Sections & elevations

Add a section

1. Click + in the SECTIONS header of the Project palette.
2. Click the start of the section line.
3. Click the end.
4. Click the side you are looking at.

That third click is the one people miss. It sets the viewing direction — which half of the building you see — rather than being a third point on the line.

Shift locks the line to an axis.

Adding a section

You get, in one go:

• a scene named Section A–A, with a perpendicular parallel camera
• a cut plane
• filled, hatched cuts through everything it crosses
• a section mark in every plan — line, arrows and letters

Letters are assigned in order. Deleting a section removes its scene, its fills and its marks.

Regenerating

The ⟳ next to SECTIONS rebuilds the fills and cameras. Do it after you have changed the model, in the same way as for plans.

Fills for a section are collected per section, so regenerating one does not touch another.

What is filled

Walls, slabs, roofs, footings, columns, beams, stairs, ramps and railings are filled where the plane cuts them. Terrain is filled too, but only in vertical sections — a hatched site in plan would swamp the drawing.

Compositions are drawn layer by layer, each with its own hatch. Where a partition meets a wall, the layers stop according to their priority instead of running through.

Caution

SketchUp draws its own section outlines on the cut plane, which is in front of where Archeform’s fills sit — they cannot be moved forward, because the plane would clip them.

Documentation scenes therefore switch SketchUp’s section edges off, and the outline comes from the boundary of the fills instead. If you turn them back on manually you will get doubled lines.

Elevations

⟳ next to ELEVATIONS builds the four facade scenes — north, south, east, west.

Before generating, facade edges are merged: the seam lines where a wall meets a slab, or one wall meets the next in the same plane, are hidden. Without that step a facade is criss-crossed with lines that exist in the model but not on a drawing.

Options, remembered between runs:

• show storey levels
• show door swing direction

Merge on demand

Merge facade edges in the ⋯ menu at the bottom of the palette runs the same edge merge without regenerating anything. It is idempotent — running it twice changes nothing — and it is undoable.

Annotation

Section marks in Archeform are deliberately plain: a line, arrows, a letter. Enough to see where the section is and which way it looks.

The reason is a SketchUp limitation: text cannot be styled through the API — no font, no size, no colour — and line weight per tag does not exist. Drawing-quality annotation is not achievable in the model.

It is achievable in LayOut, which is where it belongs. See LayOut export.

See also

• Plans
• Hatching
• Compositions