Exploding Morphs

[drh64]

I've made a column out of multiple morphs and then did a "union" to combine them into a single morph. I now want to explode that morph, take away a small portion of it and re-save to a new morph. Is there a way to do this? I try the convert function again and that does not convert it back to multiple elements.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Why don't you edit the shape of the Morph directly?
Also you can perform SEOs on Morphs, like subtract the body of one Morph from the body of another.

[Barry Kelly]

Or use the "split" tool to cut them up into smaller chunks.
You can always join them again afterwards.
Barry.

[stefan]

Exploding a morph into the individual faces would be a possible workaround to schedule surface areas of individual faces, which is (still) not possible in ArchiCAD.

E.g. to do a quick heat-loss/energy estimate based on a "Mass Model" (the way many people use Revit or SketchUp in a concept phase).

In the example below, I created a single Morph Volume with the desired outer shell of a house. Placed it on a separate layer.

On a copy of the volume, I manually selected each individual face, assigned a Surface and turned the selection into a Morph (so it got detached from the volume). This individual flat morph can then be placed on a proper layer.

I created two schedules and filtered out the morphs according their layers.

This is a very labour intensive effort, but is the exact result I would like to obtain in one step, namely by being able to schedular surface areas of all faces of the morph.

[Ruben V]

Interesting workaround Stefan!

I'm still looking for a similar way to do a "material take-off" on the interior of the building.
Doing this by using zones gives ± correct measured areas, but the inside/outside is sometimes switched around (according to the position of the reference line i guess).

I really hope GS will make (better) data-extraction a priority for 19, it would convince a lot more architects to switch to BIM/ArchiCAD...

(e.g. allow more 'own' calculations in the schedules, allowing importing of xls-files to build schedules faster, giving more control over surfaces in a composite to be measured - for more precise results, ...)