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Palettes and Facades

Palettes and Facades

Elevations

To understand Palettes and Facades, we need to start with elevations! Elevations are a special kind of Option that comes in all Higharc .home files by default. These are used to condition a variety of exterior design settings to turn on or off as with a Condition. To learn more, check out Options and Elevations.

Palettes

A Palette is a combination of color and material data assigned to particular entity types. Palettes control the color & material data for a home in Higharc and help create consistent styles of homes.

Palettes are an organization of numbered material slots such as ‘Wall Exterior 1’ or ‘Trim 2’ that can be activated by the ‘Exterior Material’ Setting Set to apply a consistent exterior palette across any number of homes. Palettes are created by Higharc’s graphics team as a collaborative effort between the Builder and the Customer Success Team.

A Palette can be added to a home design by:

  1. Creating a Setting Set with the ‘Exterior Material’ category selected.

  2. Under the ‘+’ sign, add the names of the Palettes to the project.

Note: It's up to the builder to decide what works best for their design team. These can have different names in the Sales view.

Facades

Facades are collections of finishes and trims that can be applied to roofs or edges or rooms. Facades can be managed locally in a file or referenced into another file. To get started creating and adding Facades to a home, Datums need to be created. Datums are arbitrary axes on the surface of walls & roofs that measurements are made against to align Facades.

Datum Settings

Some global datums, such as for Foundations and Facades, can be set up in the Datum Catalog and then referenced into multiple files.

To set up Foundation Datums:

  1. Add the Setting Set: ‘Datum Catalog’.

  2. Add a new Vertical or Lateral Facade Datum.

  3. Name, justify, set the anchor and offset of the Datum. The Datum should have a unique name that is easy to identify what its function is throughout the file and other referenced files.

Create Facades

Facades can be added in the Project Browser. They can be grouped together by selecting all and right clicking to keep them organized for different Elevations and Conditions.

To create a new Facade:

  1. Add a new Facade using the “+” in the Explorer List View under Facades.

  2. Give the Facade a unique name, making it identifiable from other facades used in the project.

  3. The first tab in Facades, ‘Basic’, allows for Cornerboard behavior and Wainscoting to be added or removed.

  4. For Finishes under Placement, Datums for Base Wall Bottom, Base Wall Top, Gable End Bottom & Gable End Top can be used to span facade materials. Custom datums created in the Datum Catalog can also be found and utilized here.

  5. Under the Materials Tab, a material can be assigned from the material slots coming from the Exterior Palette. The material can also be rotated or offset.

  6. Under the Trim tab in Placement, Datums created from the Datum Catalog can be utilized.

  7. A Trim Profile from the Profile Catalog can be used.

  8. The datum can be offset a distance.

  9. Under this group of settings, trim can be broken up by openings.

  10. Trims can be offset from the start, end or surface.

  11. Under Materials, a material can be assigned from the material slots coming from the Exterior Palette. Annotations can be added to Trim as well to automatically populate on elevations.

Facades Best Practices

  1. Create a strategy to group Facades. One strategy would be to group by ‘zone’ such as the garage elevation vs a main entry. Facades can also be grouped by Elevation.

  2. Create Trim Facades separately from Finish facades for flexibility of use.

  3. Create Gable Facades separately from Wall facades for flexibility of use.

Creating Multiple Facades

Palettes and Facades are Conditioned and Optioned using Elevations.

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