Use building hierarchy in Diaz Editor
Structure beats flat geometry. Site → building → floor → room lets every component inherit its parent transform and the BOM rolls up per level — useful for multi-floor or multi-room work.
Quick answer
- Open the Outliner (
O). Right-click → Add building. - Inside a building, right-click → Add floor, then Add room.
- Drag components onto a node. The BOM groups by hierarchy automatically.
Step-by-step
- Why hierarchy matters: a flat project with 200 loose components is hard to debug, hard to re-use, and hard to read in the BOM. With a hierarchy, moving the building moves everything inside it (inheritance), and the BOM groups costs per floor or per room (roll-up).
- Open the Outliner: shortcut
OorWindow → Outliner. The root node "Site" is always present. Right-click Site → Add building. Name it (e.g. "Main house", "Garage"). - Inside the building, right-click → Add floor. Diaz creates "Ground floor" by default; rename, set the floor level (0 mm ground, +2700 mm first floor, +5400 mm second floor are common defaults). Add more floors as needed.
- Inside a floor, add rooms: right-click → Add room. Each room becomes a container — drag walls, components, or even sub-rooms (closets) into it. The room knows its own area, useful for the BOM line "Kitchen — 12.4 m²".
- Components inherit parent transforms. Move a building 5 m to the right — every component inside moves with it. Rotate a floor — sockets, doors, sinks rotate together. This is why hierarchy beats grouping for anything bigger than a single room.
- Roll-up in the BOM:
File → Export → BOMshows costs grouped by node. Toggle "Group by hierarchy" in the dialog. You get a sub-total per room, per floor, per building — exactly what a client wants to see in a multi-section quote.
Watch out
- Orphaned components: if you drag a component into the canvas while no parent is selected, it lands on Site directly. The BOM shows it under "[orphan]". Open the Outliner and drag it into the right room.
- Deleting a parent breaks all children: if you delete a building by mistake, every floor, room, and component inside disappears. Use
Edit → Undoimmediately. To delete only the container but keep children, right-click → Dissolve instead of Delete. - Deep nesting hurts performance: nesting beyond 5 levels (e.g. site → building → floor → wing → room → closet → shelf) slows the Outliner refresh. Keep nesting shallow — closets and shelves often work better as components inside a room than as nested rooms.