Walls not drawing orthogonally

[Richard Morrison]

I'm not sure why this is, but I'm having a heck of time getting walls to draw exactly orthogonally. They end up with an angle of 89.97 deg., say. I'm not doing anything differently than I've done the past 19 years or so, at least I don't think so. Is there a setting, like a grid snap or a guideline, or behavior that I'm missing in the latest version? BTW, I jumped from AC17 to 19 (briefly) and have been working in AC20. What do I need to do differently?

[Erwin Edel]

Richard wrote:

Erwin wrote:
Part of the problem is the snapguides that create circles, extra connecting lines etc etc. The other day I was tracing a complicated polygon-shape and the amount of feedback you end up with on the screen is horrible, you can't turn them off either if you want a simple midpoint snap.

I think you can. There's an icon and you can also assign a shortcut key.

This turns everything off, I love my midpoint/divisions/etc snaps. I could do with the option for a setting for what I want to snap to (a list of things you can filter).

Unrelated, but it also slows down selecting morph edges (holding down CTRL+SHIFT for the special cursor) if you have snapguides on. Probably has to do with having to highlight both the morph edge for selection and to create the snapguide.

[Laszlo Nagy]

This is an interesting topic because I hardly ever had any problems with this. In my experience the "SHIFT key press becomes slightly off-axis" issue can only come up when a slightly off-axis element edge is marked as a Snap Reference. But you see that as it is marked by the light blue highlight.
Also, when you press the SHIFT key there is indication on the Snap Guide. Either a Parallel sign, a Perpendicular sign or an X or a Y. From that you know what direction you snap to with SHIFT press. If it is an X or Y you know you are snapping to orthogonal directions. If it is a Parallel sign or Perpendicular sign you know you are snapping to a non-orthogonal Snap Guide.

Also, in the Input Constraints and Guide page of the Work Environment Dialog you have checkboxes and radio buttons for the control of the types of Snap Guides that are displayed and whether Incremental Snap Guides are drawn relative to the grid or horizontal/vertical.

With all this, I find the increase of the cursor snap range to 5 or more pixels a good advice in this age of very high resolution monitors.

[fuzzytnth3]

In our office we have a layer for setting out. On it we place a label for every wall in the project using the command "Label selected elements" with a Label called Wall Orientation check. If any wall is slightly off the orthogonal then it is really obvious.

You can download the Label from the Object Depository Here it was made by a chap called Link

[Anonymous]

Many years ago, Autocad had the F8 key as an ortho on/off.

Until reading this post, I'd always thought that Archicad's Shift key did the same function. (Hold the shift, and what you draw is orthagonal NO MATTER WHAT!)

My question now is, once these grid rotations have been set, How does one clear them?

In a current model, I have only one rotated grid (The source of the fractional degree errors) that I need, I'd like to delete the others. Where does one do that?

[Richard Morrison]

Nathan wrote:
My question now is, once these grid rotations have been set, How does one clear them?

This is a really great question! It got me scouring the reference manual, and I could find nothing.

[Laszlo Nagy]

I am not aware of any way to clear those Grid Rotation values.
What I would do is I would quickly define 4 new values (like 15, 30, 45, 60) that do not interfere with my orthogonal directions, and those 4 new defined values will take the place of those previously defined values.

[Richard Morrison]

laszlonagy wrote:
I am not aware of any way to clear those Grid Rotation values.

Laszlo, I think this is an issue because these graphically set values appear to be saved at a system-wide level, and thus can accumulate over the course of a number of a projects. I'm surprised that this hasn't come up before, at least that I can find.

[Eduardo Rolon]

They don't accumulate system wide (at least for MacOS) it only keeps the last 4 orientations if I remember correctly.

[Richard Morrison]

ejrolon wrote:
They don't accumulate system wide (at least for MacOS) it only keeps the last 4 orientations if I remember correctly.

Yes, you are correct. They do seem to be saved system-wide, but they don't accumulate more than the last 4. It would be wonderful if this information were included in the reference manual, though. Thanks, Eduardo!

[Eduardo Rolon]

Project wise not System wise