Add-on to find off-axis (non-orthogonal) walls

[danielk]

Hello everyone!

As some of you might know, in my free time I like working on scripting little projects in GDL, Python, etc. that helps with my day-to-day work in Archicad. I actually have quite a few things that I use regularly, but I don't actually share them much publicly, so I decided I will start sharing them from now on, so that I wouldn't be the only one making use of them. Here is the first one:

Thanks to the hard work of the Tapir team, it is now possible to write simple scripts to automate some tasks in Archicad. Living with this opportunity, I wrote a script that solves something I face daily: Finding inaccuracies in a project. Small inaccuracies in a project, (such as a wall slightly off axis) can have serious impacts on the project, and the bigger a team is, the harder it is to avoid.

This little applet finds and highlights walls in your project that are not quite horizontal/vertical, and allows you to quickly clean up these issues before it becomes a big problem.

You can download the applet from here:

https://kadsolutions.co.uk/webshop/p/non-orthogonal-wall-finder

This is an early proof-of-concept solution really, I am working on gradually improving it (adding more permitted angles, issue generation, etc.), but I already found it pretty useful, and I thought it was worth sharing.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

[Botonis]

Nice work. The highlighting is really useful.

The only problem is that the addon is not taking in consideration the view orientation.

Most of the times the orientation of the view is not 0 degrees but it is adjusted based on the geometry of the building.

So somehow this parameter has to be taken into account to check the orientation of the walls.

Obviously this is for test drive but for sure it is handy.

Remain at your disposal @danielk 

Greetings.

[Botonis]

Maybe there should be a way to load the addon directly inside Archicad instead of loading an exe file from the folder.

Like a common addon......

[jl_lt]

great work! 

[Gerald Hoffman]

Very nice. I did download it and looks like it is currently only for Windows platform. Is there any way to make it compatible with Mac Silicon?

[danielk]

Yes, I wanted to upload the Windows and macOS versions at the same time, but I still need to codesign the app or macOS will just block it, so it will take a little more time (this is a step that I could skip on Windows).

I will let you know once the macOS version is ready.

[Gerald Hoffman]

Hi, I received the email that the MacOS version was ready so I downloaded it. I went through the installation video for the windows version and basically duplicated it on the Mac. The icon shows up correctly in the top menu bar but I can't get the app to load. It launches and sits in the bottom applications bar but doesn't seem to open any farther than that. I am on a Silicon MacBook M4 Max so was wondering if this was for the Intel Mac? Thank.

[danielk]

Hello everyone,

We exchanged some private messages with Gerald, and it seems like the Rosetta environment was not working properly. To avoid this in the future, now there are different versions for Intel and Apple Silicon.

[danielk]

Hello there @Gerald Hoffman, 

I am happy to let you know, that the macOS version of the tool is now available at the same link!

[Gerald Hoffman]

I haven't loading the new Silicon version yet but have to mention that this tool is amazingly accurate. I used it on an existing project and it highlighted about 74 walls which looked and measured orthogonally to 3 decimals. If I adjusted the ends by 1 degree and then adjusted them back to 0 or 90 they then indicated properly. Unfortunately I had 12 storeys to fix. 😅. Thank goodness for copy and paste.

This is something I will use and check early to avoid small errors at the beginning.

[danielk]

Yeah, that is an interesting thing: Archicad is working with at least 10 decimals in the background, but it only let's you see 4, which is crazy. It shouldn't really allow you to make a mistake so small that you cannot even see...