Splines and Magic Wand - AC 24

[daviiiiidave]

What happend here? Its not working.

I cant use the magic wand on splines cause archicad dont stop working and calculating.

It doenst work with fills, it doesnt work with mesh nor with morph.

I had to kill archicad the 100th time via task manager while trying to finish some competition plans.
Its so messed up.

Seems like somebody messed up the code for the magic wand calculation.

[Barry Kelly]

Could it also be the magic wand settings.
Is it set to 'Best Match'?
If not you may be adding many more nodes to each curved section of the splines.
If it is best match try adjusting the deviation to a larger number?

It also seems to be an issue with complicated splines.
See this post...

https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=66481&p=295781&hilit=magic+wand#p295781


I found that using polyines instead of splines was much faster.
I think with a polyline you can have a lot of curves but they all have a true radius.
This is not the case with a spline - they have to be calculated in a more complex way.


Barry.

[daviiiiidave]

Here you can see our magic wand settings.



Yeah, I get it that splines are more complex to calculate. Bezier curve etc.

But we couldn't make this kinda shape with the polyline tool.

Minh´s solution works fine. It's a whole new AC with this setting turned off.

It would have been nice to know that last week.

[daviiiiidave]

PS: You can see I'm really emotionally attached to this kinda topic. Cause I spend more time with ArchiCAD then with a lot of other things I really love. I love to dive in and get attached cause I think the output is a better one and I think ArchiCAD has a lot of potential. But I also expect it to work for me not against me. Please excuse my harsh words.

[Lingwisyer]

Spline performance in AC in general is rather terrible from my experience. Any time I get an ACAD drawing containing splines, I open it in ACAD and convert them all to polylines... And within AC I avoid them...

The shown performance improvement with the highlighting turned off is interesting and good to know. Curious to know why it makes such a difference.

[Barry Kelly]

Lingwisyer wrote:
Curious to know why it makes such a difference.

Because it has to do all the calculations of the magic wand just to show you the preview of what is going to happen.
Everytime you move the mouse it needs to re-calculate again as the result may be different.
So it is constantly calculating what the outcome will be until you finally accept it.

Because the spline curves are so complicated, it has to do a lot of calculations.


With the option turned off there is no calculation until you actually perform the magic wand.
Then it is either correct or not.


Barry.

[Lingwisyer]

Ah, so it just continuously loops. Would have thought that there would be some trigger on cursor movement before it recalculates.

[Barry Kelly · Accepted solution]

I don't know that it is continuously looping, but certainly every time you move the mouse it is looking for a new solution as the mouse may be moving to a new edge or surface or even over nothing.


Barry.

[daviiiiidave]

Lingwisyer wrote:
Ah, so it just continuously loops. Would have thought that there would be some trigger on cursor movement before it recalculates.

Barry wrote:
I don't know that it is continuously looping, but certainly every time you move the mouse it is looking for a new solution as the mouse may be moving to a new edge or surface or even over nothing.


Barry.

If this is right, there has to be something to improve that. I can imagin what is happening. Every elemnt has a boundary defined by the tolerance of the cursor. This boundaries are overlapping. Everytime you move the cursor you hitting a different tolerence area. Calculation starts over again. Can this be right?

[Barry Kelly]

daviiiiidave wrote:
Calculation starts over again. Can this be right?

If you want a preview of what will be magic wanded then this has to be correct.
Otherwise if it didn't recalculate, the preview would be worthless.

The thing is, Graphisoft need to work on the algorithm that calculates the preview for splines (if that is possible) to speed it up.
It works fine for other elements (slabs, polylines, etc.).
It is just the calculations for the free-form curves of a spline must be very complex.


Barry.

[Lingwisyer]

It is just the calculations for the free-form curves of a spline must be very complex.

If it can talk to the Spline, rather than calculate it from scratch, it is the simplification of the equations into arcs / lines which is the issue. Not sure on the math of spline approximations, though that could be avoided by just reworking the other tools to work with Splines, however impractical they are to build.



Ling.