topic Re: Falls and grades in meshes in Documentation

Falls and grades in meshes

Matthew Johnson — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 16:02:10 GMT

Looking for help to crowd source a solution to a tool limitation in ArchiCAD.

What ArchiCAD does: Meshes and spot level dimensions work really well together to automatically update changes in the mesh surface. i.e. lift a point and the surrounding spot level dimensions will update accordingly.

What I want ArchiCAD to do: An automated fall indication marker that can be associated with a mesh and automatically tell me which direction the mesh now falls in and what the incline is.

Use: detail design of slab profiles with falls to drainage (carpark decks, bathrooms, food processing areas, etc.) so that I can see the impact of lifting or lowering a point on the mesh with regard to cross falls, grades and depth. Currently I have to manually calculate all of the fall lines every time I change a point height.

Problem: A GDL object cannot extract a height reference from another object and a level dimension cannot be scripted.

Re: Falls and grades in meshes

Laszlo Nagy — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 14:58:13 GMT

That sounds to me like something that can be solved only with an Add-On written using ARCHICAD's API.

Re: Falls and grades in meshes

Matthew Johnson — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 23:55:50 GMT

Laszlo,

After 12 years of using API Add-ons to ArchiCAD we have spent the past 18 months rebuilding our procedures to using clean out-of-the-box. We have had too many problems over the years caused by API conflicts and crashes.

After I posted this originally we have developed a GDL object that achieves some of the functionality that I wanted but without the automation that multi-point gravity could provide it does rely on manual input.

Re: Falls and grades in meshes

Hmooslechner — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 09:38:45 GMT

Should be posted in wishlist...

In my opinion, it wuld be great if it were possible to get visual feedback also in 2D - levels about the hight if meshes - maybe with displaying different colours.

let me suggest:

Bright worm - higher surfaces , dark cold colours for deeper surfaces.

It would not be nescessary to make the Colours depending on a specified higt - it would be enough to take the whole colour - spectrum between hightest and deepest point. So anyone could see the falling or rising surfaces direct.

Re: Falls and grades in meshes

Matthew Johnson — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 22:22:19 GMT

Hmooslechner,

A wishlist of better feedback for the mesh tool has been on the table for some time but the tool has not changed since 2004.

Visual feedback in the form of height differentiation (i.e. contour lines denoting height) is OK but our more pressing need is for the ability to study the nature of points in a mesh; that is which way does the fall run, how steep is it, how do all the falls in a mesh work together to effect water runoff/wheelchair access...

Re: Falls and grades in meshes

mark reid rowland — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 15:47:16 GMT

This is vital!

#19year-old-tool-needs-revising!