topic Re: Coordinate List? in Modeling

Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Tue, 23 May 2023 15:28:56 GMT

Is there any way to generate a txt. file consisting of a list of coordinates of any element? I want to produce a list of construction staking coordinate info. I have searched through the entire calculate menu to find some way to generate some x,y,z info of a hotspot,column,elevation dimension anything! No luck! I would be willing to pay for some help generating an object or GDL script to do this. Any help much appreciated!

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 05:52:03 GMT

I'll explain my goal a little better. I have access to a motorized total station which i'm shure many of you are familar with. I have the proper software and cable to attach it to a PC and download and convert the info into a text coordinate file. Me and a partner sucessfully shot property lines and a topo grid at a site yesterday. We were pretty pleased considering neither of us are surveyors or CE's. I also managed to import the file into architerra. I am very excited about being able to get this valuable information into AC without waiting for a surveyor. The next logical step is to be able to send specific coordinates as a text file back to the conversion software into the total station and out to the field! I was hoping to find, create or buy an object that could act like the elevation markers with gravity. I would snap it to important points on the model and use the calculate lists or schedules which I believe can already save as txt. files. One idea was to use the column tool to create a small "stake" like element. I think you can use the bottom elevation of a column as a parameter in a list. I havent found any way to list the x,y in relation to the user placed origin though. I am also not shure if the column tool works with gravity. I am getting the feeling that some GDL is on my horizion!

Re: Coordinate List?

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 06:46:34 GMT

This should let you get what you want, Mark. If not, it lets me share yet another strange feature of ArchiCAD. 😉

The Special Menu has an option to save the contents of the 3D window as vertices, edges, and other primitives. You are only interested in vertices: the x, y and z coordinates of the corners of polygons.

In the screenshot, I've drawn a slab and a column in metric ... because ArchiCAD operates internally in metric and the output is in metric ... so this was the easiest way for me to verify the numbers were right. You'll have to convert to FFI of course.

Choose Save GDL from the Special Menu and GDL 3D as the type.

Open the file and delete (or have software ignore) all lines other than the VERT lines. (My column was .1m wide, 3m high, and sitting on top of a .5m high slab at a corner located at (2m, 0m). The slab is 2m x 3m x .5m All comes through nicely - even tabbed!)

If you only want the x, y, z coordinates of certain locations, select just those 'marker' objects before generating the 3D ... and only their coordinates will be output. If your marker is a cube shape with 8 vertices like the illustration, then if you always place the smallest x,y,z coordinate on your intended point, it would be easy to have a tiny program eliminate all of the other points, too. Maybe a 3D hotspot would generate a single VERT ... I didn't spend any more time exploring.

Interesting, huh?

Karl

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:05:14 GMT

I think you are on to something! I still have not been able to get to the special menu. I will try again ( should be easy ) at the office tommorow. I hope I can produce a streamlined method of doing this. I would have never came up with that on my own. Mabey we can come up with something usefull to others. Thanks!

Re: Coordinate List?

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:17:49 GMT

Part 2.

OK. I couldn't resist the challenge. Someone else may have a better solution.

I wanted to make a 'marker object' that you could plop down at points that you wanted output. For 2D, I just used a circle with crosshairs and a hotspot in the middle. The 3D became tricky. The easiest thing for output is for the 3D script to have nothing but a VERT 0, 0, 0 in it ... and then the output file would only have the desired coordinates. But, this is invisible in the 3D window and wouldn't allow you to visually drag the marker up and down to snap it to vertical height. So... I went for just a 3D line to allow 3D editing.

To output your coordinates, use Find and Select to select all of these marker elements, then go to 3D and save as in the tip below. The first coordinate of every pair is the coordinate that you want. The second (top point of the line) can be discarded.

2D script:
---------------------
HOTSPOT2 0, 0

CIRCLE2 0, 0, A/2

! Crosshairs
LINE2 -A/2, 0, A/2, 0
LINE2 0, -A/2, 0, A/2

3D script:
----------------------
LIN_ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1

Karl

Re: Coordinate List?

Petros Ioannou — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:38:21 GMT

There is also an xyz locator object which can be downloaded from http://www.archiradar.com/eng/objects/al2d02.htm

HTH
Petros

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:16:32 GMT

Thanks Again Karl, I don't understand exactly what to do with what you sent me. Any chance you could explain how to put the object to use? I know verry little about GDL. I downloaded the free object from archiradar. It works great. I am trying to generate a list using them.

Re: Coordinate List?

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:27:06 GMT

Petros wrote:
There is also an xyz locator object which can be downloaded from http://www.archiradar.com/eng/objects/al2d02.htm

I believe that that only produces a visual label (using the SYMB_POS_X, Y and Z globals) ... but Mark is looking for a text file with many coordinates listed I think.

Good thought!

Karl

P.S. Potentially one could create a combination of GDL objects that use the SYMB_POS values, OPEN, OUTPUT, and CLOSE and some other globals to write a custom text file (and turn the writing on and off)... but to do it cleanly requires a special on/off switch object and a MASTER_GDL script to start a clean file. (I think.)

Re: Coordinate List?

Petros Ioannou — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:40:23 GMT

You are right Karl. First thing that crossed my mind was if it would be possible to extract this visual data from the locator to a list but no luck...
Petros

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:17:36 GMT

I think the object is only metric! Darn

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:20:05 GMT

Who could be employed to build me such an object? I can't spend the time to learn that much GDL at this time.

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:37:50 GMT

I've got the special menu. Now I can't seem to save as gdl.

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:37:49 GMT

OK, I saved it as a GDL, how do I get to the GDL script that contains the coordinates? Bear with me guys!

Re: Coordinate List?

Karl Ottenstein — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:56:15 GMT

Flamer wrote:
OK, I saved it as a GDL, how do I get to the GDL script that contains the coordinates? Bear with me guys!

It's wherever you saved it. 😉 Open the file in Notepad or Word.

I noticed an inconsistent glitch where sometimes I would have to close the 3D window and then open it again before the Special Menu's GDL save would create the file.

HTH,
Karl

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 02:18:17 GMT

Got It! Now I will work on a way to filter out what I dont need. Thanks Again

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 21:53:22 GMT

Flamer wrote:
Is there any way to generate a txt. file consisting of a list of coordinates of any element?

Mark

Add this code to any object, ie make a simple cross-hair symbol

!Put in property script

component "X",SYMB_POS_X,"m"
component "Y",SYMB_POS_Y,"m"
component "Z",SYMB_POS_Z,"m"

You will have to set up a custom component listing ( a basic text list type). I have done a quick test of the settings:

Under the parameters tab:
check the global element parameters "Internal ID"

Under the listing tab:
list each element individually
sort by internal ID first
then component name
then the component quantity

This will produce a list of similar to:

Internal ID | Component Name | Component Quantity |
-------------|----------------|--------------------|
3 | X | 299,948.706 |
3 | Y | 700,006.840 |
3 | Z | 0.000 |
4 | X | 299,951.322 |
4 | Y | 700,016.286 |
4 | Z | 0.000 |
5 | X | 299,962.076 |
5 | Y | 700,007.276 |
5 | Z | 0.000 |
6 | X | 299,964.691 |
6 | Y | 700,018.901 |
6 | Z | 0.000 |

I hope this is of some help, regards

Re: Coordinate List?

Karl Ottenstein — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 23:36:18 GMT

Bill wrote:
!Put in property script

component "X",SYMB_POS_X,"m"
component "Y",SYMB_POS_Y,"m"
component "Z",SYMB_POS_Z,"m"

Duh. Of course. Brilliant, Bill. Hopefully Djordje will copy this 'proper' tip over to where the earlier part of this thread went (with my now-to-be-disregarded special menu thing).

Karl

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 23:46:47 GMT

As Karl said, Brilliant! I am adding the code to the object Karl posted. I have a feeling it will produce metric results though. It shouldn't be to hard to have the script do the conversion. Thanks Bill! Definately tip material!

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 00:44:29 GMT

I added *3.281 in parenthesis to each line of the property script. this converted it to feet. Were are so close. I have tried to change the script to get the coordinates to list in the following format- User ID, X, Y, Z
I can't figure out how to get the coordinates in the same row and only show the ID once on each line.
Is there any way to generate the coordinates based on the user origin? If it is not possible to do this directly, is there a way to return the coordinate of the user origin alone within the script and then use that value to calculate an offset for each coordinate. If this isn't possible than maybe I (we) can use another object' coordinates as the offset. At this point I would be happy to just get the output in the proper format. Thanks again

Re: Coordinate List?

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 01:25:24 GMT

Flamer wrote:
I can't figure out how to get the coordinates in the same row and only show the ID once on each line.

From the department of sneaky tricks...

component "XYZ," + str("%#10.4df",SYMB_POS_X) + "," + str("%#10.4df",SYMB_POS_Y) + "," + str("%#10.4df",SYMB_POS_Z), 1, "m"

Gives you:
Internal ID | Component Name | Component Quantity
--------------|-----------------------------------------|--------------------
30,295 | XYZ, 72.6036', 54.3047', 384.7113' |
30,296 | XYZ, 72.7396', 49.2716', 384.7113' |
30,297 | XYZ, 70.2457', 46.7324', 384.7113' |

You may need to force your equipment to read every comma as a field separator or better clean it up in excel. It can also be done with gdl via DATA I/O functions but they are much tougher to learn & get working!

Is there any way to generate the coordinates based on the user origin? If it is not possible to do this directly, is there a way to return the coordinate of the user origin alone within the script and then use that value to calculate an offset for each coordinate.

The simplest way would be to add XYZ offset values as parameters to your library part and subtract them from the SYMB_POS values (assuming all are positive!)

regards