Understanding Building Materials AC17

[Anonymous]

So I am still "wrapping my head (mind) around" the new AC17 Building Material (BM).
Opening my AC16 office template in AC17, there are some new BM's that are created. Three of which are Background, Foreground & Empty Fills. Building Materials seem to be mostly about the addition of Thermal properties, which none of these fill have. Is it necessary to have BM's for these items that are already contained in the file as Fills?

Also I use to have different surfaces different Wood items in a project. I would have a Wood - Post material, Wood - Beam material and often both a Wood -Joist and Wood - Rim material. The different surface materials are necessary for the items not to "merge" together in 3D or 2D. Do I need to create separate BM for each? What are others that work in residential Construction mostly in wood framing doing?

[schagemann]

Building Materials seem to be mostly about the addition of Thermal properties, which none of these fill have.

Not quite, they are also an attempt to simplify the overly complex pre AC17 intersection 'paradigm' - which in our experience seems to be working quite well so far…. although we did also have problems with converting templates and ultimately choose not to migrate, but setup our template(s) from scratch.

So if I understand your problem correctly, you have 2 options:

1. recreate the individual AC16 timber 'surface materials as separate AC17 'building' materials;

2. keep as one AC17 BM, but override the surface material in the Element Settings > Model

Anyway, hope this helps at least a little.