topic Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24 in Modeling

Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Sun, 26 May 2024 21:27:42 GMT

What happend here? Its not working.

I cant use the magic wand on splines cause archicad dont stop working and calculating.

It doenst work with fills, it doesnt work with mesh nor with morph.

I had to kill archicad the 100th time via task manager while trying to finish some competition plans.
Its so messed up.

Seems like somebody messed up the code for the magic wand calculation.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Minh Nguyen — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:39:49 GMT

Hello,

Thank you for the report and I am very sorry about the experience!

I made a Spline used magic wand to make a fill and a morph out of it. Everything was quick and snappy. I'm using Archicad 24 INT on Windows 10.

I'm wondering if you can replicate this issue on a brand new file? It could be that there was corrupted data in the existing file that makes this process slow.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,
Minh

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:45:40 GMT

Archicad support told me to split the splines.

but its still a pain in the ass and im waiting like 20mins to get a part *filled*

its urban planing and its not working. frustrating.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Minh Nguyen — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:48:49 GMT

Hi,

Could you share with me the file for further investigation? It looks really complicated!

Let me know if you'll need a secure link to upload the file to.

Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Minh

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:33:14 GMT

i wrote you a DM

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Minh Nguyen — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:44:11 GMT

Hi,

I sent you a link via private message, where you can share the file to us for further investigation.
Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Minh

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Anonymous — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:51:45 GMT

If this is an urban scale project it could be a distance from origin issue, I cannot see the origin location on the attached image but if 000’s of meters away from what we can see that could be the issue as the numbers for calculations of the splines / fills get really large and prone to error

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Minh Nguyen — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 08:35:50 GMT

Hi,

Thank you for the file! The slowness can be seen in both AC23 and AC24, so this is not an AC24's issue

I found out that, due to the complexity of the spline, it causes a huge delay at Graphical Feedback phase. In order to avoid this, please navigate to Options > Work Environment > Selection and Element Information, switch off "Highlight element before selection and Magic Wand". The process should be a lot faster now.

I attached a GIF about how to do it. Should you have any further question, feel free to ask me again!

Best regards,
Minh

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:00:10 GMT

been there done that.
0,0 is right in the middle of the model.

it was the first approach I tried.
We tried like everything. even going back to AC 22.

the area is like 350m x 300m.

I'm really disappointed with AC since the weekend. we had so much trouble doing the urban planing in AC.
I can't imagine doing much bigger and complex projects in AC. it was extremely slow. we tried everything to make the thing not so complex. the support told us in a joke to change the design which made me furious. software shouldn't restrict what to design.

The moment we switched to rhino+grasshopper it was fluent and speedy (like 4 hours before deadline). Processes AC couldn't handle rhino did in seconds. (for example, fill a Spline with a surface/fill/hatch or show us the corrupted part to heal the spline)

I don't know how to recommend AC to my students I teach 2 times a year. Their projects are way more complex and out of the "standard" world. Right now I don't believe AC can handle it and I think they will all stay in Rhino.

We couldn't produce the results we had in mind. we are going back to rhino+grasshoper+illustator for this kinda work. And I'm wondering cause our design is so basic. Just some cubes, some trees, and this wavy road.

This blue loading ring has burned into my retina.

(1)The site model tools in AC are non-existent. If anybody says "Use the mesh-tool", I will explode
(2)ParamO was a really good toy to use. I see so much potential.
(3)Working on drawings was a pain in the ass on this scale
(4)visualization of 2D drawings was cruel and every change took 15min+.
We need CMYK, we need hex color codes, we nee a way better handling of jpeg, png etc, we need transparencies, we a decent layout tool with the possibility to create a whole layout with different pages in one view like the artboards in Illustrator and a lot more
(5)we need different view styles for working (low quality, mid, and presentation) like in InDesign or Illustrator.
we don't need the whole time the perfect presentation view which is slow af.
(6)These precalculation operations like the magic wand tool are destroying the fluent work. I had to tape my space to avoid pressing it and to avoid the precalculations for the "boundaries" of the magic wand tool. cause every time I hit the space in the wrong place, the calculation started and ended up me killing the AC process via task manager and this happened like 50+ times.

Till the weekend I was like "I wanna do everything in AC cause I believe in it and I think we can do it"... but since last weekend I'm questioning it a lot. The performance of AC was really really bad and costs us a lot.

I told my colleges if AC was a game the community had ripped it apart and nobody would have played it.
I would have uninstalled it immediately and cried for some long time spending 5k for this.

You can see I'm really in a bad mood talking about it cause they asked me if we can do it in AC and I told them I'm pretty sure. This was a bad choice and a bad recommendation. it has cost us all a little bit of our life time.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:09:09 GMT

mnguyen wrote:
Hi,

Thank you for the file! The slowness can be seen in both AC23 and AC24, so this is not an AC24's issue

I found out that, due to the complexity of the spline, it causes a huge delay at Graphical Feedback phase. In order to avoid this, please navigate to Options > Work Environment > Selection and Element Information, switch off "Highlight element before selection and Magic Wand". The process should be a lot faster now.

I attached a GIF about how to do it. Should you have any further question, feel free to ask me again!

Best regards,
Minh

Thanks for your help and your solution. I'm really happy GS is trying to solve user issues.
But to be honest. You call this spline complex. In my world, this spline is not complex. AC shouldn't have problems with it.

But I tried your solution. you are right it's working super fast. even with the mesh tool, it took me just seconds to fill the spline. and to create what I was looking for. Thanks a lot for your approach. So now GS has to work on this highlighting thing.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Barry Kelly — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:25:28 GMT

Could it also be the magic wand settings.
Is it set to 'Best Match'?
If not you may be adding many more nodes to each curved section of the splines.
If it is best match try adjusting the deviation to a larger number?

It also seems to be an issue with complicated splines.
See this post...

https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=66481&p=295781&hilit=magic+wand#p295781

I found that using polyines instead of splines was much faster.
I think with a polyline you can have a lot of curves but they all have a true radius.
This is not the case with a spline - they have to be calculated in a more complex way.

Barry.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:48:08 GMT

Here you can see our magic wand settings.

Yeah, I get it that splines are more complex to calculate. Bezier curve etc.

But we couldn't make this kinda shape with the polyline tool.

Minh´s solution works fine. It's a whole new AC with this setting turned off.

It would have been nice to know that last week.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 09:54:51 GMT

PS: You can see I'm really emotionally attached to this kinda topic. Cause I spend more time with ArchiCAD then with a lot of other things I really love. I love to dive in and get attached cause I think the output is a better one and I think ArchiCAD has a lot of potential. But I also expect it to work for me not against me. Please excuse my harsh words.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Lingwisyer — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 01:46:12 GMT

Spline performance in AC in general is rather terrible from my experience. Any time I get an ACAD drawing containing splines, I open it in ACAD and convert them all to polylines... And within AC I avoid them...

The shown performance improvement with the highlighting turned off is interesting and good to know. Curious to know why it makes such a difference.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Barry Kelly — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 02:04:37 GMT

Lingwisyer wrote:
Curious to know why it makes such a difference.

Because it has to do all the calculations of the magic wand just to show you the preview of what is going to happen.
Everytime you move the mouse it needs to re-calculate again as the result may be different.
So it is constantly calculating what the outcome will be until you finally accept it.

Because the spline curves are so complicated, it has to do a lot of calculations.

With the option turned off there is no calculation until you actually perform the magic wand.
Then it is either correct or not.

Barry.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Lingwisyer — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 02:10:09 GMT

Ah, so it just continuously loops. Would have thought that there would be some trigger on cursor movement before it recalculates.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Barry Kelly — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 02:15:23 GMT

I don't know that it is continuously looping, but certainly every time you move the mouse it is looking for a new solution as the mouse may be moving to a new edge or surface or even over nothing.

Barry.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

daviiiiidave — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 06:56:13 GMT

Lingwisyer wrote:
Ah, so it just continuously loops. Would have thought that there would be some trigger on cursor movement before it recalculates.

Barry wrote:
I don't know that it is continuously looping, but certainly every time you move the mouse it is looking for a new solution as the mouse may be moving to a new edge or surface or even over nothing.

Barry.

If this is right, there has to be something to improve that. I can imagin what is happening. Every elemnt has a boundary defined by the tolerance of the cursor. This boundaries are overlapping. Everytime you move the cursor you hitting a different tolerence area. Calculation starts over again. Can this be right?

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Barry Kelly — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 09:12:18 GMT

daviiiiidave wrote:
Calculation starts over again. Can this be right?

If you want a preview of what will be magic wanded then this has to be correct.
Otherwise if it didn't recalculate, the preview would be worthless.

The thing is, Graphisoft need to work on the algorithm that calculates the preview for splines (if that is possible) to speed it up.
It works fine for other elements (slabs, polylines, etc.).
It is just the calculations for the free-form curves of a spline must be very complex.

Barry.

Re: Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

Lingwisyer — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 09:25:25 GMT

It is just the calculations for the free-form curves of a spline must be very complex.

If it can talk to the Spline, rather than calculate it from scratch, it is the simplification of the equations into arcs / lines which is the issue. Not sure on the math of spline approximations, though that could be avoided by just reworking the other tools to work with Splines, however impractical they are to build.

Ling.