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Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

Selected objects across views

Anonymous
Not applicable
The one thing that would make my Archicad experience so much better would be the ability to select an object in plan view and have it also selected when I then open the 3D window, or vice versa. Or between plans, sections, elevations and 3D window.

Is it only me that would like this? Is it impossible to implement?
5 REPLIES 5
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
Yes, it would be useful.
Please create a wish so we can vote for it.
If you create a wish, please post its link here.
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Barry Kelly
Moderator
There probably is a wish for this already as it has been wanted for a long time.

The problem is probably not so bad going from 2D to 3D - in fact you can simply choose to 'Show selection in 3D' now.

The big problem comes when you select in 3D or elevation and want to go back to plan.
In 3D elements can be on many storeys but the plan can only show one at a time.
So what happens to all those other elements that are selected?
Can they simply be filtered out because they are not on the correct storey?
And if you now change storeys will the other elements that were selected still be selected?
And if you were to unselect something in the plan are the elements in the other storeys still selected so if you press DELETE or move something still selected in the current plan will they all delete or move as well?

Probably not insurmountable problems but I can imaging it will need a lot of re-writing of code in the program.

Barry.
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Anonymous
Not applicable
You make some interesting points that I had not considered, however I dont think it has to be as complicated as all that.

You select an object or objects in 3D on several stories. Now when you open a 2D plan the objects that you selected are selected but in "highlighted" mode with a certain color to show that they are in this state.

Then you can either select the objects you want as usual on the plan by clicking on them and the objects that were highlighted and that you didn't select become un-highlighted, or (and this is the difference) you can use a radio button or keyboard short cut that gives you the option to select all the objects on that story that are "highlighted".

Objects that are highlighted are the first object that will be selected when the mouse pointer hovers over them.

At any moment you can move to a different story and the objects that you selected in the 3D window on that story are in "highlight" mode.

You can only delete and edit objects on the story that you are viewing.

As above, the action of selecting objects on any story plan has the effect of un-highlighting any and all objects on any other story.
Professor Pickle
Advocate
Actually there is a simplified version of how this feature could work. When you select an object and switch to any other view if that object is visible in that view then it also becomes selected. If it is not visible then it won't be selected. Based on my experience in software development I believe that this would be fairly simple to implement.

Alternative semantics would be to simply keep it selected regardless of its visibility but that can be confusing.

I really wish this feature was available. Coming to ArchiCAD from Revit I really miss these little features. BTW, I think that ArchiCAD has lots of awesomeness, but there is always room for improvement, especially if we want to continue calling it "industry-leading Building Information Modeling (BIM) platform".
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Lingwisyer
Guru
If I feel the need to select multiple elements in 3D across multiple stories, then go to 2D, I group them temporarily. I still need to make the selection again in 2D, but it will select everything across multiple stories. The issue with going from 3D to 2D selections is when it comes to layered objects, losing time to picking the correct layer.



Ling

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