Cabinet Builder Problems

[Anonymous]

Cabinet Builder for AC 10 seems to be rather buggy, or maybe I'm just missing something. Any help resolving these issues would be greatly appreciated.

A few problems have surfaced:

1) Handles don't work right at all. All loop-type handles show up properly, but CB adds in an additional handle that goes through each pair of them at right angles, crossing the opening of double doors, resulting in a H-like shape of three handles on two doors. All spherical-type handles work fine, but the cut one also spans the double doors. The cup handle just spans the pair of doors.

2) Handles on drawers at the top of a vanity cabinet show at the top of the drawers, really more on the countertop or in between, regardless of the spacing for handles that I select, certainly nowhere near the placement in the drawer I would expect. There's a gap between the drawers and the countertop I can't figure out for the life of me how to eliminate.

3) I want white cabinets, and no matter which material or which of a couple of different flat or raised rectangular panel door panel types I select, CB produces the most goddawful ugly heavily grained brown wood pattern, some of which bear no relationship whatsoever to the design of the panel on the door.

4) When I set an overall width dimension, changing the number of units changes the overall dimension with apparently no consistency. I want to divide the total width into X number of separate sections, not multiply the number of sections at the overall size. I am going crazy trying to get the right number of sections.

5) The numbering of the sections once set up is crazy. With four sections, the three leftmost drawers, running across the top, are all section #1, but the fourth is section #3. Likewise, the corresponding leftmost three door-paneled sections below are all section #2, and the right hand one is #4. This is making it totally impossible to set up the cabinet arrangement I want or to experiment with variations. I want the end two sections to be drawers and the center ones to have doors, but it can't be done with one object like this. I also can't get it set up to do one drawer on one unit and two on another at the top, or just a flat single panel in front of where the sink goes.

In order to get the two sets of double doors I presently seem to be stuck with, too, I had to set up 4 sections instead of two, when the reality of how this unit needs to be built is just two sections at most.

6) There doesn't appear to be any way to set the thickness of the back and side splashes to something other than that of the countertop, and no way to change the materials of the back and sidesplashes separately, or indeed to change the materials of the sidesplashes at all. There also doesn't appear to be any way to get any sort of joining of them other than coving, which is fine for Formica and solid surfacing, but of course useless for stone and quartz kinds of materials. And sometimes you simply don't *want* them coved anyways. How do I show a butt-joined countertop and back and sidesplashes?

7) The toekick is showing up in elevation with a bunch of apparently entirely random vertical lines that in no way correspond to the cabinet units. This is obviously not a desirable situation, and I can't figure out how to make it go away.

There doesn't seem to be any way to have a cabinet without a door, as in open shelves.

9) There isn't any way to automatically insert any sort of sink into the countertop without manually adjusting the height of it and utilizing SEOs to cut the opening. This is a definite step backwards from the last version which certainly wasn't always easy to place a sink, but at least you could do it as part of the whole basic operation, as you would expect from a tool of this nature.

10) And cripes, who on earth thought up using black fills for the cabinetry and sinks in plan? One would expect this to be changeable, but I can't find how to do it. It's certainly hideously ugly and a real blot on the model, not to mention a waste of ink come printing time.

Overall, even though I found the last version of this add-on more difficult to use and the operability of this one seems at least somewhat improved, at least on the surface, I'd have to say that this is not a new and improved version at all. I'm pretty disappointed in it, and I think it will just be easier to build my cabinets from scratch.

Wendy

[Anonymous]

Hi Wendy

Sorry you seem to be having issues with the tool. This release of the Tool was mainly concerned with re-designng on the intefaces to work with Ac10. And also to standardise our interfaces, and introduce defaults for each of the tools that can be stored/saved & re-used, which most users seem to like (so far). Anyway if you can send in a couple of mod files. e.g just select the problem cabinets, copy to the clipboard, then choose save as module file from clipboard, and email them to us:
'toolsupport@cadimagetools.com' we'll go thru your problems, and make sure that they are resolved in the next update to the tool.

Regards

[Anonymous]

First off, make sure you have the latest version of Cabinet Builder (10.2).



1 – Problems with handles. I am unable to reproduce the ‘H’ shape problem that you are getting, so we would need to see a module file for that. As for the cup handle spanning the 2 doors, you can correct that by going to ‘Handles’ – ‘More Options’ – ‘Position’ – and change the ‘Position on doors’ offsets.



2 – For the gap between the drawers and the countertop, are you talking about the bit where the sink goes? If so, you can’t adjust it at the moment, but we can make the change to that. If not, can you let us know what you mean(a screenshot might be good)?



3 – Unable to reproduce, so we would need a module for this one



4 – We are working on improving the way this works by adding the ability to ‘lock’ fields so that you could set the number of units and lock it, and then any changes to the width fields would not change the locked number field.



5 – Because of the way the old version worked, the way it now works is all we could do to keep it compatible with existing CabinetBuilder 3 objects. This will be getting a major overhaul in the next major release. As to the double doors, you can just use 2 sections and set them to double-doors, as opposed to 4 singles.



6 – The back and side thicknesses and materials are all changed by the ‘Upstand’ parameters. At the moment there is no way to set them differently or change the joining type, so that has been added to the issue list.



7 – Unable to reproduce this one either. Maybe you have assigned it a material which has vertical vectorial hatching? If not, we will need a module file.



8 – In the Structure – Setout page, set the module type to ‘None’ to have no doors.



9 – Using SEO’s is the best way of inserting sinks into this, as you can move them around without having to change the cabinet object. It also means you can drag the sink over multiple cabinets and still have it cut correctly.



10 – Unable to reproduce this one either. Make sure that your fills aren’t set to ‘Solid’ in your model view options, but again, we would need a module file to see this problem.

Would be helpful if you could post some module files to us to help resolve your issues.

[Chazz]

I can duplicate the crazy handles in the 10.2 Mactel build. It's maddening. I think it has to do with having multiple copies or versions loaded at the same time. Try this: in the problematic file bring up the settings for the object tool, then do a search for "cabinetbuilder". If you get more than one hit with the cabinetbuilder 3Q object it will never work.

Still, I cannot get the handles on drawers to rotate at a different angle from those on doors and I was almost sure there was a setting for this previously. Cadimage if you have anything more to say about this I hope you'll speak up.

Thanks. --chazz