Tutorial 11: Attach Panels

Bring the panels you built onto the site drawing — attach the set as a flat inventory, proof it, print the site plan, and stand it on its wall lines with Tilt-up Panels.

Tutorial 10 built the Riverside site drawing — grid, wall lines and slab — before any panel existed, and Tutorials 2–9 then built TP08-12. This lesson goes back to the site drawing and brings the panels onto it: Attach Panels, then Tilt-up Panels. Attaching is how the whole panel set gets onto the project plan as external references (xrefs): every panel listed on the wall lines, laid flat around the building at its true size beside the wall it belongs to. That flat set is how the project gets proofed — count the panels against the wall lines, check the numbering, catch a wrong width — before anything stands. Tilt-up Panels then stands each panel on its wall. Because the panels are xrefs, the set always shows each drawing’s latest saved state.

Note

This lesson also exists in the browser. Work it in ConstructiVision on the web — same steps, same values, so you can follow either and end up with the same panel.

What you will build

A full pass of the attach cycle on the Riverside Distribution Center site drawing from Tutorial 10: lay the panel set out with Attach Panels (both Riverside panels flat beside their walls), proof that inventory, print the site plan, reset the set with Detach Panels and attach it again, take a short detour to see what Attach does when a listed panel’s drawing does not exist yet, and close by standing the set on its walls with Tilt-up Panels.

Before you start

  • Complete Tutorial 10: Site Drawing and Tutorial 9: Brace Points & Expansion Gaps — this lesson continues in the riverside site drawing Tutorial 10 created, and attaches the panel drawings: Panel 1 from Tutorial 1 and TP08-12, which Tutorials 2–9 finished.

  • This lesson asks you no questions: Attach and Tilt-up read everything from the site drawing and the panel drawings. The one dialog you meet is a file picker, in Step 6.

Want to check your work? Download the solution to compare against at the end. It references the panel set as xrefs, so keep it in one folder with TP08-012.dwg and TP08-001.dwg.

Screenshots are on the way

This lesson is written from the product’s dialogs and prompts; annotated captures are being added as the site walkthrough is completed.

Lesson

Step 1 — Reopen the site drawing

  1. Open riverside site.dwg from the project folder — or click Site Plan on the toolbar and use Edit Existing Site Drawing to pick it from the project’s site drawings.

  2. The grid, wall lines and slab line are as Tutorial 10 left them, and there are no panels on the plan yet: the wall lines list them, and this lesson brings them in.

Step 2 — Attach the panels

  1. Click Site Plan on the toolbar. In Site Options, click Attach Panels.

  2. No question is asked. Each panel’s width and height come from the panel drawing’s own record, so nothing is typed and nothing is guessed.

  3. Every panel listed on the wall lines is inserted as an xref and laid flat around the building, beside the wall it belongs to: a row along the north side, a column on the east, a row along the south and a column on the west. Each panel is at its real size, with a P-NN mark at its centre. Here that is two panels: Panel 1 north of the building and TP08-12 east of it. The view stays in plan.

This flat set is the perimeter inventory: every panel the wall lines list, laid out so you can count and proof it before anything stands. Because the panels are xrefs, this site plan is a window onto the panel drawings themselves: a panel revision shows up here the next time the site drawing is opened or its xrefs are reloaded (AutoCAD XREF → Reload).

Note

Attach Panels reads everything it needs from the site drawing and the panel drawings. If you run it in a site drawing whose wall lines have not been defined, it stops and tells you to open the Wall Lines dialog first — nothing is guessed.

Step 3 — Proof the inventory

Zoom extents and look at what came in:

  • Every listed panel is present. Riverside lists two: Panel 1 lies north of the building and TP08-12 east of it, each beside the wall it belongs to. On a full building, count the flat panels on each side against that wall line’s panel list — the numbers the wall dialog marked along each run (Tutorial 10, Step 4) are the headcount.

  • Each panel is at its real size, read from its own drawing. A panel that looks too wide or too narrow against its neighbours is a width to check before anything stands.

  • The P-NN marks number the set, one at the centre of each panel.

  • Attach never stacks a second copy. On a flat inventory it sweeps its own previous set before it places, so running it twice leaves one set. Once the set stands (Step 7), Attach refuses rather than lay a constructed site flat again — Detach Panels first is how you start over.

This is the view a fabricator proofs the project from: is every panel present, is the numbering right, do the widths look sane — all before a single panel stands. Since each panel in it is the panel drawing itself, the inventory is never stale.

Step 4 — Print the site plan

  1. In Site Options (toolbar Site Plan), click Print Selected Layers.

  2. The site-print layer preset is applied for you — gridlines, wall/slab construction lines, hardware, and most dimension layers are turned off, leaving the solid panel and slab views — and then the plot dialog opens. From here it is exactly the plot dialog from Plot and print drawings: pick the printer, confirm the paper, and OK.

  3. For a working print with everything on it, Print All Layers plots the full drawing instead. And when a large site gets slow on screen, View Selected Layers opens a checkbox picker over the site layer families — unchecking the panels box freezes layer 0, which hides every attached panel at once.

Step 5 — Detach and attach again

  1. Click Site Plan on the toolbar, then Detach Panels in Site Options. Every panel xref disappears; the grid, wall lines, and slab stay. Nothing about the panels is lost — the wall lines still carry the panel lists.

  2. Click Site Plan → Attach Panels again. The same two panels come back, flat, in the same places.

Detaching is the reset lever of the site workflow. You will reach for it whenever a panel’s width changes (a width change shifts every panel along the same wall line) and after any wall-line edit, since redrawing wall lines invalidates the attached panels’ insertion references.

Step 6 — Meet the missing-panel check

On a real project, panels get listed on the wall lines before every panel drawing exists. Attach re-places every panel each time it runs, so it will not run past a panel whose drawing it cannot find: a panel it erased and could not put back would be lost. Riverside has no missing panels, so make one:

  1. Open Walls on the toolbar. In row 2 (the east wall), change Include Panels from 12 to 12 2 — panel 2 has no drawing in this project. Click OK, then click Site Plan → Attach Panels.

  2. Attach looks for panel 2’s drawing in the site drawing’s folder. When it cannot find one, the command line says panel 2 (TP08-002) not found. Pick its drawing and a file dialog opens, titled Select the drawing for panel 2. If the drawing is somewhere else, pick it here: Attach uses that file, and your choice sets the naming pattern for the rest of the run.

  3. Click Cancel. Attach refuses the whole run and says why: cv-attach REFUSED: 1 of 3 panel(s) on the wall lines have no readable width: TP08-002, because panels are sided by their cumulative width and one missing width would move every panel after it. It adds NOTHING was erased and NOTHING was drawn, and the two panels already in the inventory are left in place, untouched.

  4. Undo the detour: set the east wall’s Include Panels back to 12, click OK, then Attach Panels again.

Step 7 — Stand the set with Tilt-up Panels

  1. In Site Options, click Tilt-up Panels. With no panels selected it acts on every panel on the site, and the command line says so — select some panels first to tilt only those.

  2. Each panel moves from the inventory onto its wall line, standing in the position Attach recorded for it: Panel 1 on the north wall, TP08-12 on the east wall. TP08-12 also gets the braces its brace points call for (Tutorial 9), drawn on layer CV-BRACE.

  3. Layout Panels lays the set out flat for casting, with Save Layout recording the casting arrangement (one per site drawing; each save replaces the last). Tutorial 12: Construction Layout works that whole cycle, with Tilt-up standing the set back up at the end.

One rule ties the whole cycle together: panel edits flow into the site drawing on their own (xrefs), but a width change or a wall-line edit means Detach Panels → fix → Attach Panels → Tilt-up Panels — the set’s positions are computed at attach time.

Check your result

Tip

Check your work automatically. Type CV-CHECK-LESSON11 at the command line — ConstructiVision grades the attach cycle’s stored results: the standing record Attach writes, the attached panel xrefs themselves (both panels present, no stacked second copy), and the wall-line panel lists the step-6 detour must leave restored — with a pointer back to the step for anything that doesn’t match. Run it with the site drawing current; run in a panel drawing it points you back here instead. The print, the Step 6 file dialog and the tilted set leave nothing stored to grade — those stay on the eye checklist below.

You should now be able to verify all of the following:

  • Attach Panels lays the set out flat around the building, with no question asked; the inventory carries every listed panel at its real size with its P-NN mark: Panel 1 north of the building, TP08-12 east of it.

  • A printed (or plotted-to-PDF) site plan showing the solid panel and slab views without the grid and dimension clutter.

  • Detach Panels clears every panel xref and leaves the grid, wall, and slab geometry untouched, and a second Attach Panels brings the same set back.

  • Attach never stacks a second copy: it sweeps its own flat set first, and refuses once the set stands — Detach Panels first is how you start over.

  • In Step 6 you met the missing-panel check: the Select the drawing for panel 2 dialog, then a refusal with nothing erased when you cancelled it — and the east wall’s panel list is back to 12.

  • Tilt-up Panels stood both panels on their walls — Panel 1 north, TP08-12 east with its braces — in the positions Attach recorded, and it is the way back up after Tutorial 12’s Layout Panels.

Where next

Watch the lesson

The recording picks up the Riverside site drawing as Tutorial 10 left it, then works the attach cycle: Site Options, Detach Panels (every panel xref gone, grid, wall lines and slab kept), Attach Panels laying both panels flat beside their walls, and Tilt-up Panels standing them on the walls.

It was recorded before the course moved to build order (2026-10-09), when Tutorial 10 attached and printed the panels, so the video opens with them already attached and starts with Detach Panels. In build order this lesson attaches them for the first time (Step 2) and prints the site plan (Step 4).