Terrain mesh and boolean operations

[Anonymous]

Ok, I probably made a couple of strategic errors early in the project. I created a mesh with way too much surface and way too many points. I made that worse by using ArchiTerra's ability to create excavations and plateaus. That, it appears uses some hidden protocol to create boolean operations, which may triple the number of points. As if that wasn't bad enough, I have used boolean operations of my own to extract dirt in place of foundation walls, slabs, and footings. Extremely slow processing I can deal with. Constant freezing I can't. It seems I can't remove any of the boolean operators, so I can't even delete a wall or a footing slab. I did succeed to take out one by first artificially lowering the grade by moving topo lines around until the object was no longer in the mesh. Then I could delete it. Any thoughts?

[Link]

I don't remember v3.14. Was that still on the scientific calculator?

Anyway, you should be able to maintain or cancel any Solid Element Operation using the 'Maintain Operations' panel of the SEO dialog. Just select your targets/operators first.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link:

I think I ran v3.14 on a Mac ci. It actually had a color monitor.

Thanks. Ironically, as I've experimented with that part of the tool, I found that only the bottom button ....all other selected elements actually did anything. Go figure. In the meantime, I cut and pasted the terrain out of another copy of the file, which, of course, drops all its boolean operations, including the ones ArchiTerra created. I've been methodically recreating the operations looking for the ones that cause trouble. I think I have isolated columns as the culprits. Thanks for your help.

[vfrontiers]

Mark,

3.14! Purple-ish, pink-ish box.. no layers! I do remember it.. (actually, I thought is was 3.4)

Used to be able to set the tops of the corners of wall independently!

Had a little matrix of 16 numbers that really represented LAYER COMBOs... So any entity could belong to MORE than one of these at a time..

Sorry.. for waxing nostalgic... But I do remember back then.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like Architrion! Did you start out with that one, too?

[vfrontiers]

Was that Architrion? Yes we used it for about one month then went over to ArchiCAD... As I recall, they [Gimeor] stiffed my company for the return. Sent back the program and they kept the money.

But I was sure I was remembering ArchiCAD with the 16 layer grid thingy... I must be getting old! Those synapses are not quite connecting fully..

[Anonymous]

Duane:

I think you are right about the matrix thing. Yes, Archicad ran a special in which they would buy your Architrion license as an incentive to switch. Architrion was very fast (considering how comparatively slow the processers were in those days) because it limited all geometry to 6 sided objects and because it used wire frame for more complex objects like window frames. Lame, but it worked.

I have a new problem with meshes and boolean operations you might know a fix for. Now, operations have no effect. Is there a limit to the number of operators on a given target? I succeeded in recreating all the footings and retaining wall operations, but when I went to do the most important objects, the floor slabs, they do nothing. I tried using slabs and I tried using roofs. I tried deleting and replacing them. It seems to think it did an operation because when I delete an operator, it processes the view as normal, but no change is made in the target, the terrain mesh. Any thoughts on this one?

Mark