MARKER FILL, AIR SPACE FILL WHAT ARE THEY FOR

[Anonymous]

Aloha,
What is the purpose/use for fills like the "marker", "air space" and "2x4"? We want to keep ArchiCAD's menus as lean as possible. Will deleting these fills cause problems later?
Thank you,
John

[Djordje]

johncassel wrote:
Aloha,
What is the purpose/use for fills like the "marker", "air space" and "2x4"? We want to keep ArchiCAD's menus as lean as possible. Will deleting these fills cause problems later?

It will, as the standard library parts use them as default fills.

[Aussie John]

If you have a composite element which is basically just lines ( no visible fills) then you need two different blank type fills or the line between two fill sof same name will disappear in section.

[Rakela Raul]

thx for asking this question i just learned two things from 2 veterans...

[Karl Ottenstein]

Yo, John, easy on the all-caps (shouting) in your subject. My ears are smarting. 😉

I recently learned something new about "Air Space" in an offline tip from an ac-master:

If a material is set up with "Air Space" as the fill, then NO fill is shown in any of the material pop-up palettes. You can see this on the left side of the attached image ... the materials with "Air Space" and no texture have no icons on the material line.

On the right side, those materials have "Empty Fill" for whatever reason and the fill shows up as a white square (the bitmap rep of Empty Fill). If I were to change the fills for those materials to "Air Space", no fill icon would show up on those lines.

AFAIK, this behavior requires that "Air Space" is fill number 16.

Karl

[Anonymous]

Karl wrote:
...I recently learned something new about "Air Space" in an offline tip from an ac-master:

If a material is set up with "Air Space" as the fill, then NO fill is shown in any of the material pop-up palettes....
AFAIK, this behavior requires that "Air Space" is fill number 16....
Karl

Karl,
This is interesting "behavior"...do you have any insight as to the intended purpose of it? I'm not sure I understand the reason...just curious if I am overlooking something obvious.

Thanks,
Dan K

[Anonymous]

johncassel wrote:
Aloha,
What is the purpose/use for fills like the "marker", "air space" and "2x4"? We want to keep ArchiCAD's menus as lean as possible. Will deleting these fills cause problems later?
Thank you,
John

This is a great question and I hope that someone can clarfy exactly what fills/index#'s can and can't (or shouldn't) be removed from the fill palate.

The ArchiCAD standard palate is quite large and as John has suggested many users would want to minimize or make it "leaner". I have experienced some problems with AC's standard doors and windows because some of the fills have been removed. Because of this I get error messages that certain fills can't be found. Its quite a nuisance and not easily ignored.

You can fix some of these errors by changing the fill in the door and window dialogue...but others can't be changed because the fills are set in macros called by the doors and windows and don't have a parameter in the main object to change.

Some of the fills Ive noticed that shouldn't be removed or modified are:
85 (empty filly), 19 (wood), 73 (wood siding), 28 (marker fill?), 1 (brick common), 13 (brass/bronze) ...I'm sure there are others - can someone shed some more light on this subject?

Thanks,
Dan K

[Link]

There is no safe way of making one's CAD Template leaner because so many attributes are used by so many different elements in ArchiCAD. And GS keep changing them! So there's really no safe method. At last count I figured the fills alone could be trimmed down to only 24, without the word MISSING appearing consistently as future attributes are used. Library parts, especially the parts in the Extras menu are particularly troublesome regarding fills!

Linetypes aren't too bad. Composites, Zone Categories are a no brainer, but fills are hazardous! Materials are just a nightmare.

It can be done but until GS gives us some kind of global replacements (similar to the 'General' material) then there is no guarantee that you'll get a lean file that will work flawlessly between AC version IME.

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link wrote:
There is no safe way of making one's CAD Template leaner because so many attributes are used by so many different elements in ArchiCAD. And GS keep changing them! So there's really no safe method....

This is obviously an area Graphisoft should give further attention to. Any company who desires to maximize their operational efficiency by customizing ArchiCAD to their internal operating standards should be able to do so in a "safe" or predictable way. There should a "documented" standard of safe attribute manipulation and all standard parts or 3rd party components should adhere to them. In addtion, these standardized minimum attributes should probably be hard coded into the software in a way that they cannot be removed.

I understand this can, or would be, difficult to implement due to a huge legacy of components but it should be addressed more seriously.

Link wrote:
It can be done but until GS gives us some kind of global replacements (similar to the 'General' material) then there is no guarantee that you'll get a lean file that will work flawlessly between AC version IME.

Excellent idea!..If this were implemented the problem with standardized attributes for fills, etc. could be minimized.