AC 20 problem with drawing 90 degrees walls/slabs/etc

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Recently We have changed our workflow to AC 20. In our office we have this strange problem. When drawing simple walls with SHIFT ArchiCad places them with 89,99° or 179.98° etc. This makes a lot of troubles in Sections and Elevations because materials won't merge. This issue is super hard to fix after some time because We cannot tell which wall/slab/etc is placed normally and which is placed with 89,98 etc.

It is painful with zones too. Once I spent 1h to realise that zone update cannot be done because of 89,98° wall on intersection.

Only way for now to cope with this issue we found is "always checking if degrees are 180 even when drawing with shift"

I know it's not only my problem because everybody in our office have that issue at some point.

With regards,
Marcin

[Laszlo Nagy]

I don't know what can cause this. I was thinking you may have a 4K monitor an your Cursor Snap Range is set to a low value in the Work Environment Dialog, or you may accidentally release the SHIFT key a fraction of a second before actually clicking the mouse button to enter your point input. I don't know if any of these could be a contributing factor in your case.

However, Link has been writing about a solution to this in this blog post:

http://www.bim6x.com/blog/fixing-untrue-models

The "Element Orientation Check" object mentioned, which was created by James Murray, can be downloaded from here:

https://bimcomponents.com/LCF/Details/6119

[Richard Morrison]

Not a lot of help, but Nick's suggestion may help a little.: http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=53498

[Barry Kelly]

Is your background grid exactly vertical/horizontal or maybe it is slightly rotated?

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Barry:
On daily basis, I do not use Guide Lines and background grid. To be honest I don't like them so they are constantly turned off.

Laszlo:
As for 4K monitor - I do not have one but still I will try to play with Cursor Snap Range.
Shift release is not the problem.
I will check the blog post You mentioned and write if I come up with some kind of solution.

Richard,
Thank You, as in the above I will check this post and try use their solution or at lest try to cope with this issue :d.

[Barry Kelly]

mnagorski wrote:
Barry:
On daily basis, I do not use Guide Lines and background grid. To be honest I don't like them so they are constantly turned off.

The background grid may be turned off but check you have the 'Orthogonal' grid active and not the rotated grid.
Even when the grid is off it is still used to snap to with the shift key.

Better still set the rotated grid so it is definitely square and then switch back to the orthogonal grid.

I was just messing around and set my rotated grid slightly off square.
Even when I switched back to the orthogonal grid it was still snapping off square sometimes - not all the time though.
Switching to rotated grid then back to orthogonal seemed to fix it.

Basically I ensure all grids are horizontal/vertical and I have never had an issue.

Barry.

[Erwin Edel]

As I wrote in the topic linked by Richard, shift locks to whatever snapguide direction you have active (the bold one), this doesn't have to be perfect 90 degrees. Especially the circles and other non orthogonal lines generated by automatic snapguides can cause you to be off by a few degrees.

I am zooming in a lot to make sure I am drafting correctly and pressing ESC (carefully as it can also cancel your action) to clear the mess of guides when they become to big.

The snapguides could do with some (optional) dumbing down sometimes. Especially those circles and midpoint intersections and so on, that rarely are needed.

[Katalin Borszeki]

Hi All, As a workaround, to avoid such problems you can switch off the display of the snap guides in the Toolbar and use the SHIFT key instead. In this case the SHIFT will always find the exact horizontal or exact vertical directions. When you draw a line, which is not exactly vertical then you can check to see the difference with SHIFT regardless if the snap lines are turned on or not. Alternatively it is also a good method to place an orange guide line from the side of the screen on the particular point and then follow that guide line during the input.