topic Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views. in Modeling

Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Wed, 24 May 2023 06:47:15 GMT

The skins of a composite wall were showing up in 3D just fine but I must have accidently changed something and now one of the skins (insulation) is not showing up anymore. How do I get it to show as before ?

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Dontknow — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:10:59 GMT

You probably accidently removed a skin in your composite.
Insert it as followed again:

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:30:25 GMT

No missing skins. Other composites with the same skin show in 3D as expected. I have also tried to remove it and replace it.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Dontknow — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 19:35:20 GMT

Hmmm, strange.
The only thing I've noticed is that you've set your insulation skin to 'core' as skin-type.
But you can't leave out a core in 'Partial Structure Display' (under 'Document' pull-down menu).

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

NCornia — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 19:40:58 GMT

Steve,

You should look into the Surface that is applied to the "R-21 INSULATION" building material. And check in the Surfaces dialog to make sure the texture for the Surface is not missing. You could also try switching the 3D View to Vectorial Engine (Previously known as Internal Engine) to see if the core shows. This would isolate whether the display issue is specifically within the OpenGL environment or not.

PS - The question mark you have a red arrow pointing to is simply a link to our Help Center.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Barry Kelly — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 07:32:31 GMT

Or is it because the surface associated to your R-21 Insulation building material has a transparency setting and transparency has been turned on in your 3D view?

Barry.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Erwin Edel — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 09:12:37 GMT

Failing the above suggestions, check if you are viewing the entire model or core only, etc

Go to Document > Partial Structure Display (3D)

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Laszlo Nagy — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 14:04:37 GMT

I think Barry is closest to the solution.
The "R-21 INSULATION's" Building Material's Surface probably has a Transmittance value of 100 and Transparency is turned ON in the 3D Viewpoint.
A clip explaining this behavior (was a new feature in AC18):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWsddYJZHuY

Although if this is the case that still does not answer the question of why the skin shows in other Composites, but not in this one.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 19:20:09 GMT

Dontknow wrote:
Hmmm, strange.
The only thing I've noticed is that you've set your insulation skin to 'core' as skin-type.
But you can't leave out a core in 'Partial Structure Display' (under 'Document' pull-down menu).

The R-21 is where the Core of the wall is - The stud wall. I never dimension anything except the Core because all dimensions are to outside face of stud.

The Dimension tool can be set to dimension only the Core which is how I want it. That is why the R-21 is set as the Core.

Each of the 13 different wall types (Composites) for this project were made by editing the first one as needed to make the next. The skins show up as expected in some walls, but not others. Older copies of the file work as expected. This file is probably corrupted some how. ?

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Laszlo Nagy — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 19:31:57 GMT

Yes, the project file may be corrupt or those elements may be corrupt.

What happens if you cut the Wall from the project to the Clipboard (CTRL+X) and then Paste it back into the project? Does that fix it?

If not, you could try to delete and remodel those elements.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 19:44:53 GMT

I don't know if it is related but I did find some sort of file corruption.

Zooming out as far as the program can view with all layers turned on I see that there is something wrong.

There seems to be something at project origin that is bad. I will open a new topic on how to fix corrupt files.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 04:30:10 GMT

It's hard to tell with 19 what is a bug or a corrupt file.

Take any project, go to a Project Map and zoom out manually to the extreme limit. You will see some stuff in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

Mine looks like this-- It may not be a bug or a corrupt file. It just looks like something is bad. I don't know.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Laszlo Nagy — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 14:32:24 GMT

Definitely looks like some kind of file corruption.
Can you select that point towards the middle into which all those line run and delete it? Those could be corrupted elements. (Or cut the to the Clipboard and paste them back - pasting sometimes fixes data corruption in elements.)
Or another thing may be that that point in the middle is close to the Project Origin and all those elements in the upper left corner are too far from the Project Origin and these huge distances cause this error. You could try moving all those element close to the Project Origin (if this is the case).

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 18:29:06 GMT

It may not be a corruption. Try it with any file. Open a Project Map ( all layers on) and manually zoom out the extreme limit and you will see stuff in the upper left hand corner of your screen. You may need to try this using different Project Maps.

I am not able to select anything beyond the area you would get with zoom to extent, which is not all the way out to the extreme limit.

I think the problem is that my Tyvek has a thickness of 0". I am checking it out know to see what happens to the entire composite if I make it .001"
1/64" will probably be the default minimum thickness that can be used in a composite.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Steve Jepson — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 18:44:48 GMT

Yes. That was the problem. I made the Tyvek the minimum allowable thickness for a Composite Skin (1/64" ) and the missing skin in 3D views shows up again. This was also causing the R-21 Skin not to show up in Section views too.

Why this affects an adjacent skin rather than the 0" skin is where the Bug is.

This is a problem that I had forgotten about. It was discussed in Beta Testing and before.

I don't want to delete the skin to avoid the cumulative dimensional error that may show up in dimension chains because of the information I am showing in labels for those walls and for the sake of my Wall Types schedule which is also annotated with a label.

Just another reason for another work-around.

As for the possibility of a corrupt file - If the file does have some corrupt elements it is probably not the reason why some of the skins were not showing up in 3D views.

Also, this may not be the ultimate cause of the problem, just one of them.
I am fairly certain that in older files I was using the same complex profiles and not getting this result. I need to check that out as well.

Re: Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

Laszlo Nagy — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 22:10:27 GMT

OK, so it was a zero thickness skin.
Maybe then ARCHICAD should either handle such cases correctly, or it should not allow such a value to be entered in the first place. That would save some headache in the future.
I will forward this to Graphisoft for their consideration.