It should work. I wonder if the reference lines aren’t perfectly aligned and as a result the windows aren’t moving from one wall to another. I just double checked that it all still works in ArchiCAD 17 and it does.
As a test, take a wall, copy it to parallel to the reference line and try moving windows from one wall to it’s copy.