Modeling
The handoff to BIM
Turn the rooms you sketched into walls, slabs, doors and windows in one step, and see what it made and which rules it changed.
Make walls
- In a Design project, choose Make Walls (⇧W), or click Make walls, the last button of the tool palette.
- If the project has wall types, Studio asks which type the Exterior walls and the Interior walls take, or no type for the default thicknesses (8″ exterior, 4½″ interior). Click Make.
Studio then:
- turns each exterior room edge into an exterior wall that grows outward from the edge you drew;
- turns each shared edge into one interior wall centred on it;
- makes one slab per storey from the footprint;
- turns each door and window mark into a door or window hosted in its wall.
It runs as a job ("Making walls") with Cancel until the change begins, as one edit on the conversation on view or on Manual edits. The header then says BIM mode, and the BIM tabs and tools appear: the Sheets tab draws the set. To switch to BIM without making walls, use Promote to BIM.
Read the card
The conversation shows what the handoff made, updated and kept, each row selecting its wall. A rule that passed before and fails after (the exterior walls grew outward, so a setback can shrink) is listed under Now failing.
Rooms after the handoff
The rooms stay on the plan as a read-only overlay with their names and areas. Those areas are what is left between the walls: a 16′ × 14′ room with two shared edges reads 218 ft², not 224, because each shared edge loses half the interior wall.
Limit. The areas are worked out from the sketch and the default wall, so a wall moved or thickened by hand does not change them.
Go back to Design
File › Switch to Design (⌥⇧⌘D) returns the project to Design and keeps the walls: the BIM tabs and tools are hidden until you promote it again. To take the walls back as well, use Undo (⌘Z) right after Make Walls.
Run it again
Edit a wall by hand and run Make Walls again: the walls you edited are kept as they are, and the card lists them as kept.