topic Re: Using AC for Conditions Assessment in Collaboration with other software

Using AC for Conditions Assessment

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:15:35 GMT

Is it possible to use AC to quantify conditions on a building? In doing an existing conditions assessment, let's say you have an elevation of a brick wall and you create a fill that marks areas of high deterioration. So you have an elevation with a lot of strange shapes on it. How would you get AC to give you the total area of those shapes? Can that be linked to a schedule?

It doesn't seem that there's any way to do this as part of a composite.

There are examples of something similar using AutoCad and GIS.

http://www.design.upenn.edu/hspv/second_bank/conservation/drawings.htm

Re: Using AC for Conditions Assessment

Richard Morrison — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:20:34 GMT

You could do an Interactive Schedule using fills that would give you what you want, but you would have do the elevations in a plan view (i.e. 2D only, in a floor plan), which kind of defeats the purpose of the BIM model. I don't think there is any way to extract schedule information from a 2D elevation view.

I would consider making a story for the 2D elevations, then use a copy/paste from the Section/Elevation window. OR, you might consider using .MOD files generated from the Section/Elev. window, then place the .MOD files into the plans. Place fills on top of the hotlinked MOD files. If the elevations change, then the MODs could be updated automatically.

You could also schedule the fills by ID, if you wanted to use a keynoting system, with automatic labels.

Re: Using AC for Conditions Assessment

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:01:46 GMT

Wow.

This will take me a while to figure out - I've never used a .mod file. I need to go to school on that for a minute.

Could I then query the file to tell me where things overlap? I.e., could I get it to tell me where one fill overlaps another if there are overlaps?

Re: Using AC for Conditions Assessment

Thomas Holm — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:14:22 GMT

If you could use rectangular shapes instead, you could either use small walls or perhaps a customised "window" object (without wallhole), They are duplicatable in S/Es and will show in the schedules.

COme to think of it, there is an irregular window in the object depository. Make it extend on the outside of the wall, and remove the wallhole from the script (you'll have to post a question to a GDL expert for that) and it should be useable for your purpose, while retaining the BIM qualities of the project.

You could even do 3D overviews of the conditions!

To see where fills overlap, I think the best way is to use percentage fills of different colors - you know blue + yellow = green etc. You'll see them fast. I don't think there's any better way to locate overlaps.