Materials and intersection priority with meshes

[Paul King]

Looking for a way to overcome the design defects/limitations in ArchiCAD's handling of materials / intersections priority in relation to meshes.

In particular I need a way to have some translucent slabs and roof elements cut a terrain mesh when switched on, but not cut the terrain mesh when switched off again in a given saved view.  

This is for a schematic design visualisation, showing a sequence of things happening on a large complex terrain, as well as permutations and combinations of those things, all for a range of completely different options.  I have never really managed to use the Design Options tool very successfully (mostly due to my lack of experience with it) but I suspect this will not suffice to deliver the flexibility and simplicity needed here to allow any one of the 40 cut terrain permutations and combinations to activate at will, on the fly, in front of an audience, 

I really don't want to make 40 copies of this large complex site to handle each permutation via SEO.

[cuba]

If your mesh is the main model and your translucent slabs and roof elements are the design options then SEO will work like you want them to work.

With the design options hidden, the mesh will be fully visible.

When you show the different options, the mesh will contains holes created by the SEO (in this case i used substraction with upwards extrusion).

The SEO operation will not be copied when you make a copy of the design option (you will have to do 40 SEO options but only on one mesh)

[thesleepofreason]

Yes - design options will help with separating the intersections but it's unfortunate that we still have to manually multiply elements for different positions/dimensions.

[cuba]

Maybe I am misunderstandig but if you selection an option and click on duplicate, the whole option is duplicated, you don't have to multiply. 

[Paul King]

The problem is each option will have maybe 10 elements, each of which elements I need to be able to turn off or on (complete with cuts to mesh) independently of all the others  This means we are not just talking about 10 design options.

Life would be somewhat simpler if materials priority of visible elements could cut meshes

[Paul King]

By 'multiply' ,this just means repeat the copying process more than once to capture every SEO permutation and combination.

Way to much work for something that needs to be simple, because each option is far from resolved and there will be many, many iterations, each iteration containing multiple elements that need the ability to show or hide  independently of all others (including their SEO impact on the mesh)

[cuba]

You can do everything with one seo-operation, if you store your options as different library elements and call them with gdl.
Place both the target and operator in the same design option and duplicate them together, maintaining the seo-operation.

*depending on the complexity of your design....

[Paul King]

Sadly each element within each option needs to remain editable during workshop discussions - basically this is a live exercise

[thesleepofreason]

The use of  "manually" was misleading. What I meant was that it is that design options requires multiple elements for what is actually nothing more than different configurations of one and the same element. So instead of just creating the element once and have its position, dimension, properties and SEO vary across different options the element has to be multiplied as independent elements for each option. This manual work gets out of hand quickly limiting the use of design options to rather trivial cases rather then design exercises like the one Paul seem to have in mind.

[JaseBee]

A little late to the party but this may work for your situation...

1. Create your mesh.
2. Create a column that is larger than the mesh.
3. Perform SEO intersection (column target - mesh operator).
4. Then draw your site cuts with the slab tool.

A few things to note.

• The column will be live linked to changes in the mesh but will have a building material that can intersect with the slabs (slab to slab won't work, that's why you use a really big column, or a wall if you prefer). Just turn the mesh layer off for presenting/layouts.
• Different cuts can be performed by putting your slabs on different layers and adjusting the layer intersection group number to enable or disable the slab's interaction with the column (site). You can save layer combinations for different stages.
• The building material of the slab must be higher than the building material of the column (or the site won't be cut).
• The 2D display of the column may not work as you would prefer perhaps, some workarounds may include creating a 3d doc of the column to display under your drawings on the layouts

• If the mesh is large and complex, some slowdown may occur, there may be ways around this by breaking the site into smaller sections.

Happy Modelling.