Schedule Criteria/Field - Orientation for N,E,S,W

[Steve Jepson]

Do we have a convenient way to schedule exterior surface area of Walls per Project Orientation/Location settings ?
Perhaps there is a Field we can add to a Schedule for this ?
Can we create a new Fields?
Or do I have to do it with layers/ID...

I frequently need preliminary surface areas for making cost comparisons when the model is at various stages of development, before it is detailed enough to schedule surface areas per more specific criteria.

[alemanda]

You can use properties unless you need to switch off/on ... in this case it is better to use layers.

[Steve Jepson]

alemanda wrote:
You can use properties unless you need to switch off/on ... in this case it is better to use layers.

I guess it is not that much trouble to give the elements I am after and ID and sort that way. I just thought it would be nice to have a a pre-defined Field for orientation of the Walls relative to Project Orientation.

[alemanda]

Yes.
I suggest to use properties becasue maybe in the near future you need to filter by other property ... so ID is a bit limiting in mhy opinion

[Karl Ottenstein]

As Alemanda has been saying: use a property by creating it in Property Manager.

Using the ID field is certainly possible, but will be limiting in the long run.

In the old days, we had 'User Defined 1', 2, 3... fields for elements into which we could 'stuff' our own data, and rename the fields in the schedules (although they were still called User Defined 1 (etc) globally.

Properties are so much more powerful. Any additional data you want to associate with any kind of element including all elements, just certain ones, just those built with a certain tool, etc ...is easily possible via Property Manager.

Rather than limit you to storing text as in the old days - you can say what kind of info is stored and the name is globally available so there should be no confusion wondering what a field contains (as there was with "User Defined 1" e.g.)

Attached screenshot shows creating a new Property for your example called Orientation. Since the Orientation in your case will only be North, South, East and West, I choose an "Option Set" and created those values. To attach this data only to walls, I made it available only for ARCHICAD Classification > Elements > Walls. Since all walls will get this data field (without playing more) - I added an option for "Ignore Orientation" as the default... for interior walls / whatever.

This property field - with a drop-down list to select the value - now appears in the Wall Settings dialog for you to manually set as you are with your ID workaround.

You can use another newer feature of AC to help verify that you have set the property correctly for the walls you want to schedule: graphic overrides. Set up an override that colors the surfaces of all East, West, North and South walls with four unique and garish colors. View your 3D model with the override to error check or as you set the property for the walls.

[Laszlo Nagy]

I do not have the Grasshopper-ARCHICAD Connection in front of me right now, but I think you could use Grasshopper to input every single Wall element into Grasshopper, then based on their orientation and location, you could create a Grasshopper Graph that would set a custom Property (you would create such a custom element property in the Property Manager Dialog) to the proper value for each Wall based on that geometric information.

Recently I read a blog post which talked about the same use of Grasshopper for setting element Properties:

http://www.weareenzyme.com/grasshopper-archicad-learning-computational-bim-for-concept-design/

So after you have this element Property and its value is set to the correct value for each Wall, you would then be able to use that Property as a criterion in your Schedule.

[Steve Jepson]

Karl wrote:
As Alemanda has been saying: use a property by creating it in Property Manager....

Thanks Karl for the example of Alemanda's suggestion.
It's a very good solution for this kind of special preliminary schedule because it does not needlessly complicate or affect the other schedules I will be making later for the same elements.