Attribute manager won't Overwrite

[Anonymous]

Hi.
I have been running into my attribute manager not overwritting attributes when I ask it to.
I get an error message that says something like " am material with the same name already exists" (I lost my print screen of it) and then it makes a copy of it.

Does anyone know why this happens?

[Laszlo Nagy]

The way it works is that it tries to overwrite the corresponding attribute with the same INDEX NUMBER.
So let us say you have BRICK with index no. 1
and you have WOOD with index no. 2

In another PLN you loaded into the right side of the Attribute Manager, there is BRICK with index no. 2
So you select BRICK on the right side and click Overwrite.
It wants to overwrite index no. 2 on the left side (WOOD). But the BRICK name is already taken on the left side.
So it gives you the error message.
That is what I think this can be, I have not tried it though.

[Anonymous]

hmm.
How do we deal with this then?
is this where we make sure we don't change textures, we make copies of them to alter them,?

[Laszlo Nagy]

Let me ask this back: is this the case you are experiencing?

[Anonymous]

I am not sure of your question- but I can explain my issue further.

Over time we have been working on a project that has 5 buildings, over years actually, and archicad versions, and while we were still learning how to use archicad.

At this point we want to take all of our models and put them into a site plan and render it.

We have made all the materials for each building the same for each model, but they all have slightly different names. And apparently different #s.

For instance, I have "green Vertical Trim" for three different buildings but they come into the site differently because i have a "green vertical trim" material in that .pln too. they come in as brick, or tile or something. Which makes sense with the 3 thing you're talking about.
As I am writing this I am thinking best way to handle this for speedyness sake would be to just append all the different , material .aats in the site model rather than over writing and trying to make them all use the same material.

but for future reference how do i go about handling this so that when i make material in the main house file, and can use that same material (number, name, and the way it loosk in 3D) in an out building file?

[Laszlo Nagy]

Basically you have to make sure that the Attribute Set is identical in all files.
So for example, whenever you change any attribute, you propagate the change to all other files.
Unfortunately, there is no automated way of doing it that I know of.

[Anonymous]

Jesikuh123 wrote:
As I am writing this I am thinking best way to handle this for speedyness sake would be to just append all the different , material .aats in the site model rather than over writing and trying to make them all use the same material.

This is certainly the quickest way to get the job done. Material attributes will mostly be assigned by name. The exception to this will be attributes assigned in the parameters settings of library parts. These are stored by index numbers. Depending on how you've modeled this may or may not produce acceptable results.

The best solution would be to match the materials across the projects. Though a bit tedious, you could take it as an opportunity to establish your office standards (and learn a bit about attribute management - probably more than you want to know 😉 ). There are a few tricks for coordinating attributes using both Attribute Manager and merging files back and forth. The details of how to attack this depend on the degree and nature of the variances between your files and the extent of the problems in library part material assignments.

One thing that can help is to save the lists of materials for each project from attribute manager (it's call print to file in AM). This makes tabbed text files that can be opened in a spreadsheet to compare the various project models. This will give you a quick overview of the variances by both names and index numbers as well as showing which attributes are in use in each file.

The library parts can still be a problem but may not be too difficult depending on how many are used and how much variation there is in the materials set by parameters.