topic Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally in Modeling

Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Wed, 24 May 2023 06:37:47 GMT

I'm not sure why this is, but I'm having a heck of time getting walls to draw exactly orthogonally. They end up with an angle of 89.97 deg., say. I'm not doing anything differently than I've done the past 19 years or so, at least I don't think so. Is there a setting, like a grid snap or a guideline, or behavior that I'm missing in the latest version? BTW, I jumped from AC17 to 19 (briefly) and have been working in AC20. What do I need to do differently?

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Dontknow — Sun, 21 Aug 2016 10:01:24 GMT

Are you using your shift-key to keep your direction?

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Sun, 21 Aug 2016 16:04:37 GMT

Dontknow wrote:
Are you using your shift-key to keep your direction?

I've been using guidelines since AC17, and didn't have any problems in that version. Somehow, that procedure seems to have become more finicky. I like guidelines because it avoids one-handed typing of distances.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:55:17 GMT

yes this has been an issue in more recent versions.

if one element is slightly off, the following elements seem to auto orientate to that (off) one even when shift is depressed.

Usually you would pick it up, but if it is very slight it is an issue!

The only reliable way I've found to override it is to actually click on the perpendicular or parallel modifier first, then it seems to take up the new orientation.

FWIW there is a very neat label tool that has been shared that labels all non-orthogonal walls, which is very useful in this situation.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Stress Co_ — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 05:02:18 GMT

Richard:
I know this doesn't directly speak to your issue, but does showing Tracker help?
You at least get instant feedback that angles are off.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 15:05:07 GMT

rwallis wrote:
FWIW there is a very neat label tool that has been shared that labels all non-orthogonal walls, which is very useful in this situation.

Yes, I've actually been using this very helpful label by James Murray. It is telling that this problem seems to be common enough that he went to the trouble of creating a label for it!

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 15:11:51 GMT

Stress wrote:
Richard:
I know this doesn't directly speak to your issue, but does showing Tracker help?
You at least get instant feedback that angles are off.

I always use the tracker. But it makes me wonder whether when I take my hand off of the mouse key to type a distance and hit Enter, if the slight vibration from the keyboard jiggles the mouse enough to nudge the cursor off the guide.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 16:07:35 GMT

I spent a fair amount of time playing around with this in a close-up view. I think the issue boils down to that in AC17, there was a little bit of "stickiness" that kept the cursor on the guide line, and so you could take your hand off the mouse with some assurance that the cursor wouldn't move.

Now, there seems to be ZERO stickiness and if you want something exactly on the guide line or snap guide, you HAVE to use the SHIFT key or the context menu "Lock to Guide Line/Snap Guide", which is confirmed in the documentation. I didn't realize this, so I guess the issue can be traced to "user error."

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 20:58:36 GMT

I almost always hit R (or X or Y) while holding shift to constrain before inputting the dimension so I know when I take my finger off the shift key I'm definitely locked in to the right direction. An extra keystroke, but worth it.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

NCornia — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 22:03:16 GMT

Hi Richard,

In the Work Environment there is a setting to control how far the cursor must be from an element to snap to it. The default cursor snap range is 5 pixels. On newer high resolution displays 5 pixels can equate to a very small portion of the screen. You might try increasing the number to see if it makes a difference in your experience with the cursor snapping to the guide lines.

Options > Work Environment > Input Constraints and Guides

Best regards,
Nick

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Eduardo Rolon — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 22:28:07 GMT

NCornia wrote:
Hi Richard,

In the Work Environment there is a setting to control how far the cursor must be from an element to snap to it. The default cursor snap range is 5 pixels. On newer high resolution displays 5 pixels can equate to a very small portion of the screen. You might try increasing the number to see if it makes a difference in your experience with the cursor snapping to the guide lines.

Options > Work Environment > Input Constraints and Guides

Best regards,
Nick

Perfect!

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 22:42:51 GMT

Thanks, Nick! I had missed this option. I have to say that after a little use, it is feeling and working more like I remember!

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 14:52:52 GMT

FWIW, we've found the the Snap Guides (not Guide Lines) have become more of a hindrance exactly because of this. We've had ourselves and a number of partners get slight angle variations sneaking in, and once they're in, the snap guides seem to proliferate it further. As a practice, we always have the tracker on, but it is still easy to miss until it's too late. I've simply advised to turn the Snap Guides off.

It's really hard to catch a 89.97º angle when the snap guides lead you that way...

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Laszlo Nagy — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 09:21:49 GMT

I don't know, Snap Guides or no Snap Guides, I always press the SHIFT button to make sure I am drawing horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe it is something that stayed with me from using ARCHICAD for 20 years.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

KeesW — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 12:40:26 GMT

Laszlo
Rchard's point is exactly this: using the SHIFT key does NOT always guarantee a 0 or 90 degree line. This is a very annoying defect that has existed in the last 3 or 4 versions. Graphisoft should check this and fix it. Please, no excuses! It is not a user fault - it is an Archicad bug.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 15:39:20 GMT

laszlonagy wrote:
I don't know, Snap Guides or no Snap Guides, I always press the SHIFT button to make sure I am drawing horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe it is something that stayed with me from using ARCHICAD for 20 years.

The SHIFT key no longer constrains to ABSOLUTE vertical/horizontal/45 deg. It now constrains to those -- but RELATIVE to whatever snap guide is closest. So if you have a snap guide that is slightly off, you will get new items created that are slightly off, also.

I agree with Kees that this needs to be corrected, or at least changed back to the original, if it is intentional.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Erwin Edel — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 08:39:59 GMT

Part of the problem is the snapguides that create circles, extra connecting lines etc etc. The other day I was tracing a complicated polygon-shape and the amount of feedback you end up with on the screen is horrible, you can't turn them off either if you want a simple midpoint snap.

And yes, once you have one thing that is slightly off-axis, it starts spreading.

Shift now locks to whatever snapguide direction you are currently having as the active (bold) one, which isn't allways perfectly 90 degrees.

It is telling if veteran users with uncountable hours of working in ArchiCAD are having problems, I would say.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

DGSketcher — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 14:54:16 GMT

Just adding my voice to the chorus. As I have said previously the snap guides are clever, but sometimes too clever. Ideally they need some kind of desensitising to avoid the problem Erwin just described. Anything less than perfectly square causes all sorts of frustrations.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

Richard Morrison — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 15:56:32 GMT

Erwin wrote:
Part of the problem is the snapguides that create circles, extra connecting lines etc etc. The other day I was tracing a complicated polygon-shape and the amount of feedback you end up with on the screen is horrible, you can't turn them off either if you want a simple midpoint snap.

I think you can. There's an icon and you can also assign a shortcut key.

Re: Walls not drawing orthogonally

sinceV6 — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 17:00:23 GMT

Richard wrote:
Erwin wrote:
Part of the problem is the snapguides that create circles, extra connecting lines etc etc. The other day I was tracing a complicated polygon-shape and the amount of feedback you end up with on the screen is horrible, you can't turn them off either if you want a simple midpoint snap.
I think you can. There's an icon and you can also assign a shortcut key.

If you have one snap guide active while drawing complex shapes and getting a lot of feedback, you can hit ESC and it'll make them disappear without canceling the drawing operation. Just be careful not to do it if you don't have any snap guides or you'll cancel everything and actually cry

As for the orthogonal walls and snap guides, I think there are two distinct cases:
1. You have slightly off orthogonal snap guides and when using SHIFT, AC draws based on that weird angle: This is by design and I think is correct. AC will let you know when you are drawing parallel or perpendicular to a specific snap guide. Remember that SHIFT no longer means orthogonal, it means LOCK to whatever snap guide the user wants (e.g. X-axis, Y-axis, snap guide extension, snap guide parallel to, incremental angle, etc). Attention to AC feedback while drawing is needed.

2. You don't have any active snap guides and orthogonal SHIFT is not 0/90 degrees: I don't know if it is currently only applying for walls, but if it applies to any drawing tool, then I would suspect of a legacy issue. I remember that in old versions input and constraints preferences could change when rotating the grid, using parallel constraint to a line with a weird angle or bisector angle to a set of lines were used, and you'll get this weird angle when constraining vertical/horizontal using shift. In older versions you could just adjust preferences again; then in newer ones this could be solved by using those constraints (parallel, bisector angle) in orthogonal lines/walls, but now I just wouldn't know where this value is stored. Just a path to look further into this issue.

Best regards.