Deleting Materials & Fills

[Lachlan Green]

I've been going through all the Fills, Materials and Composite Fills to clean out all of the useless ones that I will never need. However, they don't die... I delete them, click ok and if I look through the list again, they're back. Even if I delete, save and reopen they are still there. I've also tried changing the names of some, but they either change back, or it re-creates the original fill.

Any tips on how to get rid of these fills and materials?

Just as a side note, the Composite Fills are fine and don't come back.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Some attributes (materials, fills, line styles, etc) are created by library parts, and so the loading of the library re-creates those attributes.

Others are required by ArchiCAD and are re-created.

In general, you would be well to leave most everything alone until you become pretty expert in AC since many attributes that seem 'useless' are used by library parts. Deleting them will result in the lib parts not displaying themselves as intended, requiring more manual setting of parameters than might otherwise be required.

Invariably the next thing someone does after deleting these things is to create new things. But, this can lead to trouble / hassles. AC refers to materials, fills, etc by the internal number that you can see by opening Attribute Manager. If you delete existing attributes and create new ones, you might well end up with the lady in red having a brick dress, carpet face and insulation in section (e.g.).

(Since it will no doubt be something else you are about to do, given that you are in purge mode... do not modify pens 1-10, 19 or 91 as these are all used by the library. Again, once you really understand what's going on, you might change some of these - although 19 must always be white for non-US versions and 91 must always be white in the US version. Safest bet is to leave 19 and 91 as white so that any objects you download from here will display correctly.)

Cheers,
Karl

[__archiben]

LGreen wrote:
... or it re-creates the original fill.

also be aware that some library scripts generate attributes: from fills to materials. again, these scripts are generally creating attributes that will be called in specific associated objects. it's a big task and you are going to need a thorough expert knowledge to undertake it - not to mention maintain it for each subsequent archicad release. are you sure it's something you want to get into?!

~/archiben