Automatic X/Y axis dimension

[Anonymous]

Hello!

Our clients love to know the dimensions of each room, and we like to present this on the floor plan. We typically measure the length and width of the room and type this out manually with the room name. (Or if we use the zone tool to name rooms, we add this as custom text).

We want to speed up this process so instead of measuring then typing, we want to place just two dimensions that will be shown on a presentation view of the floor plan. While we can manually place dimensions, it would be much faster if there was an object that when placed (with one click) would extend one dimension along the y-axis and one dimension line along the x-axis until both ends meet a wall.

We attended the GDL for Everyone class at BIMcon, but we are unsure where to start to create this type of object. Anyone have suggestions or material for us?

Thank you for any help.

-Isaac Strong

[JaredBanks]

Isaac, I was in the process of pestering Patrick May (who did the GDL talk at BIMcon 2017) to respond to your post then another friend pointed out this:

https://4dproof.com/product/room-size/

It's exactly what you're looking for (And by Pat). Though I'm sure if you want to script one yourself, Pat can give you some tips.

[sinceV6]

Hello.
I don't think you can do that single click thing with GDL, as placed objects are isolated (I can't find the position of surrounding walls based on a click). It could be done with an add on (like AC does with the magic wand), but you'd need to have more advanced coding skills. I can think of a couple of workarounds that would also need GDL, but I think they would complicate things even more.

One way to automate this is if you script a zone stamp, as you can query (I think) the resulting zone polygon and ask for each node coordinate. Total Zone by MasterScript does this. You can look into it.

So, given the options at hand... a few minutes of scripting yielded the attached object that I think you can use as a starting point. Extend it to your needs. If you do, post it back so more people can benefit from it too. I have no real use for it, but it was a fun rapid development experiment/challange.

Best regards.