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October 1, 2025 šŸ“‘Ā Live Plans!

HIgharc Release Notes

We're excited to share the latest Higharc release!

Live Plans, the new generation of architectural documentation produced in Studio, is now available to all Higharc users. Many of you have already been putting Live Plans to work, customizing construction documentation templates & deploying them across all your Studio files. We look forward to helping even more teams unlock the power of centrally managed documentation standards with Live Plans.

Here’s what you can expect with Live Plans. Check out the Knowledge Center, or talk with your Higharc team for more information.

  1. Centralization of your documentation standards & content

  2. Live, Community-specific Master Plans with unlimited options representation

  3. Custom formatting for automated Lot-specific CDs, exported directly from option-configured homes

Here’s a brief recap of a few of the latest exciting Live Plans developments. Moving forward, all future Live Plans updates will be shared together with the main release notes.

  • Integrate Existing Assets: Combine DXFs created outside Studio with model content to enrich your Live Plans documentation.

  • Seamless collaboration: Export Live Plans documentation as DXFs to share with colleagues working in other drafting tools

  • Dynamic Data Tables: Build and style data tables that automatically update to reflect any model configuration

  • Flexible Templates: Leverage centrally managed Live Plans templates that can be adapted to fit any plan in your library.

  • Ensure Legibility: Utilize automatic overlap reduction that keeps you plans clean and easy to read


āœļø For Design & Drafting

Ceilings are now a Room Finish

  • Ceilings have been moved from the Layout section to the Finishes section of the Room Inspector

  • By Default, Rooms now contain a flat ceiling entity. Removing this entity will result in a ceiling-less room. Users can add multiple ceiling entities to a room and condition them.

  • Several of the ceiling parameters have been renamed to improve clarity.

  • Ceiling Finish and Overall Ceiling Height Offset has been moved to the Ceiling Entity. Users can now condition individual ceilings with different ceiling heights, reducing the need to condition the overall room when they want to optionally adjust ceiling height.

Wall Assembly Finish Layer Datum Migration

  • Wall Assembly Finish Layers (exterior and interior) utilize existing legacy datums.

  • In order to continue advancing datum improvements, we’ve migrated the datums previously shown in this inspector to now reference datums in the datum catalog.

  • If an existing Wall Assembly Finish layer referenced a legacy datum, we preserved that relationship. Likewise an offset parameter is still available on the wall assembly inspector.

  • If a user previously utilized the ā€œnormalizeā€ parameter on this wall assembly inspector, those values were migrated to newly created datums in the datum catalog.

Snap Grid Control improvement

  • Added units to Grid Snap Distance for clarity

Live Plans Improvements

  • Section cut views now mirror with the home, ensuring that sections are always at the expected location and view angle.

  • Added the ability to adjust the offset for Level Annotations in Live Plans, so that it is easy to resolve collisions.

    • Under Effects, change the Level Annotation Method from Fixed, to Elevation Relative to adjust the position.

    • Use the Level Annotation Offset value to adjust the horizontal position of the vertical annotation.

  • Casework plan notes no longer appear in Showroom plan views

New - Framing Components and Assemblies are now in Studio

  • You can now define header size, jack stud counts and king stud counts for your openings in Studio.

**NOTE**

At the moment, these WILL NOT appear on drawings and WILL NOT report to Procure. This has been added for forthcoming improvements/additions to use and we will notify in future release notes when they are available for export with Live Plans drawings and Procure

  • Go to the Framing Catalogs to set up the framing components and header assemblies. Framing components are the most basic unit, while header assemblies also define the number of framing components needed for a header.

  • Go to Header Framing Settings to set up the logic of when to use a particular header assembly and how many jack studs are required. The header assembly and jack stud count associated with the smallest maximum span that works with an opening will be applied.

  • Go to Door Framing Settings and Window Framing Settings to define the number of king studs, rough opening size and cripple stud location. Here, you can also override the header assembly and number of jack studs.

  • For each window and door, you can also modify the header setup on an instance level by going into the Structure > Framing section. This will override any defaults applied through Header Framing Settings, Door Framing Settings and Window Framing Settings.

Studio & Live Plans Fixes!!

  • Removed the ability to create new edge hosted elevation notes. These notes should be created directly on the desired elevation. Existing edge hosted elevation note can still be selected to aid in their removal.

  • Fixed an issue preventing view template text size from clearing

  • Fixed an issue causing data sequence columns to disappear when changing column width.

  • Fixed an issue where electrical data sequences were outputting unexpected values.

  • Fixed an issue causing data sequences to display on top of Live Plans Previews

  • Fixed an issue preventing some data table linework from displaying.

  • Fixed clipping annotation issues in Elevation drawings.

  • Improved Live Plans snapping behavior to ensure that viewports always match the size indicated in the temp dims during viewport creation


🧾 For Purchasing & Estimating

  • Room name and room type attributes have been added to the Doors category.

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