SEO Slab Doesn't act on wall

[Brad Elliott]

Can anyone explain this behavior? I understand that somehow legacy changes the surfaces to their defaults but I don’t understand how it is affecting the Solid Element Operations. You can see that the outer skin is getting acted on but nothing else. My other projects aren’t showing this behavior. I need my SEO’s to work in non legacy settings. Otherwise I’m going to be spending a ton of time changing materials again. This is AC19.

[Brad Elliott]

And with Legacy Options on

[Barry Kelly]

Slabs and wall have what they call 'Priority Based Connections'.
This means that the higher strength Building Materials will automatically override the weaker ones.
An automatic SEO if you like.
That is why the SEO will not work as the connection has already been made and the bits cut away can't make any further cuts in SEO because they are not there.

So you have 2 options.
Play around with the strengths of your building materials.
Or place the slab and the wall in different layers and set the intersection priority number (found in the layer settings dialogue) to be different for each layer.
Then the PBC will not occur and you can do your SEO as ther is nothing being cut away automatically.
If they have to be in the same layer then you can set the intersection priority number to zero.
Of course this will affect how other elements interact with elements in these layers.

Remember also to set the priority number in the layer combinations as well otherwise you will find they reset every time you change to a new combination.
You can of course have different settings in each combinations so maybe in some they do connect automatically and in other combinations they don't.

The best way is to sort out your building material strengths which may mean you have to duplicate some building materials but have them at different strengths for different uses.

Barry.

[DGSketcher]

Without organising your material strengths PBCs can be a nightmare. I am starting to group my materials under basic elements e.g. floors, walls, roofs. As Barry has suggested you may end up with duplicate materials, but you are more likely to be able to correct a bad junction without blindly screwing up the rest of the model. As an example you may want the roof insulation to cut the top of a wall but if you used the same insulation in a floor or partition it would also pass through the wall which may not be what you want displayed.

[Brad Elliott]

Thanks Guys.
Sheesh, this is what happens when it gets too complicated. I went through a lot of effort setting up my materials to all work with my default composites when they first came out and haven't had to think about them much since. I had to create a new floor for some specialty framing and selected the wrong Building Material. And Building Materials was the first thing I checked but my expectations overrode what I was actually seeing.
This reinforces something I've been saying for a couple of versions now. We need some way to create a composites spreadsheet showing the used composites and their building materials so we can do an overview to help us find and sort these issues. It would also create a great base sheet for the assembly details.

[Richard Morrison]

Brad wrote:
We need some way to create a composites spreadsheet showing the used composites and their building materials so we can do an overview to help us find and sort these issues. It would also create a great base sheet for the assembly details.

I believe we already have a way. This should be very easy to do with interactive schedules. What, exactly, would you like this to look like?

[Brad Elliott]

Richard,
I actually conflated a couple different issues.
First, I would like to be able to select two or three different composites and when opening the building materials window have each one show up with a different color. That way I could quickly sort the hierarchy and easily tell what material or relationship is causing me trouble.
Second I would like to have a way to select the composites that I am using and have the fill imagery from the composite structures window show with the corresponding material. I have attached a quick and dirty image.

[Richard Morrison]

Brad,
I'm not totally clear on what you'd like to see, but I wonder if you are aware that you can select a couple of different composite items on your plan, and then open the the Building Materials dialog box. The materials in the selected items will be highlighted and by clicking the top icon in the first column, they will all be sorted to the top. This puts all of the relevant priorities into proximity, and the priorities can be easily adjusted from there.

[Brad Elliott]

Didn't know about the icon. That helps a lot.
Now if only the different composites were in different colors I would be set. That is because of what started this thread and that is I have multiples of wall framing and it's hard to remember/tell which one goes with which wall and that's usually what I am trying to fix.

[Richard Morrison]

Well, a couple of things. First, for a pretty quick way to figure out which framing material is being used in a particular composite, you can alt-click (or whatever the "eyedropper" key is on the Mac) on the element before you open the composite dialog, and then the dialog will come up with that composite already selected.

Second, you can use colors in the material fill backgrounds, and see it on the plan or section directly. See http://blog.graphisoftus.com/archicad-user/adding-legibility-to-details#. This would only take a couple of minutes to add to your existing materials.