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About Archicad's documenting tools, views, model filtering, layouts, publishing, etc.

Surface Fills - Why no background option?

Liamthanks
Booster

Can anyone advise why there is no option for the cover fill of a surface to have both a foreground AND a background option like a normal fill does? Is there a workaround for this at all? 

My specific situation is a tiled splashback where I'd like to have a solid fill for all tiling, however an alternative surface to have the same solid background colour but with a foreground fill over it to indicate a different finish/material. Right now I have to manually put a 2D fill over the top to do this, but it seems like such an obvious feature to have this as part of the surface options? Am I missing some obvious setting somewhere? 

 

Operating system used: Windows

AC27 Build 5060 AUS - Windows 10 Pro, Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3090, M.2 NVME 0.5TB SSD, 32GB RAM
4 REPLIES 4
Barry Kelly
Moderator

With surfaces you will only see the foreground (hatch pattern) of the fill and not the background.

This way in the basic 3D engine you see the surface colour you have set for that particular surface and in Hardware Acceleration engine (OpenGL), you will see the texture image if you have one.

The surface colour or texture is your background.

For the hatch you will only see the foreground lines and you can choose to use the element's uncut pen colour or you can set a specific colour.

 

So in your case you would have to set up 2 surface materials, one with a cover fill and one without.

Repeat for each different colour/texture that you need.

 

Barry.

 

One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
i7-10700 @ 2.9Ghz, 32GB ram, GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11

Hey Barry,

 

I'm not phased about the 3D view, my query relates towards the internal elevations. 

AC27 Build 5060 AUS - Windows 10 Pro, Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3090, M.2 NVME 0.5TB SSD, 32GB RAM

Elevation views are just special 3D views.

In the elevation settings you can choose to show the surface colours, textures or you can override to use a particular pen colour for all surfaces (that doesn't help if you want to see individual surface colours).

You can also choose to show the 'surface - cover fill foreground', but again that is global for all surfaces - not what you want.

 

If you have your elevations set to show surface colour (or surface texture - I don't recommend that as it causes problems printing PDFs), and 'surface - cover fill foreground' is on, they will show the surface colours and hatching as you have set up for each surface material.

 

BarryKelly_0-1724125000896.png

For each colour surface you want you will need 2 different surfaces, one with a hatch pattern and one without.

 

And in 3D (basic engine) they look just the same.

 

BarryKelly_1-1724125205717.png

 

Barry.

 

One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
i7-10700 @ 2.9Ghz, 32GB ram, GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11

My internal elevations are set to "Uniform Pen - Color Fill, Non-Shaded" and also have the the "Surface - Cover Fill Foreground" option selected as I don't want the surface colours from any other element to come through as I want to keep the plans in black, white and grey. 

 

The example below shows the glass splashback displaying with no background colour, so the splashback to the left has used a standard solid fill from the surface and I have manually had to draw a 2d hatch over it. 


example.png

AC27 Build 5060 AUS - Windows 10 Pro, Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3090, M.2 NVME 0.5TB SSD, 32GB RAM

Setup info provided by author