HighRise is a complicated tool. It serves two purposes, really: to design the structure vertically, and to facilitate the ability to edit six different floors of data within Punch!. We will describe here a project to build a residence with four floors, to give you an idea of how HighRise works with Punch! to build such a house.
The house will have four floors including a basement and a study at the peak. The study will not occupy the full footprint of the house; it will be recessed in from the floor below it. The four floors are the basement, main level, bedroom floor and study. Note that this is a very simple house for the purposes of description only; it is not designed for elegance, and is not meant to showcase any other features of Punch!. Please excuse the simplicity. Since we are building this house with AS4000, will use a couple of Punch!'s PowerTools as we go along, namely the Topo Designer and the Roof Designer.
We will start Punch! in a new file and immediately call HighRise:
HighRise loads displaying the vertical planning and editing window. On the left is a representative sectional view of a wall; on the right are the entry options for the user. We have entered values to represent four floors, all with automatic flooring. Each floor has a floor-to-ceiling measurement of 8', and the three ceiling/floors are each 12" thick. The bottom slab is 5" thick, and the top ceiling is 8" thick. The top floor is recessed as we noted above. The basement will be sunk 80" into the ground. The roof will have a pitch of 4:12, and the soffit will overhang the wall by 18". We will let the zero reference plane be the top of the basement floor.
Pressing Next yields:
This second display shows our configuration, but with the derived Punch! measurements filled in. On the right are a few options; we request that the table of measurements be left on the plan. Note that all the automatic adjustments are grayed out, since no walls, floors or roofs exist on the plan as yet. At the bottom are the options we have at this point: we can Print the measurements table, we can go back to re-enter any parameters we may have errored on on the previous screen, we may Cancel the PowerTool, we can display the Help document, and we may Finish the PowerTool's business. "Finish" is a bit of a misnomer, as the excitement begins at that point. When Finish is indicated HighRise must:
Between these steps HighRise checks to see if there are any objects in the plan. If there are, it requests that the user assign them HighRise levels from the floors they occupy. This step is skipped in this instance as we are starting on a clean slate, with no prior existing objects. On the left side of the dialog is a list of the three Punch! floors that are available for editing. Depending on which floors we want to be displayed in Floors 2 and 3, the ceiling heights on these floors will vary, and they are shown in the list. If they are depicted in red, then they are different from what is currently stored in there, and will have to be changed after HighRise exits. Note that we have the reminders checkbox checked, so we will see reminders on the floors themselves as well. As shown we are selecting the basement level to be displayed on Floor 2, and therefore the main floor on Floor 3. When the Swap button is pressed, those levels are moved appropriately:
Having moved the levels, we must first change the Punch! Ceiling Heights so that they are correct for the level configuration. The easiest way to do this is to cycle through all three floors, changing the Ceiling Heights at each one as recommended in the reminder, and then delete the reminder text from that floor.
(Tutorial continued on the next page.)
HighRise and the contents of this help file are
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