Making Composit Skins visible in 3D views.

[Steve Jepson]

The skins of a composite wall were showing up in 3D just fine but I must have accidently changed something and now one of the skins (insulation) is not showing up anymore. How do I get it to show as before ?

[Steve Jepson]

I don't know if it is related but I did find some sort of file corruption.

Zooming out as far as the program can view with all layers turned on I see that there is something wrong.

There seems to be something at project origin that is bad. I will open a new topic on how to fix corrupt files.

[Steve Jepson]

It's hard to tell with 19 what is a bug or a corrupt file.

Take any project, go to a Project Map and zoom out manually to the extreme limit. You will see some stuff in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

Mine looks like this-- It may not be a bug or a corrupt file. It just looks like something is bad. I don't know.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Definitely looks like some kind of file corruption.
Can you select that point towards the middle into which all those line run and delete it? Those could be corrupted elements. (Or cut the to the Clipboard and paste them back - pasting sometimes fixes data corruption in elements.)
Or another thing may be that that point in the middle is close to the Project Origin and all those elements in the upper left corner are too far from the Project Origin and these huge distances cause this error. You could try moving all those element close to the Project Origin (if this is the case).

[Steve Jepson]

It may not be a corruption. Try it with any file. Open a Project Map ( all layers on) and manually zoom out the extreme limit and you will see stuff in the upper left hand corner of your screen. You may need to try this using different Project Maps.

I am not able to select anything beyond the area you would get with zoom to extent, which is not all the way out to the extreme limit.

I think the problem is that my Tyvek has a thickness of 0". I am checking it out know to see what happens to the entire composite if I make it .001"
1/64" will probably be the default minimum thickness that can be used in a composite.

[Steve Jepson]

Yes. That was the problem. I made the Tyvek the minimum allowable thickness for a Composite Skin (1/64" ) and the missing skin in 3D views shows up again. This was also causing the R-21 Skin not to show up in Section views too.

Why this affects an adjacent skin rather than the 0" skin is where the Bug is.

This is a problem that I had forgotten about. It was discussed in Beta Testing and before.

I don't want to delete the skin to avoid the cumulative dimensional error that may show up in dimension chains because of the information I am showing in labels for those walls and for the sake of my Wall Types schedule which is also annotated with a label.

Just another reason for another work-around.

As for the possibility of a corrupt file - If the file does have some corrupt elements it is probably not the reason why some of the skins were not showing up in 3D views.

Also, this may not be the ultimate cause of the problem, just one of them.
I am fairly certain that in older files I was using the same complex profiles and not getting this result. I need to check that out as well.

[Laszlo Nagy]

OK, so it was a zero thickness skin.
Maybe then ARCHICAD should either handle such cases correctly, or it should not allow such a value to be entered in the first place. That would save some headache in the future.
I will forward this to Graphisoft for their consideration.