Window and Door niches - Zone calculation

[agroni]

Hi,
while working on a project I have stumbled upon a problem and would like to ask about your opinion.
It has to do with Zones and especially with the calculations of the area in door and window niches. This process is being done automatically by the options defined in the project preferences.

But what to do if there is a part of the building that this calculation does not need to be considered? For example, in 4 upper floors this must be calculated, whereas not in 2 lower floors. So, the project references in this case are valid for the whole project file and there is no option the define this parameter for specific doors or windows.

The only solution that I could find was dividing the project into two hotlink files. In this case one file would consider the niche calculation and the other not. But to be honest with you, in this project we already have a very complex structure of hotlinking 8 different files with each other. Splitting it again just for this calculation I don’t find it reasonable.

Therefore, I wanted to ask you if you have another workaround to correctly implement the zone calculation for the whole project.

[Szabolcs Miko]

Hi,

We had a little brainstorming in the office and there are two workarounds which we can think of.

1. If the openings on lower floors have a unique value (deeper then the others), set it up in the Project Preference/Zones (If deeper then...) to use them as exceptions.
2. Have a line (set to be a Zone Boundary) 0.1 millimetres before the opening - downside - loosing zone's connection with opening.

Otherwise, AC doesn't support a workflow where the niches are treated differently within one project.

[agroni]

Hi Szabolcs,

thanks for your reply.
1. Sadly all openings have the same depth. I already tried this one...
2. The line would be a solution but the interconnection between Zone and Window/Door is important for our Door/Window schedules.

Otherwise, AC doesn't support a workflow where the niches are treated differently within one project.

For e better workflow in the future I would not mind to have an option for a Door/Window, where i can simply click "Exclude element from niche calculation"...

This way we are more flexible instead of working with hotlinks and drawing lines