Easy way to change elevation of nodes of a static rail?

[R Muller]

Putting a fence on a large, hilly site. There are no mesh nodes on the fence line. Actually, the location of the fence is a design element, so I am moving it around a lot. Don't want to change the underlying mesh to do this. My rail is a static rail. Associative rails kept crashing my system.

First problem: how to select a rail node in edit mode. I just fuss around until I finally get it. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't. I have no idea what I'm doing differently when I succeed. The documentation doesn't seem to have anything about this- it just makes it sound easy.

Option 1:drag the selected node up or down in 3D, use the tracker to input how much I am changing the elevation. It appears that tracker can't input the elevation directly- it is in italics and can't be selected. So I have to first calculate how much it needs to go up or down.

Option 2:set the elevation numerically in plan view, rather than drag it in 3D. Can I do this? It would be much easier, because I need plan view to see the mesh that shows what the elevation of a particular node must be. Is there a way to set the Z elevation from plan view, similar to points on a mesh?

Does ArchiCAD have a way to actually create a 3D polyline? If I knew how to do this, maybe I could just put the rail on the polyline and not need to set elevations for lots of points.

[Barry Kelly]

R wrote:
Does ArchiCAD have a way to actually create a 3D polyline? If I knew how to do this, maybe I could just put the rail on the polyline and not need to set elevations for lots of points.

The MORPH tool has a polyline mode which shows in 3D.
I don't believe a railing can associate to a morph though.

I am having no trouble selecting the baseline node in 3D and dragging it vertically - no need to go into edit mode.

Have you tried adding nodes or contour lines to your mesh.
Very easy to drag the baseline nodes of the rail to a node on the mesh and it snaps to the correct height of that node.

Barry.

[Laszlo Nagy]

R wrote:
First problem: how to select a rail node in edit mode. I just fuss around until I finally get it. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't. I have no idea what I'm doing differently when I succeed. The documentation doesn't seem to have anything about this- it just makes it sound easy.

In Edit Mode, make "Segments and Nodes" visible. If you then select the Railing Reference Surface you will see that the Railing Reference Line is also displayed and those Railing Nodes will be located on the Railing Reference Line. This way it will be easier to find them.