Materials no longer individually assigned to surfaces - Bug?

[Anonymous]

After wrestling with setting up a few so-called multi-storey MODs, after an update, the display of all elements' material assignments got screwed up. That is, they no longer displayed separate materials for each side and edge. Every element acted like all sides were set as "linked", and displayed the material that was assigned to the edge surface, on all sides.

It's never happened to me before (though I'm pretty much a newbie, so I haven't a great deal of experience to draw on). Looking for a possible cause... prior to this happening:

1) I had hotlinked in about 10 mods (One for each storey, due to the crappy implementation of multi-storey mods . See my post here about those hassles!)
This seemed to slow down the system, particularly the "Converting to 3D / Phase 4" stage when regenerating the 3D window.

2) I'd put a sloping edge on a number of roofs in one of the MODs, and one or two of them caused a number of "Invalid Polygon" errors when regenerating the 3D window, due to length of the roof being shorter than the slope (The adjacent was shorter than the hypotenuse). I corrected it at the time, but the materials issue still remains.

As for timing, I'm not exactly sure when it happened - I ignored it at first because I thought it might sort itself out, and I had bigger frustrations to deal with at the time. So I can't remember exactly what was the precursor.

Has anybody any ideas what might have caused this, and any ideas as to how to fix it?

[Erika Epstein]

peter_h wrote:
Every element acted like all sides were set as "linked", and displayed the material that was assigned to the edge surface, on all sides.

I don't understand what you mean.

Also some screen shots would be helpful.

Did you use the same file to create the mods as you did the main file in which you are placing them? If not, the attributes such as the materials would differ.

[Anonymous]

Erika wrote:
I don't understand what you mean.

Did you use the same file to create the mods as you did the main file in which you are placing them? If not, the attributes such as the materials would differ.

Hi Erika

To clarify: There are 3 types of surfaces that can be assigned a material: reference side; non-reference side; and edges. By "linked", I mean that the "chain" button is pressed, and all 3 sides use the same material. The material it chooses to use in this case is the one that is set for "edges".

Problem being, every element acts as if the "chain" button is pressed, even though it isn't, and even though differing materials have been set for each of the 3 "sides".

Re your second question: Yes, basically... Originally it was from the same template, but there has been a few divergences between them, as attributes have been added. I did check, when I was trying to figure out what was going on, and though some of the index numbers of some materials are different, the names and properties of the attributes are the same, between files. But that's not the problem here - materials display correctly, but only 1 material is being displayed per element.

[Erika Epstein]

Peter,

AC reads the index numbers, not the pretty names we assign them.

I either make the module in the file I am in or open a new file 'using the active settings' so the attributes are all the same.

No idea why materials are ganged as a result of placing the mod file into a pln; I've not experienced this phenomenon. Perhaps someone else knows.

[Anonymous]

Here's some more odd behaviour, in the same pln:

1) If I create a new element, the 3 sides can be set separately with different materials, and they display correctly.

2) If I make a copy of an existing element, it still only displays the "edge" material on all 3 sides - the same behaviour as the copied element.

3) If I take an existing vertical-sided wall, and make it a sloping-sided wall, then the reference side now displays correctly, but the non-reference side incorrectly displays the same material as the edge side.

4) If I then also change it's Cut Fill to another material, all 3 sides now display correctly.

5) However, if I change the wall back to vertical-sided, it reverts to the same behaviour as (3)...
and if I also change it's fill back to it's original fill type, it reverts back to displaying only 1 material on all 3 sides.

Additionally, if I go into all the source plns of the linked MODS, all these files display correctly.

This is all after another restart, so it's not a temporary problem.

[Anonymous]

Well I managed to find a workaround to this bug: by copy + pasting all elements of the project into a new pln (using the multi-story marquee tool). (Note that hotlinks to mods had to be pasted in 1 at a time, as copy+paste with multi-story marquee tool just pasted in the elements as a group with no hotlink)

Luckily, I hadn't gotten around to setting up many annotated 2D views, nor custom layouts, so I didn't suffer too much loss of work.

Would still like to hear from anyone with more info though; if it's happened to your; if you know the cause of it...?