topic Re: AC 17 Building Materials in Project data & BIM

AC 17 Building Materials

Erich — Fri, 26 May 2023 13:53:40 GMT

I am just starting to create a template for the new AC 17 and am now attempting to wrap my head around the building material attribute. Does any one have a clever idea or best practice for organizing this new attribute?

While it seems to fix a number of things and is quite powerful, it also seems like it could get unwieldy quickly if not well managed.

I am hoping the community (at least the beta testers) might have some good information to be shared.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:48:18 GMT

I think what you could do is make a list of the most important real life building materials that you use in your Projects, such as concretes, insulations, etc. Then create the equivalent Building Materials attributes for all of them in your Template file.
Most probably the hardest thing to decide will be what Intersection Priority Number to assign to each of these created Building Materials.
I think the default ArchiCAD Building Material attibute set give a good base to start from in this regard.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Rick Thompson — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:29:28 GMT

Erich wrote:
I am hoping the community (at least the beta testers) might have some good information to be shared.

The info GS provided in the videos and pdf's should be really studied. There are several major things to be mindful off when building your template. My work deals with the constant use of plns created many years and updated through the years (I still have acive plns from the mid 90's). This is by far the biggest change I have had to deal with, however, at this point it is pretty easy and straight forward. I am very happy about this change.

Remember all your favorites need to be carefully examined for consistency. Before walls and slabs (etc) could use fill overrides, but not now, so any Favorite with overrides will generate a unique BM. Same with any default setting, and any placed walls/slab etc. I spent a lot of time first thoroughly rebuilding all my composites and Complex Profiles, along with renaming Surfaces and fills so I could tell where things were coming from. Consistency is the main thing. All drywall should have the same exact fill, pen, priority etc or opening in a new file will create way more building materials than you expect. I had become sloppy over time so I had a mess to clean up.

The delete/replace is worth the price of the update alone. It will quickly eliminate near duplicates. Attribute Manage is something I use daily. Be aware of what will produce unwanted BM's, such as the "stock" Complex Profiles. When I migrate a file I first open AM, and purge somethings (like Complex Profile) and override everything.. well.. composites, fills, surfaces and CP's.

A clean template is very important to migrate existing files. It is worth a complete cleaning and reworking for absolute consistency of fills, surfaces and priorities. Then use delete/replace to clean the migrated file. So, the Template is worth a lot of attention first.

I changed most fills that were generic ~ "50%" as an example ~ to an identifiable name. So, I duplicated and renamed Surfaces and fills to make that work as needed. Again, I had gotten pretty sloppy, so maybe you want have as big as mess:)

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 13:57:18 GMT

I last updated our template (created new from scratch) in AC 15, and brought that into 16 with no troubles. Now I'm thinking of starting new as Rick suggests because of the Building Materials. I have about 100 right now, and it is chaos.

I agree with you Erich, it could get out of hand quickly.

For example, you cannot have just one GWB material. What if you want yellow gwb in one room, blue in another, and so on? You need a new material for every different surface, correct?

This means dozens of materials for different types of siding?

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Rick Thompson — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 14:14:27 GMT

Steven wrote:
I last updated our template (created new from scratch) in AC 15, and brought that into 16 with no troubles. Now I'm thinking of starting new as Rick suggests because of the Building Materials. I have about 100 right now, and it is chaos.

I agree with you Erich, it could get out of hand quickly.

For example, you cannot have just one GWB material. What if you want yellow gwb in one room, blue in another, and so on? You need a new material for every different surface, correct?

This means dozens of materials for different types of siding?

You really shouldn't need different BM's for colors as you can override the surface as before. I did not start over with my template and it is just fine, so you might want to convert first and see where you are. The "delete and replace" feature is a life saver and makes this process pretty fast. You can easily open Attribute Manager and purge unused first, should that help.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 14:51:19 GMT

Ok, make sense. Though if you override the surface, you lose the ability to see different surfaces on a cut element in 3D, correct?

On another note, I see that through the complex profiler, you can still assign different surfaces to any side of a fill.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Laszlo Nagy — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 10:15:30 GMT

Steven wrote:
Ok, make sense. Though if you override the surface, you lose the ability to see different surfaces on a cut element in 3D, correct?

Steven,

Surface Overrides have no effect on the cut surfaces of elements in 3D. They continue to display as the cut surface based on their Building Material setting.

Surface Overrides affect only the outermost surface of an element. So for example, in case of a Composite, even if you overrode all surfaces, surfaces of inside skins will still display with their surfaces coming from their Building Material definition. You can play around with the various Partial Structure Display options to see that.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:05:44 GMT

has anyone else noticed that Delete + Replace is NOT an option in Attribute Manager? What a pain in the butt... Being able to select 50 fill types and hit delete+replace would be so much nicer than having to do it individually in the fill types dialog, which seems to be the only way to do it.

How does stuff like this slip through the cracks? Or am I missing something?

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Laszlo Nagy — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:17:01 GMT

Yes, I notice, now that you say it.
Make a wish, it would be a great addition to the program.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 06:40:26 GMT

Hello, everyone!
Hope it is the right topic to put the question - exported a file from AC15. Working on TEAMWORK allows no alterations with building materials. Reserved everything but the Delete button as well as other options stay grey, unavailable. No such prob in solo-mode.
I have like a million of them after changing versions and would like to clean up a part badly. What do I miss?

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Laszlo Nagy — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:03:34 GMT

Maybe the Role you are using does not allow you to modify Building Materials (or any attributes for that matter).
You can check and modify Roles in the BIM Server Manager.
If that is that case, you will probably have toleave the TW project and join again for the changes to take effect.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 20:35:29 GMT

I've started today with cleaning up my template and therefore also the building materials list.

The template from AC16 that I used has a lot of cut fills that are the same material, but just the usage of it is different. For example concrete: there are several concrete cut fills for slabs, walls, beams, columns... I think it is to make a good schedule that also refers to the specifications and conditions.

Now the translation to AC17 makes all these concrete cut fills into seperate building materials. I believe this is not the point behind the building materials? There's just concrete (maybe armed and not-armed) and you use it for beams/walls/columns etc.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Rick Thompson — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 20:50:51 GMT

Rasmazzer wrote:
I've started today with cleaning up my template and therefore also the building materials list.

You have more than one due to priorities, lines weights, line over rides, defaults tool settings etc ... all being slightly different in the migrated file. Maybe things you didn't realize had slight differences. It is really simple to fix. Figure out which one you like the best, and delete/replace the others with that one. However, you might actually need a few that are very similar, but vary slightly as above. I always end up with several concretes, and I only use one. The others are from default tool settings, ones I never use. Pretty quick fix though.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Aug 2013 21:39:27 GMT

laszlonagy wrote:
Maybe the Role you are using does not allow you to modify Building Materials (or any attributes for that matter).
.

Thanks for response. But in such a case the same restriction would have stopped me from creating new materials or duplicates of existing ones - wouldn't it? and this I can do. Will check tomorrow anyway, hope you are right. Thanks again!

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 12:38:50 GMT

I've started with a new project in AC17.

The new priority based connections are really great for simple connections and details, but it doesn't make sense to me why these PBC keep existing when the materials is cut with SEO.

For example in the picture below:

I've a composite wall with masonry, insulation and plaster.
It connects with a composite slab with concrete / insulation and plaster.

The priority is slab > wall > insulation/plaster. This way the masonry always connects before the insulation and plaster.

In the section the masonry cuts the insulation of the slab because of its priority. After SEO with downward substraction the masonry keeps cutting the insulation....

I could make different building materials for the insulation and plaster of the slab, but then I don't get clean connections (line appears because of 'different material') of the insulation of the wall with the insulation of the slab.

Does someone know a solution for that? Or do I have to split my composite wall into wall AND insulation/plaster so I can give the wall an higher wallbase?

Tx in advance.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Laszlo Nagy — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 14:34:52 GMT

You have found an interesting scenario.
I assume that the PBC is executed by ArchiCAD before the SEO. Actually, all PBC connections are internally done as SEOs so it may be that PBC SEOs are performed before normal SEOs.

I would probably try to create a Complex Profile for this Wall in this situation so you will not need to perform the SEO.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Gerald D Lock — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 08:26:24 GMT

Erich wrote:
I am just starting to create a template for the new AC 17 and am now attempting to wrap my head around the building material attribute. Does any one have a clever idea or best practice for organizing this new attribute?

While it seems to fix a number of things and is quite powerful, it also seems like it could get unwieldy quickly if not well managed.

I am hoping the community (at least the beta testers) might have some good information to be shared.

I hear and feel your pain Erich (and others)!

I'm CAD manager at a practice that is hoping to move to AC17 'soon' and the building materials issue is looking like quite a task.
I'm taking the approach I took with composite wall creation a few versions back, using a simple 'paper-rock-scissors' approach to establish priorities. The list was borrowed from another AC-talk contributor, but I can't find the original post to give further credit (sorry, but this forum has become an unwieldy, hulking mass of tit-bits and sundry chit-chat)

Essentially wall skin priorities were ranked (lowest to highest):

0 - Finish : Secondary - wet finishes such as paint, plaster, etc
2 - Finish : Primary - dry/panel finishes such as boards, sheet cladding, etc.
4 - Thermal/Air Space - all solid insulation skins plus non-core voids, cavities and air spaces
6 - Membrane - solid membrane skins such as asphalt, rubber, sarna etc.
8 - Substrate/Battens - boards such as ply, particle, MDF, etc. and straps, furring, top hats for fixing
10 - Cavity/Air Space - core-only voids, cavities and air spaces
12 – Secondary Wall Structure - bearing elements such as solid concrete, timber & steel frames, masonry that beams cut through
14 – Primary Wall Structure - bearing elements such as solid concrete, timber & steel frames, masonry that beams do not cut through
16 - High priority bespoke use - use for walls to manually override beam priority '15' and wall priority '14' elements

Beam priority values just used the 'odd number' alternatives to these.

So, my Building Material 'strength' list will likely follow suit, but slightly modified.
The 0-999 strength range provides a HUGE range for each of the above categories (there are 9 above), so I'm thinking I'll assign categories as follows:

0-99 - Secondary (wet) finishes
100-199 - Primary (dry/panel) finishes
200-299 - Thermal/Air Space (finish)
300-399 - Membrane
400-499 - Substrate/Battens
500-599 - Cavity/Air Space (core)
600-699 – Secondary Structure (unit masonry, timber & steel frame partitions)
700-799 – Primary Structure (structural concrete, structural timber & steel frames)
800+ Override values for 'special' skin materials that may be needed, such as to trim wall elements to the correct roof/shell planes

Assigning Cut-fills and Surfaces to each Material is then a simple matter, once the above priority system has been established. As in prior versions, you just need to make sure you have a cut fill defined for each building material you use

Due to the large range of possible values, there is room in this simple list for other intervening priorities. I can't think of any right now, but I'm sure they'll come up.

Any feedback comments on this proposed system would be greatly appreciated as I admit it is very much a work-in-progress with considerable beta-testing (!) to do.
In this regard, I really think Graphisoft could've taken a bit more pro-active responsibility and at least conducted a working group (perhaps one per regional release) as part of beta-testing to establish such a suggested list that could be used 'out of the box', but that's another issue.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

fuzzytnth3 — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 09:23:19 GMT

As this topic is about Building Materials I hope it is ok to ask if anyone can explain why I have a warning triangle displayed next to the Surface pop up

See image below

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

James B — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:50:37 GMT

fuzzytnth3 wrote:
As this topic is about Building Materials I hope it is ok to ask if anyone can explain why I have a warning triangle displayed next to the Surface pop up

If you hover over the warning icon there is an indication that legacy mode is currently on. You can turn this off under Project Preferences > Construction Elements.

When legacy mode is on, then parts of the Building Material settings are not in use (or only partly used) - you can get a better description via the info button next to the legacy checkbox as mentioned above.

Re: AC 17 Building Materials

Laszlo Nagy — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 11:54:35 GMT

Gerald,
I think that the current default Building Material set and their Intersection Priority Numbers do reflect to some degree the Graphisoft guys' idea of a possible working solution.
However, I agree that there could be more work done on this.
But I also think that there will be many variations from one geographical area to the next due to materials and building technologies. For example, here in Hungary there is practically no wooden frame family houses built (except for pre-constructed one you can order from a catalog) so we don't really have to take those BMs into consideration much.
I can only encourage Talkers to share their BM sets once a fairly workable solution is found.