Mystery-and I'm really desperate

[Anonymous]

Attached is an Archicad file containing 2 sets of walls – the section through the vertical wall (sec-8) is correct on my screen.
The section through the tilted wall (sec 7) dos not show the wall correctly – on my screen the wall appears "narrow" and is missing part of one side.
both walls are identical - only difference is tilt. sec 7 is perpendicular to tilted wall.
This is a new phenomenon but it affects all of my files – in desperation I have re-installed the software, but got no change.
This makes it impossible for me to work altogether – I'm really desperate.
Pleas help

Thanks – ittai

[Aaron Bourgoin]

By all drawings do you mean all site drawings or all building drawings as well?

ArchiCAD has had an exterior mechanism to compensate situations where imported for cadastral information that is further than 10000 meters from the universal origin point. The documentation said that it would create a local coordinate system on the fly to bring elements closer to the origin and then make an adjustment when files were exported.

This is old information and I think Graphisoft should be contacted and asked to comment.

If you are concerned about site information only, I think it would be a good idea to maintain a separate site file and hotlink your project to it for information exchange purposes. You would develope the project with a building reference point that relates it to your project origin (bottom right corner of building 2 meters in x and y)

This way you will never be concerned with the cadastral information in design - the site file will take care of that.

[Anonymous]

I work on a pre-determined coordinate system (in the States it is called the SPC (State Plane Coordinate system) as well. All our drawings are done on this system. All building stakeout is done w/ x, y coordinates as are walks, light locations, etc. To have software that is intolerant of this type system is unacceptable, especially at $4k a seat.

If ArchiCad is to compete in the global market with Autocad and Microstation, it must be conscious of how people actually work. Having come from a company that did military planning work all over the world, and used a coordinate layout system tied to some datum unknown miles away, it is imperative to have a cad system capable of a "global" view. Doesn't anyone else work with coordinate layouts?

I have never experienced the problem this thread originated with.

[Anonymous]

Reply:
In my case every element done by any consultant has to be placed in the coordinate system, therefore having the surveyor's drawing in one location and the building in the other will not help when I send my drawings to any other consultant. I agree with Rip Weaver in expecting Archicad to allow for any element on any place in world coordinates and that it ahs to be possible to manipulate this element properly.
ittai

[Aaron Bourgoin]

ittai wrote:
In my case every element done by any consultant has to be placed in the coordinate system, therefore having the surveyor's drawing in one location and the building in the other will not help when I send my drawings to any other consultant. I agree with Rip Weaver in expecting Archicad to allow for any element on any place in world coordinates and that it ahs to be possible to manipulate this element properly.
ittai

Rip wrote:
I work on a pre-determined coordinate system (in the States it is called the SPC (State Plane Coordinate system) as well. All our drawings are done on this system. All building stakeout is done w/ x, y coordinates as are walks, light locations, etc. To have software that is intolerant of this type system is unacceptable, especially at $4k a seat.

If ArchiCad is to compete in the global market with Autocad and Microstation, it must be conscious of how people actually work. Having come from a company that did military planning work all over the world, and used a coordinate layout system tied to some datum unknown miles away, it is imperative to have a cad system capable of a "global" view. Doesn't anyone else work with coordinate layouts?

I have never experienced the problem this thread originated with.

The coordinate systems both Rip and ittai reference are, I think accomodated by AC. I'm still looking for the reference to this topic as posted in my previous reply and will pull out ArchiCAD 4.55 documentation, if I have to, to find it.

Whether you're drawing a bulding or a site is irrelevant in my view.

The project should be documented in ArchiCAD with the building model located close to the origin point; referenced back to some other ArchiCAD container for communication with consultants and authorities. 8.1 or 9 make this sort of communication pretty painless and so it shouldn't added much to file administration overhead.

To my way of thinking, the project file should work the way the user wants it to, not the way the civil engineer wants it to. Seems to me they can be accommodated pretty easily with a bit of forethought.

BTW, ArchiCAD is not a civil engineering tool: that it can be made to perform like one or collaborate with just about anyone [Microstation included] is one of its STRENGTHS, not its weaknesses.

If anyone working on the US Coast Guard Project would like to chime in here that would be just great. I've also heard talk of GIS compatibility assistance being something thta exists. Anyone on this board working with or for ESRI?

[Anonymous]

Let me elaborate:

The way it works here is that my self - and any consultant, expect any drawing sent or received to seamlessly appear in the right coordinates – this makes coordination easy – it is also required to submit plans to the authorities on the "grid"

I have previously worked on AC 6.5 that in the version sold here had problems translating surveyor's drawings – so I was forced to work not on the national grid, and had to instruct the various consultants on how to move my plan to the proper coordinates. Having only small privet clients made it not to difficult.

Having moved to AC 8.1 and having got bigger public work I, was happy to see that I can get my consultants plans in there proper place on the grid "as is" just to be disappointed by this strange phenomenon – it seems I will have to go back to having to move my plans and the plans I get from all the consultants around all the time – with all the inherent risks of bad alignment and so on.

I personally feel that if Archicad is claiming to be completely compatible to Autocad then it should also allow for a drawing to be far from 0,0 and still behave normally ?

It seems this strange behavior is not the same in different coordinates and distances from 0,0 – but do we know how far and in what direction do you need to be from 0,0 before this starts to happen ?

In my opinion it is an oversight by Grafisoft and should be fixed by them.

Regards - ittai

[AndorSzoke]

Dear ittai,

In ArchiCAD 9 this problem is solved. That means that if you open your drawing with ArchiCAD 9 the wall in question and all the other drawing elements will be displayed correctly.

For a workaround in ArchiCAD 8.1 I suggest you follow this article below which will be soon available on ArchiGuide too:

"In ArchiCAD 8.1 and older versions projects that have objects placed several thousand kilometers/miles from the ArchiCAD origin may not function correctly. Under these circumstance crashes or data loss may become more likely.

Below is a sample of problematic functioning of ArchiCAD with projects containing objects far from the origin:

170 000 m away from the origin:
Polygon operations, such as moving holes inside the polygon, may function unexpectedly.
1 000 000 m away from the origin:
Some dimensioning text entities may disappear when printing.
6 600 000 m away from the origin:
the Trim to Roof command fails in 3D and inaccuracies most likely will appear in sections
Beyond 100 000 000 m the coordinate values will not change.
Taking into consideration the above listed problems it is prudent to relocate a far-from-the-origin project to as close to the absolute origin as possible.



If you want the coordinate box to preserve the original distances you can still do this by just swapping the usage of the absolute origin with the user origin. To swap the origins and relocate a far-from-the-origin project follow the below steps:



1. Set all the Layers to Show and Unlock.

2. Unlock all locked Elements.

3. Double click the user origin button on the Coordinates palette so that user origin is the same as absolute origin.



4. Place a hotspot over the absolute origin.

5. Click on the command Fit in window in the Display menu. The project and hotspot together with the project origin should appear in two different corners of the screen.

6. Use the bold marquee to frame the project so that all the stories become selected (with the newly placed hotspot included).

7. Drag the project to the project origin.

8. By using Fit in window the project will be adjusted to the screen.

9. Place the user origin over the repositioned hotspot. You can move the User Origin by holding down the Alt and Shift (Windows) or Opt and Shift (Mac) keys.

10. Go to Save as and save the project under a new name."

Regards,

[Anonymous]

dear Andor,

thank you for the explanation - I will definitely give it a try.

regards ittai

[Anonymous]

I find this thread extremely disturbing and would like some clarification on what I am reading.

On a daily basis, I place houses constructed in Archicad (at 0,0) into a site plan that has been constructed on a coordinate grid miles from the origin. These houses (it can be a bridge, a playground, a pool, etc.) are placed on this site plan and coordinates derived from the structure's corners and given to a surveyor to locate in the field for construction. This is THE method of locating structures for constrcution here in the state of Alabama in the US. I know of no civil engineer, landscape architect or architect (using a computer) that does NOT do a site layout in this manner. It is the required method for ANY municipal, military or state work.

I am disturbed to learn that there could possibly be data corruption when dealing with points remote from the 0,0 origin. This makes Archicad useless for urban planning type work where one MUST place objects on a pre-determined grid system. it is so TOTALLY unrealistic to expect one to relocate hundreds of thousands of objects to the 0,0 to avoid data corruption. I also question the Archicad community if there have been any problems related to this issue as I can foresee dollrs spent correcting an unknown problem during construction (I luckily have never had a problem).

I know there are other users who do work exactly as I have described. Did you guys know about this problem? have you experienced a problem?

I would like to hear from the Archicad community regarding their take on this issue. I believe in the software, but am greatly disturbed to find out a limitation such as this at release 9.

Rip Weaver
Town Landscape Architect

Archicad user since 5. Currently using 9

Mac OSX/ 500mHz cube

[Anonymous]

Rip,

The problem is only with elements that are many kilometers (170km per Ittai) from the origin. Unless you are designing something that is far and away larger than any city ever built by humans, a 100km radius from the city center should not be to limiting.

One thing I don't understand with these survey requirements of having all drawings relate to some very distant datum: how is the curvature of the Earth accounted for? I would think that this would introduce very serious accuracy problems. A flat grid of 100km on each side will distort significantly when applied to the globe.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Have a look at this link.

Geodyssey is a company that developed software routines to address the issues that Matthew raises.

Hipparchus, (our product), is an "open" GIS toolkit that enables software developers to incorporate geography into their applications. And yes, we too measure distances using angles, but not using the familiar latitudes and longitudes. Instead, we work with direction cosines. And from that true "paradigm shift" flows an unexpected mathematical power and significant performance gain.

Use of the Hipparchus Library of C language functions permits the C/C++ language developer to deal with the "where" of things, without requiring proprietary database management systems (DBMS's) or specific graphical user interfaces (GUI's).

Firmly grounded in the science of geodesy, Hipparchus combines the speed and precision of 3D ellipsoidal vector algebra with a novel spatial indexing scheme to provide seamless and lightning-fast geographic functionality.