topic Re: uniting fills? in Modeling

uniting fills?

cremsberg — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:20:18 GMT

Is there a way to quickly “unite” a bunch of adjoining or overlapping fills into one fill? If not, I sure wish there was. This would be handy for simplifying fills in an unlinked elevation with cast shadows.

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:32:26 GMT

Look for the "+" button in your pet palette. select one fill and click on the edge of the fill and chose the "add to polygon" button from your pet palette. You can then magic wand the fill you would like to add to this fill. You will be left with two fills - one which is a combination of the two and one that you will need to delete. It would be nice if you had the option to truly combine the two and not had the extra step of deleting a leftover fill.

Re: uniting fills?

cremsberg — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:48:36 GMT

Thanks Mike. This technique (+) that you mention is the one I have been using., and it is a tedious way to clean up a bunch of little fills, as you get with shadow casting in a in a section/elevations cut. I would love to have a quick way to unit a bizillion fills together using one quick command.

Re: uniting fills?

TomWaltz — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:53:18 GMT

I guess my questions then are:
1) why do you want to join so many fill together?
2) why are you unlinking the elevation?

Re: uniting fills?

cremsberg — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:03:30 GMT

I am accustomed to unlinking the elevation after I have moved beyond my reliminary-modelling phase of the project. My construciton drawings are done in unlinked elevations, where I can clean up graphic anomolies vreated by the model. I know not everyone works this way. I wish to unite the cast shadow fills so that it is easier to manage and edit and the file size is not so huge. Thankse.

Re: uniting fills?

Link — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 22:06:25 GMT

I know not everyone works this way. I wish to unite the cast shadow fills so that it is easier to manage and edit and the file size is not so huge.

A lot of users work this way, as it is often simply unavoidable, especially with log homes. And shadows, much to my dismay, are still made up of many individual fills in unlinked elevations in AC10

The bad news is that there is no easy way to join them back together again. This is just one of a number of unresolved usability bugs still in existence. GS is aware of it FWIW.

Cheers,
Link.

Re: uniting fills?

Djordje — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 03:57:33 GMT

cremsberg wrote:
I am accustomed to unlinking the elevation after I have moved beyond my reliminary-modelling phase of the project. My construciton drawings are done in unlinked elevations, where I can clean up graphic anomolies vreated by the model. I know not everyone works this way. I wish to unite the cast shadow fills so that it is easier to manage and edit and the file size is not so huge. Thankse.

Try not to unlink, but to trace down the "graphic anomalies" - usually a rethink of a modeling technique removes them.

As for the shadows - it is faster to do a new one on top of the previous ones, and remove the culprits (Find&Select, Clear)

Re: uniting fills?

owen — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:58:35 GMT

I've just had to go through a similar task on my project where we show shadows on the DA sections/elevations. All drawings are linked to the model, but I had to unlink the shadows due to:

1. The unbelievable time blowout shadow casting causes when generating. An elevation with no shadows would take a couple of minutes, but blew out to 15-20 with shadow casting turned on - and this was with all high-polygon objects like trees, people, furniture, etc turned off and using facade objects which have context sensitive levels of detail. Turning shadows off until the final rebuild was an option, but given there are 14 sections/elevations to rebuild I figured it was safer to have something unlinked as a backup. Minor modeling changes can have their shadows fudged.

2. Sections make no distinction between the exterior of the building (which we want shadows on) and the interior (which we dont). So all our sections appeared with odd-looking shadows inside, for example an enclosed lift core and fire stair. It would be nice if there was an option to turn off shadows for the interior .. but i guess how does AC know where 'inside' is?

But going back to the original topic ... it would be good if GS could take another look at shadow casting in S/Es. At the moment in a linked S/E the shadow fills aren't selectable and when unlinked turn into a million split polygons. Generating the shadows of a linked section as a selectable (but locked?) fill would be good, along with uniting joining/overlapping fills into a single fill. It would really improve the handling of these drawings. Opening a PDF of one of these shaded elevations and a G5 sounds like it is about to take off.

Re: uniting fills?

Link — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 06:08:14 GMT

It seems that you can avoid these problems simply by adjusting your Section-Elevation settings. You can turn the status of your Elevations into Manual-rebuild and you can turn the shadows off for sections.

You could also tweak the layers assigned to the views of your section/elevation views to turn off everything you don't need, like internal information for external elevations.

Lastly, you may want to redefine your elevation views with 'Transparency in Shading' turned off in your 3D Window Settings (yes they do affect S/E's!).

Cheers,
Link.

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 06:33:25 GMT

Link wrote:
Lastly, you may want to redefine your elevation views with 'Transparency in Shading' turned off in your 3D Window Settings (yes they do affect S/E's!).

This may be the most under-documented aspect of the view settings. Just so it's clear, the section/elevation views store the status of the transparency setting in 3D when they are created/revised. (This seems so obscure that I though it could stand some emphasis.)

Re: uniting fills?

owen — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 07:16:00 GMT

Yep I have done all those things except switching to Manual rebuild. I would prefer to keep Auto rebuild and just unlink the shadows. I am only showing the shell and structure for the elevations, with the additional internal partition walls, stairs etc for the sections.

Unfortunately we love louvres and these are 2 fairly large apartment buildings so I am expecting them to take a while, just not 10-15x as long as when shadows are off!

As for the shadows in sections I might not have made myself clear - I was refering to the fact that AC cuts the model and then casts shadows, rather than casting shadows and then cutting the model. The result being you get shadows cast on the interior of the building which just wouldn't exist - such as light/shade in a lift core or fire stair (well actually it would ALL be in shadow). So apart from the time issue of shadow casting, this is the reason you can't use automatic shadow casting on sections ... they need to be cleaned up.

The method we use is fairly straight forward. Generally S/Es have shadows turned off. If any major changes are made to the envelope we rebuild with shadows turned on, module out the view, delete everything but the shadows in the module, then copy this back into the live S/E which has shadow casting turned off.

This would be made much simpler if as I said previously you could actually select the shadows in a live view (i guess they would be locked fills on the archicad layer) in order to copy them (module from clipboard, so no cleanup) and then be able to hotlink the shadows module back into sections/elevations (hotlinking into S/E's is another of those old wishes i think).

Re: uniting fills?

Link — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 08:41:36 GMT

As for the shadows in sections I might not have made myself clear - I was refering to the fact that AC cuts the model and then casts shadows, rather than casting shadows and then cutting the model. The result being you get shadows cast on the interior of the building which just wouldn't exist - such as light/shade in a lift core or fire stair (well actually it would ALL be in shadow). So apart from the time issue of shadow casting, this is the reason you can't use automatic shadow casting on sections ... they need to be cleaned up.

I haven't seen many users apply shadows in their sections before, but I can see how it would be a problem for you.

The method we use is fairly straight forward. Generally S/Es have shadows turned off. If any major changes are made to the envelope we rebuild with shadows turned on, module out the view, delete everything but the shadows in the module, then copy this back into the live S/E which has shadow casting turned off.

This would be made much simpler if as I said previously you could actually select the shadows in a live view (i guess they would be locked fills on the archicad layer) in order to copy them (module from clipboard, so no cleanup) and then be able to hotlink the shadows module back into sections/elevations (hotlinking into S/E's is another of those old wishes i think).

A popular technique is to simply to select the contents of your live, copy it and paste it a set distance above the model in the S/E view. Then you can drag any of the now 2D elements down the same set distance to overlay your model.

Still doesn't solve the original problem though!

Cheers,
Link.

Re: uniting fills?

SeaGeoff — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 08:59:20 GMT

Link wrote:
Still doesn't solve the original problem though!

And the original original problem is the lack of an Add Polygon command, one of many common CAD functions conspicuously absent from ArchiCAD. Absent it seems due to the fantasy that the virtual model is so damn good no one need ever draft.

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 12:41:28 GMT

Link wrote:
A popular technique is to simply to select the contents of your live, copy it and paste it a set distance above the model in the S/E view.

As long as you are unlinking the section from your main file, this is the best way of handling shadows (which sometimes creep up in unexpected places, like window panes, and sometimes just act dumb, like ironwork projections made with objects):
Move all the shadows to a different story, and use story transparency to visualize shadows and lines simultaneously.
This way you can edit either shadows or lines (also some errors, mostly resulting from shoddy modeling but sometimes also unavoidable), but still see how they look together.
After editing everything, you return the shadows to their original story, and voila.

One last thought. Having had so much trouble with imperfect and heavy shadows on elevations, I resorted to 3d line views.
I explain: The main reason for using shadows on your elevations (besides aestetically ones) is to make the drawing easier to understand. What is in front, what is second or third plan, and how far apart is everything in the hidden dimension.
So, and as long as you have a working 3d model, you might just as well put a small hidden line perspective beside every elevation, even beside every seccion.

Putting shadows on our 2d drawings is 2d thinking. You can do better.

Re: uniting fills?

owen — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:30:46 GMT

Oh dear yet again I learn not to assume a certain behaviour with AC just because it makes sense. I use copy/paste all the time in a live section to explode copies of 3D elements, but I had never even thought to try it on shadows. I guess I assumed if you cant select it, how can you copy it? But it works ... copy the wall, and it copies the unselectable shadows ...

Anyway, this really isn't a big issue - if shadows are some of the little 2D information we need to apply to our S/E's i think we (and AC) are doing ok

But back to the original piont I think the Unify command could be fixed to work on fills, shouldnt be that hard

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 14:37:48 GMT

It would be a nice feature if shadows had the ability to be placed on a separate layer versus the layer of the element that created the shadow.

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:19:15 GMT

Mike wrote:
It would be a nice feature if shadows had the ability to be placed on a separate layer versus the layer of the element that created the shadow.

I would set this to a default behavior!

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:54:21 GMT

someone please clarify >> i have tried every way to follow the technique suggested by Mike Hann in his June 12, 2006 post to combine (ADD+) fills. when i select the first fill, left click on edge, select (+ ADD) in pet pallet . . . then, everything i try will not give me the magic wand to select second fill to add to first. i want to combine 4 or 5 fills into one.

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:55:53 GMT

Re: uniting fills?

Anonymous — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:56:31 GMT