300 — Site Setup, in cv-web

The grid, the wall lines and the slab. This is where a building stops being a pile of panels and becomes a set.

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.

Where it is

Site Setup lives in Elevations mode, and only there. Switch to Elevations in the top bar and an Elevations menu appears alongside the others, carrying the five site dialogs:

Site Setup	the grid, the wall lines, the slab — this lesson
Place Panel	put a panel on a wall line
Edit Placement	change one already placed
Site Dimensions	what gets dimensioned
Site Layers	which layers the site draws on

If you cannot find them, check the mode. The menu does not exist outside Elevations.

Two halves, and the order matters

Site Setup is a grid system on top and the wall and slab lines below it. The bottom half will not start until the top half exists — with no grid lines defined, the segment section says so and offers nothing to fill in.

That is not the dialog being awkward. Every end of every wall line is a grid reference plus an offset, so a segment literally cannot be described until there are lines to reference.

The grid

Each axis chooses three things: which table labels it (Numbers or Letters), whether the labels run in order or reversed, and which direction they increase in.

Then the two line tables. Each line is a distance from the line before it — the way a drawing calls it out — and the first is measured from the grid origin. You never type an absolute position; those are worked out for you.

The wall lines

Each wall line has a Start and an End, and each of those is four fields: a letter line, an offset from it, a number line, an offset from that.

The letter and number fields are droplists of the lines you defined, not free text.

Note

You cannot point a wall at a grid line that does not exist — there is no box to type a wrong one into. This is worth noticing rather than passing over: the mistake is not caught, it is unreachable.

Then Elev S/E — the elevation at each end, so a wall can step or slope — and Panels, the marks that sit on this run, in order.

Name a mark the project does not carry yet and it tells you, without stopping you. Laying out before the panels exist is normal, and the hint is a note rather than an error.

The slab lines

The same two ends, plus a Base Thickness for the slab and a thickness at each end. Leave an end at zero and it uses the base — so a flat slab is one number, and a thickened edge is two more.

How this differs from AutoCAD

Both products build the same thing in the same order — grid, then walls, then slab — and this is the one place in the library where they enforce it differently.

cv-cad	needs a site drawing before the site features are reachable
cv-web	opens Site Setup on any project, including the sample

Note

The rule in both products is: at least one labelled grid line in each direction — one number and one letter. Four and four passes. Eight numbers and no letters does not, and should not: a wall line needs both to describe an end.

cv-web enforces that by making the bad state unreachable. cv-cad says it in words, and the message now names the direction you are missing.

What to take away

The grid comes first because everything else is described against it. Get the lines right and the walls, the slab and every panel you place from here inherit them.