topic Re: Exploding Morphs in Modeling

Exploding Morphs

drh64 — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:30:38 GMT

I've made a column out of multiple morphs and then did a "union" to combine them into a single morph. I now want to explode that morph, take away a small portion of it and re-save to a new morph. Is there a way to do this? I try the convert function again and that does not convert it back to multiple elements.

Re: Exploding Morphs

Laszlo Nagy — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:07:32 GMT

Why don't you edit the shape of the Morph directly?
Also you can perform SEOs on Morphs, like subtract the body of one Morph from the body of another.

Re: Exploding Morphs

Barry Kelly — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 01:38:17 GMT

Or use the "split" tool to cut them up into smaller chunks.
You can always join them again afterwards.
Barry.

Re: Exploding Morphs

stefan — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 07:17:46 GMT

Exploding a morph into the individual faces would be a possible workaround to schedule surface areas of individual faces, which is (still) not possible in ArchiCAD.

E.g. to do a quick heat-loss/energy estimate based on a "Mass Model" (the way many people use Revit or SketchUp in a concept phase).

In the example below, I created a single Morph Volume with the desired outer shell of a house. Placed it on a separate layer.

On a copy of the volume, I manually selected each individual face, assigned a Surface and turned the selection into a Morph (so it got detached from the volume). This individual flat morph can then be placed on a proper layer.

I created two schedules and filtered out the morphs according their layers.

This is a very labour intensive effort, but is the exact result I would like to obtain in one step, namely by being able to schedular surface areas of all faces of the morph.

Re: Exploding Morphs

Ruben V — Sat, 27 Sep 2014 18:45:42 GMT

Interesting workaround Stefan!

I'm still looking for a similar way to do a "material take-off" on the interior of the building.
Doing this by using zones gives ± correct measured areas, but the inside/outside is sometimes switched around (according to the position of the reference line i guess).

I really hope GS will make (better) data-extraction a priority for 19, it would convince a lot more architects to switch to BIM/ArchiCAD...

(e.g. allow more 'own' calculations in the schedules, allowing importing of xls-files to build schedules faster, giving more control over surfaces in a composite to be measured - for more precise results, ...)