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?

[Eduardo Rolon]

NCornia wrote:
Hi Richard,

In the Work Environment there is a setting to control how far the cursor must be from an element to snap to it. The default cursor snap range is 5 pixels. On newer high resolution displays 5 pixels can equate to a very small portion of the screen. You might try increasing the number to see if it makes a difference in your experience with the cursor snapping to the guide lines.

Options > Work Environment > Input Constraints and Guides

Best regards,
Nick

Perfect!

[Richard Morrison]

Thanks, Nick! I had missed this option. I have to say that after a little use, it is feeling and working more like I remember!

[Anonymous]

FWIW, we've found the the Snap Guides (not Guide Lines) have become more of a hindrance exactly because of this. We've had ourselves and a number of partners get slight angle variations sneaking in, and once they're in, the snap guides seem to proliferate it further. As a practice, we always have the tracker on, but it is still easy to miss until it's too late. I've simply advised to turn the Snap Guides off.

It's really hard to catch a 89.97º angle when the snap guides lead you that way...

[Laszlo Nagy]

I don't know, Snap Guides or no Snap Guides, I always press the SHIFT button to make sure I am drawing horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe it is something that stayed with me from using ARCHICAD for 20 years.

[KeesW]

Laszlo
Rchard's point is exactly this: using the SHIFT key does NOT always guarantee a 0 or 90 degree line. This is a very annoying defect that has existed in the last 3 or 4 versions. Graphisoft should check this and fix it. Please, no excuses! It is not a user fault - it is an Archicad bug.

[Richard Morrison]

laszlonagy wrote:
I don't know, Snap Guides or no Snap Guides, I always press the SHIFT button to make sure I am drawing horizontal and vertical lines. Maybe it is something that stayed with me from using ARCHICAD for 20 years.

The SHIFT key no longer constrains to ABSOLUTE vertical/horizontal/45 deg. It now constrains to those -- but RELATIVE to whatever snap guide is closest. So if you have a snap guide that is slightly off, you will get new items created that are slightly off, also.

I agree with Kees that this needs to be corrected, or at least changed back to the original, if it is intentional.

[Erwin Edel]

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.

And yes, once you have one thing that is slightly off-axis, it starts spreading.

Shift now locks to whatever snapguide direction you are currently having as the active (bold) one, which isn't allways perfectly 90 degrees.

It is telling if veteran users with uncountable hours of working in ArchiCAD are having problems, I would say.

[DGSketcher]

Just adding my voice to the chorus. As I have said previously the snap guides are clever, but sometimes too clever. Ideally they need some kind of desensitising to avoid the problem Erwin just described. Anything less than perfectly square causes all sorts of frustrations.

[Richard Morrison]

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.

[sinceV6]

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.

If you have one snap guide active while drawing complex shapes and getting a lot of feedback, you can hit ESC and it'll make them disappear without canceling the drawing operation. Just be careful not to do it if you don't have any snap guides or you'll cancel everything and actually cry

As for the orthogonal walls and snap guides, I think there are two distinct cases:
1. You have slightly off orthogonal snap guides and when using SHIFT, AC draws based on that weird angle: This is by design and I think is correct. AC will let you know when you are drawing parallel or perpendicular to a specific snap guide. Remember that SHIFT no longer means orthogonal, it means LOCK to whatever snap guide the user wants (e.g. X-axis, Y-axis, snap guide extension, snap guide parallel to, incremental angle, etc). Attention to AC feedback while drawing is needed.

2. You don't have any active snap guides and orthogonal SHIFT is not 0/90 degrees: I don't know if it is currently only applying for walls, but if it applies to any drawing tool, then I would suspect of a legacy issue. I remember that in old versions input and constraints preferences could change when rotating the grid, using parallel constraint to a line with a weird angle or bisector angle to a set of lines were used, and you'll get this weird angle when constraining vertical/horizontal using shift. In older versions you could just adjust preferences again; then in newer ones this could be solved by using those constraints (parallel, bisector angle) in orthogonal lines/walls, but now I just wouldn't know where this value is stored. Just a path to look further into this issue.

Best regards.