Reference surfaces

Using reference planes

Reference planes are the backbone of building design in Allplan. Default reference planes are ideally suited for early planning phases involving planar components. Subsequent planning phases (LOD 300/400) usually require inclined components. Here, you can use several custom pairs of reference planes. Depending on the component shape, you may need several discrete triangular surfaces for the custom planes. However, these planes cannot be edited quickly or easily.

Therefore, reference surfaces are an alternative to custom pairs of reference planes.

You can create reference surfaces from any polygonal or free-form 3D surfaces. To do this, you can use the 3D surface to reference surface tool, which you can find on the shortcut menu of any 3D surface.

At first, reference surfaces are local reference surfaces. This means that they are in the drawing file in which they were created from a 3D surface. Like components, reference surfaces can be copied, mirrored, moved or deleted. You can even copy them across drawing files. To tell them apart, you can use the shortcut menu to rename reference surfaces you copied or mirrored.

You can use the Insert or replace reference surface tool in the Planes palette to insert a local reference surface in the plane model. The height of the reference surface is defined by the z value of the lowest point in the reference surface. The Planes palette replaces the Floor Manager dialog box from the building structure in most cases.

In Allplan most architectural elements can be associated with reference surfaces. This includes not only walls and slabs but also components created with the Path or Planning and Planting tool.