Holes in "upside down" beams

[BulldogBen]

I had trouble adding holes to my beams until I found the solution, which will hopefully help others. Here's how it went...

1. Select one of my beams with the reference line on the bottom edge.
2. Click reference line, and choose hole tool in pet palette.
3. Enter sensible details in "Beam Hole Settings" window and click OK.
4. No hole appears on the beam, Ben starts scratching head.
5. Tried on beams with reference line on the top edge and it's fine.

I suspect the new hole tool is assuming the reference line is on the top and putting the hole below that, and in the case of a beam with the reference on the bottom the hole is outside the beam and never gets created (it's not there in Hole section of beam settings after the operation).

My fix was...

1. Select all "upside-down" beams with marquee and find tool.
2. Sect one of the top 6 reference axis point (see below).
3. Adjust beam elevation as required to put it back in right place.

I would say this is counterintuitive and opaque enough to be considered a bug, what do others think?

[CosminF · Accepted solution]

Hi,

In regards to what you said here:

---

 wrote:

I suspect the new hole tool is assuming the reference line is on the top and putting the hole below that, 

---

You can set the distance between hole center and reference line. And if the reference line is on the bottom, you have to enter the negative value. because that distance is measured from the reference line downwards.

You can easily see what I mean by this, by selecting a beam with a hole and just changing the reference line. The position of the hole is tied to the reference line and the hole may even be "outside" of the beam itself.

In my opinion it is not a bug, you just have to know you're measuring from the line "down" so if the reference line is at the bottom you have to use negative values.

[runxel]

Oh man, that thing nagged me before, too! I only found out because I put out a bug report.

Alas! It's not really a bug – it does work after all. However I personally think the UX is horrible, especially when people are falling for this constantly.

The dialog is just very bad. There is no hint that the reference line is taken into account. They could just make the upper line blue and I would've understand.

Or put some text. Or make a selection box so we can choose what the reference should be.

There also should be some kind of message "yo this will not be visible because it's outside the BREP of the beam! Do you really want that?".

But right now it's just bad.

[BulldogBen]

Such a good point. Perhaps they should just make it clearer its measuring down from the reference line.

[Laszlo Nagy]

There is also a little trick you can do when you do not see the created Beam Hole:

Simply Undo the command and the Beam Hole will be selected (in gray selection dots, apparently because it is not within the geometry of the Beam?)

Note: Usually it is the Undo-Redo pair of commands that selects elements created in the last step, but for some reason, in this case, Undo is enough.