Permanent Distance

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to set an object a permanent distance from another object?

For example,
* the door is permanently 520mm from the corner.
* the window is permanently 1000mm from the corner
* the light switch is permanently 200mm from the door

[Anonymous]

No not unless that is a new feature in 21 that i haven't heard about yet.

[schagemann]

You can use the 'user origin' for that, basically you temporarily locate the 'user origin' (little bold cross) and then offset from that...

https://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/guides/archicad-20/archicad-20-reference-guide/interaction/origins...

...another way is to use guide lines - unfortunately both methods are not quite as intuitive as the workflow other software provide.

[Anonymous]

Yes but you can't lock the object to that position, I think that is what the op was asking.

[Laszlo Nagy]

famadorian wrote:
Is it possible to set an object a permanent distance from another object?

For example,
* the door is permanently 520mm from the corner.
* the window is permanently 1000mm from the corner
* the light switch is permanently 200mm from the door

This would require constraints and there are only a few constraints currently in ARCHICAD. For example, Base and Top Link for Walls, Columns and Zones (and Stairs in AC21) so you can constrain their base and top to Story levels.

Unfortunately, reality tells me that these constraints can put a very heavy load on your program. When you have hundreds or thousands of these constraints in a Project File, it can slow your program down a great deal.
The reason I am saying that is because I studied Revit and Revit has constraints and even Autodesk recommends in their official performance white papers that you should keep the number of constraints to the minimum.
I guess computers are still not fast enough to handle such computing load.

[Ruben V]

It would/could be a workaround to Group a Window with the wall, but that is oddly not possible (command is not grayed out, but trying this gives an "error sound" and no effect... ). Actually, it is impossible to group a window with anything at all - weird...

You can lock layers, but windows/doors are not on seperate layers... So you would have to make a seperate layer for this type of wall and lock that one.

But I concur with Lazlo on limiting this kind of restraints in a design, although it would be nice to have a feature like this for when you really need it...