129 — Construction Layout IN and OUT

The construction layout (also called the casting layout) is the site arrangement that shows where each panel is cast, lying flat on the ground, before the crane tilts it up. Tutorial 12: Construction Layout builds one by hand through Site Options: Layout Panels lays the set down flat, you arrange it with ordinary AutoCAD editing, and Save Layout records it.

The two toolbar buttons in this lesson are a different tool. They do the arranging for you, in one fixed pattern each:

• Construction Layout IN casts the panels inside the building.

• Construction Layout OUT casts them outside the building, one straight row per side.

Construction Layout IN also puts a crane on the drawing, so read this first:

Warning

Crane stations and the slab edge — read this before copying any station shown here.

A crane station must sit entirely outside the wall-clearance standoff, on prepared subgrade, or entirely inboard of the closure strip, on the poured slab. Never between the two, and never spanning the boundary. The test is the machine’s bearing footprint — its tracks or outriggers — not the centre of a drawn circle. One track on poured slab and one on unpoured subgrade gives differential support under the mat; the slab edge spalls or the subgrade settles, and the machine goes out of level under load.

TCA Safety Guideline v13.1 (June 2013) §2 item 6, p.8: “Install entrance and exit ramps for the crane to position itself onto the floor slab. Do not allow the crane to exert its weight on the extreme edge of any portion of the slab.” See also OSHA 29 CFR 1926.1402 — ground conditions; the operator must be notified of bearing capacity, and the controlling entity is responsible for adequate site preparation.

Station placement in this release is a known open defect (CV-2714). The perpendicular standoff is a fixed value that every catalogued machine’s bearing footprint exceeds, so a generated station can straddle the boundary. Do not copy a station position from this lesson, or from its video, onto a real site. Have the setup reviewed against the machine’s bearing footprint and the site’s own closure-strip and brace-line dimensions.

And on this release the drawn frame can be mirrored, which makes an inside/outside verdict untrustworthy whenever it happens. It was measured in coordinates on a saved post-draw drawing rather than inferred: after Site Drawing Options is entered twice, wall-line ends land at the exact Y-mirror of their shipped positions – same X to the hundredth, Y negated – 622 feet apart at the widest, while a point at the origin separates by zero, which is what distinguishes a mirror from a constant shift. Two points were left unmoved, so this is a partial redraw and not a blanket transform of every coordinate. The no-flip control has since been run, and the frame flip IS the cause. An otherwise identical take with no Site Drawing Options entries drew ZERO mirrored points, with all four shipped points unchanged, while the flipped take mirrored two of them. The control was not a null run – it drew ten points against the shipped four, and left fourteen wall-line ends open against the shipped two – so the zero means something. The mirror is therefore not present on an untouched drawing – but the action that brings it on is smaller than it sounds: opening Site Drawing Options twice and then drawing is enough. Measured on the dialog itself, BOTH openings were closed with Esc – no OK, no edit, nothing typed. Backing out of the dialog still sets it. That is still ordinary use and still a defect, but it is narrower than the previous wording implied. The discriminator is clean and the sample is small – four shipped points, on staged copies rather than customer files. An earlier version of this note said the draw refused and therefore nothing reached the sheet; part of it drew, and what drew is mirrored.) So a station reported as clear of the closure strip may not be. Treat every crane position here as illustrative of the workflow only, never as a sited answer.

Where it is

Both buttons are on the ConstructiVision Site & Tools toolbar, side by side. Use them in a site drawing whose panels are already attached (Tutorial 11: Attach Panels).

Button	Typed command	Tooltip
Construction Layout IN	CV-LAYOUT-IN	“Cast layout IN – panels cast inside the building, snaked”
Construction Layout OUT	CV-LAYOUT-OUT	“Cast layout OUT – one straight row per side around the building”

If no panels are attached, Construction Layout IN stops at once and tells you why:

[LAYOUT] no panel xrefs found in drawing. Run (c:cv-attach) first.

How these buttons differ from Layout Panels

	Layout Panels (Site Options, lesson 12)	Construction Layout IN (toolbar)
Where the panels go	First run: each panel lies flat where it stands. Later runs: back to the arrangement Save Layout recorded.	Every panel is moved into the cast-IN arrangement inside the building.
Questions asked	None. It takes the panel gap from the panels themselves: [LAYOUT] panel gap from the panel NOD: 1" -- not prompting.	None. It forces its own mode: [LAYOUT] mode forced to IN by c:cv-layout-IN.
What it records	The construction layout that Save Layout keeps: ; cons_list XRecord saved (2 panels)	The drawing’s cast record: [LAYOUT] cast record stored in the drawing: 59 panel(s), mode IN (CV-3369)
Crane	No crane is drawn.	A crane is placed on the drawing (see below).

Use Layout Panels when you want to place each casting bed yourself. Use Construction Layout IN when you want ConstructiVision to lay the whole set out inside the building for you. The cast record that Construction Layout IN stores is what Crane Capacity Check (ConstructiVision Crane toolbar) reads — its tooltip says “Needs the cast record that Cast Draw or Construction Layout stores in the drawing, so run one of them first.”

1 Construction Layout IN

Try it on the Sample Building site (CSBsite1)

CSBsite1.dwg is the ConstructiVision Sample Building site. It has 59 panels attached, and its slab edges do not close into a ring — which matters for the crane, below.

1. Open CSBsite1.dwg, with the Sample Building panel drawings (CSB001 to CSB060) in the same folder.

2. Click Construction Layout IN. No dialog opens and nothing is asked.

3. The command line confirms the mode and warns you that it is about to move every panel:

   [LAYOUT] mode forced to IN by c:cv-layout-IN.
   [LAYOUT] NO PANELS WERE PRE-SELECTED, so this acts on EVERY panel on the site. That is the
   product rule, not a fault -- but if you meant to change only some of them, stop now, select
   those panels, and run it again.
   [LAYOUT] 59 panel xrefs to reposition
   [LAYOUT] primed panel widths for 59 panel(s) from their NODs.
   

   Each panel’s width comes from the panel drawing itself.

4. It stores the cast record:

   [LAYOUT] cast record stored in the drawing: 59 panel(s), mode IN (CV-3369)
   

5. It places the crane. On this site it refuses to score the crane’s first pick, because there is no closed slab outline to measure against, and it says so:

   [CRANE-FIRST] REFUSED: UNSCORABLE: this site's slab rows do not close into a ring, so there
   is no slab edge or closure strip to score against. Refusing; the wall line is NOT a substitute.
   [LAYOUT] the crane below is STAGED, not scored: this site has no slab ring to score a first
   pick against.
   [LAYOUT] staged lr1300 at 1930,-4461 -- boom 145ft, reach 71ft
   

6. It finishes with the count:

   [LAYOUT] IN - repositioned 59 of 59 panels (centroid 1865,-1626)
   

   On the test computer the whole command took about 35 seconds, and the drawing stayed in plan view.

Reading the result

• The panels lie flat inside the building. In plan view each panel’s face lies on the ground inside the wall lines, and the crane sits outside the building footprint with its reach rings drawn around it.

• “STAGED, not scored” means the crane picture shows where a crane could stand, but the product has not checked that position against the slab edge. On a site like this one, with no closed slab outline, treat the crane as a placeholder.

• On a site that does have a drawn slab, the same command says more. When Autosite (131 — Autosite) ran Construction Layout IN on the PDX248 project, the command line read:

  [LAYOUT] cast-IN on the poured slab: 76 of 76 panels in rows along their walls -- each
  nearest where it stands, 1.5 in form-board spacing, top toward the wall, top plates on one
  line, 10'-0" off the wall line, wholly inside the closure strip.
  [LAYOUT] WARNING: 5 bed(s) still lie inside the brace line of a panel that goes up before
  them, so it is lifted through those braces: PDX071 PDX057 PDX055 PDX037 PDX032
  

  Read the WARNING line before you accept a layout: it names the panels whose casting beds sit inside another panel’s brace line.

• To stand the panels back up, click Tilt-Up Panels. After a cast-in layout on PDX248 it reported [TILT] matched 76 of 76 saved panels; restored 76 to constructed state.

2 Construction Layout OUT

Where it is

ConstructiVision Site & Tools → Construction Layout OUT, or type CV-LAYOUT-OUT. Tooltip: “Cast layout OUT – one straight row per side around the building”. The published command reference describes it as: “Cast the panels OUTSIDE the building, one straight row per side.”

Try it on CSBsite1

1. Open CSBsite1.dwg from the ConstructiVision Sample Building project, with its panel drawings in the same folder.

2. Click Construction Layout OUT. Nothing opens; the command line reports each stage.

3. It first says what it will act on:

   [LAYOUT] mode forced to OUT by c:cv-layout-OUT.
   [LAYOUT] NO PANELS WERE PRE-SELECTED, so this acts on EVERY panel on the site. That is the product rule, not a fault -- but if you meant to change only some of them, stop now, select those panels, and ...
   [LAYOUT] cast-OUT: restoring the cv-attach inventory rectangle -- one row per side, centred on the building.
   

   Select panels before you click if you want to move only some of them.

4. It reads each panel’s width from the panel drawing itself, lays the set out flat, and ends with:

   [ATTACH] NOD widths resolved: 59 of 59
   [ATTACH] swept 59 placed 59
   [LAYOUT] cast-OUT complete -- cv-attach placed 59 panel(s) in the perimeter rectangle.
   

What you see

All 59 panels lie flat in straight rows outside the building, each row running along one side of it – the same arrangement Attach Panels makes (lesson 11). On CSBsite1 the rows ran along three of the four sides; one side had none, because the panel set’s walls are counted to the sides they stand on.

What this lesson does not cover

• Laying out only some panels. Both Layout IN runs above had nothing selected, so every panel moved. The command line says you can select panels first to limit it; that was not tried here.

• Choosing the crane. On the run above the staged crane was an LR1300. This lesson does not show how to stage a different machine.

• Checking the crane position. That is your job on a real site — see the warning at the top of this page.

Watch the lesson

A companion video for this lesson is planned alongside the written curriculum.