Your first storey

Set up storeys before you draw. Everything else in Archeform hangs off them: which elements belong together, what a plan view cuts through, where a section sits, and how the model is structured in IFC.

It takes about a minute and it is the one step that is painful to fix later.

Add the first storey

1. Open the Project palette. It opens by itself at start-up; if you closed it, Plugins → Archeform → Project Palette brings it back.
2. In the STOREYS section, click +.
3. Give it a name and a height.

Adding storeys

The first storey sits at ±0,000. Anything you add afterwards stacks above or below it.

Name and level

A storey has a name and a level. They are separate on purpose.

Name	anything you like — Ground floor, 2.NP, Attic. It labels the storey, its plan scene and the IFC storey.
Level	a whole number. Rooms are numbered from it: a zone on level 2 becomes 201 or 2.01, depending on the format. Basements take negative numbers.

The level is suggested for you — one for the first storey, then two, three, and downwards for storeys inserted below — so most of the time you only type a name.

Height, not elevation

Each storey carries a height — floor to floor, 3 m by default. The elevation shown next to it is derived by stacking those heights, which is why you never type an elevation: change one storey’s height and everything above moves with it, contents included.

The active storey

Click a storey to make it active. This does two things that matter:

1. New elements land inside it. Archeform enters the storey’s group, so a wall you draw becomes part of that storey rather than floating loose in the model.
2. Plans and sections use it as the reference level.

Caution

If you draw without an active storey, the geometry lands at the top level of the model. It still works, but it belongs to no storey — it won’t appear in plan scenes, it won’t be exported into the right level of the IFC structure, and moving it later is manual work.

Look at the Project palette before you start drawing. One click saves an hour.

Isolate

The Isolate switch in the palette footer shows only the active storey and hides the rest. It is separate from selection — switching storeys while Isolate is off changes what is active without changing what you see.

Use it while drawing, turn it off to look at the whole building.

The ground

Site in the palette footer creates a ground plane at ±0,000 as IfcSite. Its top face sits 150 mm below zero, so the floor slab reads correctly against it in sections.

Editing and copying

Each row has:

eye	show or hide this storey
copy	duplicate the storey with everything in it
pencil	rename, change the level or height, insert above or below
bin	delete the storey and its contents

Copying a storey is the fastest way to build a repetitive building: draw the typical floor once, copy it upward, then change what differs. Copies get fresh identities, so the IFC export doesn’t see two elements claiming to be the same object.

In IFC

Each storey exports as IfcBuildingStorey with its name and elevation, and the elements drawn inside it are contained in it. That is the spatial structure a viewer shows as a tree.

See also

• Your first wall
• Storeys & organiser