Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

AC12 - lose ability to constrain cursor with Shift key

Anonymous
Not applicable
Anyone else experiencing this problem? Shift key has no effect on constrain the cursor to the grid or skewed grid.

When I start archicad, it works like normal, then after working for a little while, I lose it suddenly. Maybe i'm pushing a key combination that turns it off?

Anyway, when I restart, it works- only to have it not again within a half hour or so....
6 REPLIES 6
matthewjj
Newcomer
We get this little bug all the time at our 100% Mac office of 100+ people. We usually just have to quit archicad and restart the app. If that doesn't work we restart the entire computer. 99% of time that takes care of these weird input problems like that in archicad. We think it is some kind of memory/cache problem. In our experience, it seems to happens most often when people haven't restarted their computers for a while.
matt johnson
archicad since 2004
imac 27, 4.2 GHz Intel i7, 16 GB RAM, radeon 575 4 GB, macOS 10.14.6
imac, 4.0ghz i7, 16gb ram, Radeon M9 390 2GB, OS X El Capitan
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
I had this happen randomly under Windows with AC 10 and finally found that if I brought the mouse back to very near to the initial click/hotspot, that the shift-constraint would work again. Drove me crazy. Have not seen it on my Mac.

Generally, I prefer using the Guidelines now... but there are still times when you either have to shift-constrain, or it ends up being just plain faster than mousing over things to get enough guidelines to show up (e.g., aligning to other elements).

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier   •   macOS Sequoia 15.2, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Link
Graphisoft Partner
Graphisoft Partner
Karl wrote:
I had this happen randomly under Windows with AC 10 and finally found that if I brought the mouse back to very near to the initial click/hotspot, that the shift-constraint would work again. Drove me crazy. Have not seen it on my Mac.
It used to be that the constraint would be relative to the element you were creating (as explained here), but that was back in AC9. I think GS has changed the functionality now, as the edit origin seems to never move when shift is enabled, which is a shame because I kinda liked the old functionality.

Anyway, this sounds pretty buggy, even though I haven't experienced it. Guide Lines are good, but I have heard reports of them disabling randomly too.

Cheers,
Link.
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Link wrote:
It used to be that the constraint would be relative to the element you were creating (as explained here),...
Argh. Thanks, Link. Wish I had noticed that post of yours back then...it explains a lot, even as it makes the head spin! 🙂

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier   •   macOS Sequoia 15.2, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
Happenned to me also in AC 12. It seemed like the problem was occuring when trying to edis a curtain wall in 3D and constraining it. After exiting editing mode I had lost the Shift function.

Just a little tough
Anonymous
Not applicable
ArthurG wrote:
....It seemed like the problem was occuring when trying to edis a curtain wall in 3D and constraining it. After exiting editing mode I had lost the Shift function....
Hmm, I was doing that too when it would happen, maybe that's it.

Also, it's not just losing the shift constraint but also, when drawing or moving an element, if I align to a guideline and type 'r' and then the distance I want, it flies way off to a different direction.