Great tip from Jared and Til on managing Complex Profiles

[Karl Ottenstein]

Jared Banks and Til Breton give a super tip in today's GSUS BIM Engine Blog post for managing a library of many complex profiles: using a special, annotated 'Master' Complex Profile (that would never actually be used as a profile) that contains all of the possibly 100's of individual profiles that one might want to use:

http://blog.graphisoftus.com/archicad-education/tips-and-tricks/the-master-complex-profile

One of the really cool things I like about Til's idea as extended by Jared is that this entire master 'drawing' can be moved from project to project simply using Attribute Manager. Doing something similar with an independent Worksheet is not as easy, particularly since attributes can be saved and shared as tiny AAT files. Clever.

Til's original idea, presented there, just defined fills - with pens and materials (including unique edge conditions) - for constructing other profiles. That palette concept is really efficient. (You cannot do the same outside of Profile Manager, as only it can store different materials-per-edge, etc.) Brilliant.

Jared mentions that copying a profile from the Master Profile would require re-creating the vertical stretch points and opening reference lines (perhaps from saved drafting lines). One other thing to watch out for, if you go with this idea of only copying a profile into a new CP as you need it, is that the same CP will most likely have different index numbers (as seen in Attribute Manager) in different projects, requiring care if you ever merge project attributes or hotlink one into another.

Thanks, Til and Jared for this clever idea.

[JaredBanks]

Karl, thanks for sharing this. I really wish we had a like button on the forum, because all I really want to say is +1!

And also that I never thought about the transferability of the Master Complex Profile via an .att file. That's HUGE! Thanks for expanding on this idea.