Microstation: Creating a Figure-Ground Drawing

DIGITAL SESSIONS WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE - CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

MICROSTATION: CREATING A FIGUREGROUND DRAWING

WASSIM JABI AND SERGIO PINEDA

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DIGITAL SESSIONS WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE – CARDIFF UNIVERSITY DR. WASSIM JABI AND MR. SERGIO PINEDA

MICROSTATION: CREATING A FIGURE GROUND DRAWING GETTING YOUR SOURCES RIGHT This tutorial will demonstrate how to create a Figure/Ground drawing from files sourced from Digimaps.

Digimaps is a resource that enables professionals and students to have accurate and updated planimetric data of any location in the UK. Cardiff University is affiliated to Digimaps, so if you need any planimetric information for your projects you should visit: http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/ As long as you have the address (or at least the postcode) of the desired location in the UK, Digimaps will be able to provide files with the all buildings, structures, railways, roads/streets/highways, waterways/rivers, forests/trees, etc.

They can also provide topographical surveys.

Luckily for you, this job has already been done for your Autumn 2010 project! Here is what you need: SITE-SURROUNDINGS.dgn

Open the file in Microstation. Now, make sure you can find your site on the file.

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WHAT REFERENCES CAN DO FOR YOU References have always been one of Microstation's most important features. Imagine that you have a big team of architects working on one same project. You could have one person working on the definition of the walls/finishes, another person detailing the staircase, and yet another person designing an outdoors landscape feature. At the time of putting together a print for the groundfloor (to include walls, staircases and landscape) you can ‘reference’ all these files into one general print file, which itself doesn’t include the information on which the architects are working. It just ‘shows’ the contents of other files.

In the same way, we are going to Reference the site drawing received from Digimaps. The truth is that although it is great to have a resource like Digimaps (to access any planimetric information needed for projects in the UK) the drawings provided by Digimaps often are very heavy (much more than needed!) and bring a lot of clutter – i.e. unnecessary drawing lines, unnecessary levels, unfinished lines, etc.

So the idea is to reference the Digimaps drawing, and copy from it exclusively the information needed for the drawing we are putting together. This way, our drawing will be manageable and easy to work with.

CREATING A NEW FILE Close the Digimaps file to be referenced, and create a new Microstation file called ‘Figure-Ground’.

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Now go to ‘Settings>Design File’

This will open the DGN File Settings window, where you can modify many settings for the file such as Background colour, grid dimensions, snaps, and Working Units. The reason we are opening this option (working units) is because we want to make sure it is set to ‘Meters’, so that when we insert a dimension the machine know exactly what we are refering to (some computers might bring by default Feet and Inches, as this is a widely used standard in North America).

Also, make sure you have the following tool boxes open: Main Classic and Modify. To do this go to ‘Tools>Tool Boxes’ and make sure they are ticked. You can then locate them on the left hand side of the screen.

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ATTACHING A REFERENCE Click on this icon to open up the References window:

It will be located somewhere around here:

You will get the following window:

Now click on the ‘Attach Reference’ icon:

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You will be prompted to locate the file you wish to reference, so locate SITE-SURROUNDINGS.dgn. Once you’ve selected the file, you will get the following window:

Make sure you have ‘No Nesting’ selected in the ‘Nested Attachments’ option! Nesting a file is basically copying entirely into the new file, which is not what we want to do with the Digimap file.

Click OK. At this point, you might think that nothing happened, because it is very probable that you won’t see any actual lines/drawings on your screen.

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This happens Digimaps might have located the file quite far away from the (0,0) coordinates of the file, and currently your view of the screen is focuses very near the (0,0) coordinates. So click on the ‘Fit View’ icon:

The fit view icon is located here:

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You should now see all a reference of the SITE-SURROUNDINGS.dgn file, something like this:

You can turn on/off the reference by ticking or unticking the following:

When a file is attached as a reference, the master file to which it is attached must record the name of the file so it can be opened in future sessions. MicroStation also saves the full file specification of where the reference file was located.

This is very convenient for the user attaching the reference file, because it means that they will always be able to locate the reference file when they reopen the master file (unless, of course, they move or delete the file).

CONTROLLING LEVELS IN REFERENCES Just as you can control the levels that are on and off in your drawing, you can control the levels that are on or off in the References attached to your drawing. For this, click on the ‘Levels Display’ icon:

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In the levels display window click on the SITE-SURROUNDINGS.dgn file name.

By clicking on each one of the names in the levels-list you can turn them on or off. Test it!

Now, try to find the level that contains the lines corresponding to the buildings surrounding your site.

This is now the base for a Figure/Ground drawing: the contours of all the buildings that make up the physical structures surrounding your site. The next step will be to capture those lines, and incorporate it into your own file, without including all the other junk in the Digimaps file.

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COPYING ELEMENTS FROM A REFERENCE Zoom out and select all the elements that form the buildings surrounding your site.

Click on the copy icon from the copy fly out menu:

Zoom into the drawing until you can clearly notice a corner within the drawing. Making sure your snaps are on,snap to one of the corners in the drawing, and click. You will notice that you then have control over the whole set of elements you just grabbed. Microstation is now waiting for you to provide a second point where it will paste all these elements, so click again at the exact same point where you clicked the first time.

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If you now turn off the reference, you will notice that all outlines of the buildings make now part of your drawing. You also have a new level that you didn’t create yourself!

THE LEVEL MANAGER Open the ‘Level Manager’ window:

You can rename the new level by right clicking on it and going to ‘Rename’. Rename it as ‘Buildings’.

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You can also change the colour, line type and line thickness of the level.

THE FILLING TONE Once you’ve decided on a colour, line type and line weight for the ‘Buildings’ layer, close the Level Manager. If you zoom into the drawing and clikc on a specific building you will be able to select it’s borders. Sometimes they will appear to be a single contour, and sometimes they will apear to be made out of multiple smaller lines that touch at their ends. To create a Figure/Ground drawing, we need these contours to be single entities that close (i.e., they enclose an area and can be given a filling colour).

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The image above shows a building contour that is not complete and does not describe an area. The challenge now is to unify all the lines that form this building. To do this we will use the ‘Create complex shape’ tool:

A window will open. Make sure that the you have chosen ‘Automatic’ as the method, ‘Solid’ as the area, ‘Opaque’ as the Fill type, and choose a colour of your preference for the fill (the same as the line colour is a good place to start).

The click on a segment of a building, and then click on the next segment to the right of the first one. There should be a sort of ‘string’ of connections occuring before your eyes in such a way that all of a sudden multiple lines have now been stitched into a single element.

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Why does it not have a fill if we specified so? Because ‘Fill’ is not ticked by default in the ‘View Attributes’ Menu. Go to ‘Settings>View Attributes’ and tick Fill. You should now have something like this:

AREAS Ok, so now you know how to create solid shapes with actual filling tones. Do you want to know the area of the filled shape? Easy: select the shape, and go to ‘Element>Information’. Then click on ‘Geometry’ and you will get a perimeter and area for each shape.

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Now all you need is to repeat the process with all the other buildings you wish to include in your drawing. Good luck!

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WASSIM JABI, PH.D. IS A SENIOR LECTURER AT THE WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE SERGIO PINEDA, AADIP IS AN ARCHITECT AND A PROFESSIONAL TUTOR AT THE WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

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