Baumit Tools in Archicad 24: materials and composites, SATE systems and anchor calculation

This is the first of the two sessions that SIMBIM and Baumit devoted to the use of Baumit Tools in Archicad 24. It starts from the basics of the program: what building materials and composites are in Archicad, how they are edited, duplicated or created, and why the intersection priority value decides which materials cut others when walls and floor slabs meet. Martina D'Andrea shows this live. She duplicates a building material to create a new one, adjusts its attributes and its properties, and then generates two composites: a floor slab based on an existing one, and a five-layer wall created from scratch, defining the thickness of each layer, its type — core, finish or other — and the tools that will be able to use that composite. Finally she assigns them to the model and checks the result in 3D. José Luis Muñoz presents the Baumit Tools add-on, which adds its own submenu to the program once installed. He works through its five sections — building materials, colour charts, building constructions, settings and wind load — shows the manufacturer's material library classified by families alongside generic materials, and explains how the project settings locate the building geographically for the subsequent calculations. María Dolores Sánchez sets out the construction side: which layers make up an external thermal insulation system — adhesive mortar, insulation board, reinforcement layer with mesh, primer and finish, as well as the anchor — what distinguishes the manufacturer's different systems and insulation boards, how the base wall influences the choice of anchor, and which decisions affect the final finish: texture, aggregate, primer and colour. The closing demonstration is led by José Luis Muñoz on a single-family house modelled with a single-leaf brick envelope. He configures the layers of the system from the add-on, adds the substrate and the internal lining, reviews the calculation panel, inserts the system into the project and converts all the envelope walls in one go. He then runs the wind load study on the house and on a block of flats, and the add-on draws the density of anchors by façade zone onto the 3D model. The presenters stress that the add-on's results are indicative and that it is for the project's technician to check them. Martina D'Andrea closes with a summary and a question session.