When a new Punch! project is first opened up, it displays a ground plane textured with grass, with a cloud-filled sky overhead. That grassy plane follows the Zero Plane, the vertical reference used in all of Punch!'s vertical calculations. All elevations are measured from that plane. Later on, the grass may change by adding slopes and berms or depressions (collectively, "terrain" or "topography") to the original flat drawing area, but the Zero Plane will remain exactly where it was originally. A drawing may or may not have a feature corresponding to the Zero Plane. If it does, then that feature has an elevation of 0, but there is no requirement that any feature reside at elevation 0. It is an arbitrary reference and has no special meaning attached.
However, it does allow us to define "elevation" as it is used in Punch!. Rather than a measurement relative to sea level, to which many are accustomed, elevation is measured in Punch! as the vertical distance between the Zero Plane and the lowest extent of an object (there are a couple of exceptions which we'll get to in a minute). The "lowest extent" of a roof is the bottom of the eaves; for a floor, the bottom surface (i.e., the ceiling of the floor below). All objects which are visible in LiveView have an individual elevation. Some, like windows and light switches, have an elevation relative to the wall they are in, which in turn has its own elevation. In this scheme, sometimes an elevation will be positive (when the object is above the Zero Plane) or negative (partially or completely nelow the Zero Plane). There is no prejudice for positive over negative elevations. The only exceptions to the forgoing are:
Sometimes a design for a house has roofs on more than just the top of the highest floor. Many designs have second floors which are recessed in from one or more of the exterior walls of the main floor, and a partial roof on that recessed area which runs into the walls of the second floor. Thus there are roofs on both floors, and HighRise can yield details for both of these roofs.
Exterior walls in Punch! are meant to be the walls that bound a building. They separate the inside from the outside on each floor. All walls in Punch! have the property of being able to join with one other wall at each end, thereby creating a running series of walls; such a set of linked walls is called a wallset. The exterior walls are intended to form one complete wall set which links back to the beginning, creating an enclosed space. That wall set is termed "closed". This is useful to Punch! for a number of things: it provides a good usable definition of "floor area" on each floor. It definitively separates what's inside from what's outside the house, and it provides the footprint for cutting the terrain, so the grass doesn't appear inside the house. It does one other thing: it provides the autofloor. All walls that are not part of an exterior wall set should be interior walls. (See The Ten Commandments of Walls for more information.)
The autofloor, as its name implies, is an automatic floor that doesn't need to be separately specified. It grows from the exterior wall set and covers the entire "inside" of the building. Since walls are usually separately specified on each floor, it provides the floor and ceiling on each floor, excepting only the ceiling of the highest floor. It is optional; it can be turned off. If it is on, it has a defined thickness, defaulting to the rather odd choice of 1/2". There also can be more then one exterior wall set on a floor, though they cannot overlap. An example of such might be a house and an unattached garage on the same plan. Finally, since autofloors are optional, they may be turned off and the manual floor tool used, possibly multiple times, to provide the floor(s).
This feature of the autofloor makes defining wall elevation tricky. The elevation of an exterior wall is its lowest extent when the autofloor is off. When it is not, the wall extends downward along with the autofloor through its thickness, thus in effect both heightening the wall and raising it in elevation so it's lowest extent - at the bottom of the autofloor - is it's elevation measurement.
Finally, interior walls are drawn so that they also sport the 1/2" thickness that the exterior walls have, but are also drawn 1/2" higher than the exterior walls. This is manifest in the way that interior wall trim is 1/2" off the floor, and the fact that the top of interior walls penetrates the ceiling to a 1/2" depth. This is usually not very noticeable, but it is there. More recently, AS4000 has introduced automatic crown molding, and that molding sticks 1/2" into the ceiling if not corrected.
Punch! has three floors on which a user can build. These "Floors" are simply bins in which objects reside. If an object is in the First Floor bin, then it will appear on the first floor's plan, and not on any of the others. Since floors are normally used to present horizontal slices of a building's design, the floor usually contains all the objecst at a given interval of elevation, but that is not necessarily the case with Punch!. There is no necessary correlation between the floor an object exists in and that object's elevation. It is very possible for a commode in the basement bathroom to accidently make its way to the first floor's Dining Room. If it does, it is still in the basement, as a LiveView walk-through will show, because the elevation it has is appropriate for the basement, but since it is actually a member of the next floor up (say, Floor 2) it will appear on that floor's plans, and not in the basement plans. In this case, the commode needs to to have its floor setting changed, but this illustrates the possibilities.
Punch! provides a set of three quantities, one for each floor, called Ceiling Heights. These all default to 96" (8'), which is nominal for American houses (assuming no thickness for the floor, which is not very nominal). What the Ceiling Heights do is give default heights to walls when they are drawn, and to drive three other quantities that don't have their own defaults, known as Working Elevations. These elevations function to provide a starting elevation for any object created on a particular floor. Many users expect that they would be defaulted and permanent unless manually reset, but that's not the case. They are individually set from the Ceiling Heights (actually, the sum of the ceiling heights of the floor's below) and some other measurements whenever a floor is opened, so if a working elevation is set, then the floor changed, then changed back, the working elevation will be reset to its computed value based on the ceiling heights. This may be somewhat irritating at first glance, but it cuts both ways and can be rather useful. The key is knowing what it does so advantage may be taken of the way it does work, and the point is that the ceiling heights, not the working elevations, need to be properly set at the start of a project.
For example, perhaps one wants to set a table with plates, silverware and accessories. It is a good idea to set the current floor's working elevation to the top of the table before creating any of the objects. All the newly created objects will then reside at the proper height. However, when that effort is finished, simply swapping floors will return the working elevation back down to the floor where it more properly belongs, as most objects (walls, stairs, furniture) need to be elevated to the floor's top.
Every object, once it is created, has an independent elevation and is thereafter independent of Ceiling Heights and Working Elevations. Note that changing the Ceiling Heights and Working Elevations has no effect on any already created object. They affect only objects created after they are set. Remember these points as we take a break here and get HighRise installed and updated.
(Note: most of the ideas on this page are described in more detail in The Ten Commandments of the Vertical.)
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