AC 17 New materials best practice?

[Achille Pavlidis]

I'm in the process of setting up the template for AC 17, and I'm wondering what is the best solution for materials.

I'm thinking that maybe I should create materials that have different priorities according to their placement on walls, slabs or beams. That would mean that the same material with the same fills, texture, and physical properties will only differ for its priority and would have a different name, for example Floor Finish - Marble and Ext. Cladding - Marble.

But this will create a lot of copies of the same material and maybe the db will be too cumbersome to mange.

What is your approach on the matter?

[Anonymous]

I am saddened to see that priorities can no longer be set in the composites attributes.

Yes, I think your approach is correct. I will be focused on finding how few instances I can get away with (due to intersection priorities) for each building material. In your marble example, I would make only one copy since both cladding and floor finish are the outermost (lowest #) skin.

For objects that reside in a variety of skin positions, ie sometimes wood is a core, sometimes a sheathing, or a secondary sublayer. These will require a unique building material definition per location.

I have two related questions:
1) I do not follow the AC default logic of Stainless Steel at 900 and Steel also at 900. I almost always use Stainless Steel as a finish (say 100's range) and Steel as a structural or core element (900s).
2) Can you shed any light on the default numbering system of 41-30 20 for both Steel and SS?