Dear Community members,
You may have wondered how to ensure you are using associative dimensions in your documentation, especially in cases where there is a high chance that late changes will be made to your model.
To help you out, we present our August tip, by Erwin Edel. Edel has collected a list of good practices to make sure your dimensions set will adapt accordingly to future architectural/structural changes.
They are as follows:
- Only show the layer of your annotation and the elements you are dimensioning;
- On corners, favor dimension to the element that is perpendicular to your dimension segment;
- Before deleting elements, drag them out of your model from both axes - this will clearly show you if there are dimension nodes attached to them;
- Avoid using the Adjust tool on Line elements that might have dimension nodes attached to them;
- Zoom in to make sure the mouse cursor is indicating an associative dimension reference point (indicated by a circle); convert any static dimensions indicated by a square;
- Reduce your margin of error by merging multiple simple dimension segments (ctrl + right click on Windows; command + right click on Mac) instead of maintaining a long complex dimension chain.
You may also benefit from the use of Graphic Overrides in your file to catch dimensions that are static. The setup is simple:
After applying this Graphic Overrides rule to your view, static dimensions will be highlighted in red.
Honorable mention
We would like to highlight the contribution of our moderator László Nagy, who posted a modeling tip for the effective use of the trim elements to roof/shell command.
Especially for cases in which you have multiple roof entities to trim an element, László recommends that you merge them into one. This way, the trimming body will be processed by Archicad at once, resulting in a more effective operation.
For further details, check out the original forum thread.
A thank you and congratulations goes to Erwin and László for sharing their knowledge and winning the tip of the month! Your valuable contributions foster a stronger community and level up everyone’s use of Archicad!
We can’t wait to see what September has in store for us.
See you next month!
