Foundations

Two kinds: strip footings running under walls, and pad footings under columns.

Strips under walls

The fastest way, and the one you will use on most projects:

1. Select the walls, right-click → Archeform → Foundation from Walls.
2. Click walls to add them — click again to remove.
3. Press Enter.

You get a strip under every selected wall. Its faces come from the wall’s own faces plus a toe and a heel, so the footing is correct whatever the wall’s justification. The top of the strip is the base of the wall.

It does not need a closed loop — corners mitre themselves from the axes. A wall that already has a strip is skipped, so running it twice does nothing.

Drawing strips by hand

Foundation on the toolbar draws a chain like a beam. The point to understand:

Caution

The axis you draw has z at the top face, and the body goes downward.

You are drawing at the foot of the walls, not at the bottom of the excavation.

↑ / ↓ switches justification between left, centre and right of the axis.

Pad footings

Pad Footing — Plugins → Archeform → Tools — places a rectangular pad, in the same way a column is placed:

← / →	rotate in 45° steps
Type a number + Enter	exact angle
↑ / ↓	reference point — centre, corner, edge

The click point is the top face here too.

Editing

Right-click a foundation → Archeform → Foundation Tools. They are the same tools as beams — the adapter is shared, so behaviour is identical:

Join	bring two strips to their intersection and mitre
Joint	toggle an end between mitre and butt
Extend	run a strip out to another
Trim	cut one back at another
Stretch	drag one end

Caution

Extend and Trim on a footing aim at the face of the target, not its axis — wall semantics, not beam semantics.

Extend brings the strip to the near face so it just touches; Trim cuts it back to the far face so it does not run inside. That is what you want under masonry, and it is the opposite of how beams behave.

Parameters

Field	Default	What it does
Width	600 mm	of a strip
Height	1 000 mm	depth below the top face
Toe / Heel	100 / 100 mm	projection beyond each wall face
Pad	900 × 900 × 800 mm	width, depth, height
Strength class	C25/30	concrete grade
Exposure class	XC2	environment

Changing the width of a strip holds the centre of its faces, so an asymmetric footing generated from a wall keeps its asymmetry. Changing justification recomputes from the axis instead.

Strength and exposure class go into Pset_ConcreteElementGeneral, so the structural engineer gets them without a separate schedule.

In IFC and in drawings

Exports as IfcFooting with PredefinedType strip_footing or pad_footing, Qto_FootingBaseQuantities and Pset_FootingCommon.

In plans a footing below the storey is drawn as a dashed outline in the storey above it — the convention for something under the slab you are standing on. In its own storey it is cut and hatched normally.

See also

• Walls
• Columns & grid