Where is this purple color coming from?

[Richard Morrison]

I am drawing an existing house, and cannot figure out where this purple color is coming from. It is clear that it is related to the surfaces on the walls, since I can override them with other colors. Right now the purple corresponds to the "GENERAL" material. But I have no purple pens or any other purple materials or surfaces that I can find. Nothing in 3D view filters, or renovation overrides. This is really my first project in 19. Is the GENERAL surface purple now? What am I missing?

[Laszlo Nagy]

In the Surfaces Dialog switch the Engine Settings field to OpenGL and then check the Texture settings. The Dialog currently shows settings for the Internal Engine.

[Richard Morrison]

Erwin wrote:

Did you try to merge the surfaces with the new ArchiCAD 19 template? <snip>

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Erwin. In this case, I used a pretty clean AC19 file (from the GS AC19 residential template), and the walls did not have any surface textures assigned. I had changed the uncut outline from purple to black, thinking that this was the issue. After a significant time of working with purple walls in the 3D view, all of a sudden the walls turned to black. (I quickly applied some surfaces, of course.) That is why I am thinking the effect doesn't relate to missing textures, but rather an updating issue.

Your post is a good indication of why GS needs to focus on making version upgrades less onerous. This is just too much time to spend on an annual basis, and one reason why people stay with older versions.

[Erwin Edel]

Well, with these kind of big updates (from 17 to 18 ), we ussually only start new projects in the new version, there is no reason why you can't work in 17 or 15 etc. We hardly ever move projects from one to the next version if it means tweaking things.

19 to 20 doesn't seem to give any huge problems, but we'll know come september when the NL release is coming.

18 to 19 was no problem at all.

[Anonymous]

Richard wrote:
I am drawing an existing house, and cannot figure out where this purple color is coming from.

It is coming from missing material of a wall (in your case, but can be any object, really). It does not have to do with transfer from AC17 to AC19. Same thing happens in all ARCHICAD versions without any transfer.

Just follow along (to the tune of "This Is the House That Jack Built"):

• Your original wall (object, column, beam... etc.) had a Building Material assigned to it (in your case — in AC17, but it has nothing to do with versions).
• The Building Material, in turn, had a specific Surface assigned to it (naturally, as all building materials have Surfaces for 3D and Fills for 2D cuts).
• The Surface assigned to Building Material assigned to the wall (object, column, beam... etc.) in question had a Texture file signed to it (like many Surfaces do)

Now... if a Texture file is missing (or, one logical level above, the Surface containing Texture is deleted, or even one more logical level above — the Building Material is gone).... Then ARCHICAD has nothing to represent the 3D appearance of an object.
Short of, of course, as you already found out yourself — its last resort (the thing none of us can delete, only reassign...) — Countour Pen under "Countours" tab (you would not want it to represent your object with some odd thing line Cut pen, right?). 🙂

Just reassign any existing Building Material to that wall (object, column, beam... etc.) and everything will be back to normal. You can track the issue by following the bread crumbs: Building Material -> Surface -> Texture -> Countour Pen.

Usually happens in ARCHICAD version 17 and above if Surfaces linked to Building Materials get deleted without selecting "assign another material" option in the deletion Dialog.

File cleaning (for template) can cause this to happen. Happens to the best of us.

[Richard Morrison]

Anton wrote:

Richard wrote:
I am drawing an existing house, and cannot figure out where this purple color is coming from.

It is coming from missing material of a wall (in your case, but can be any object, really). It does not have to do with transfer from AC17 to AC19. Same thing happens in all ARCHICAD versions without any transfer.

Actually, no. It was caused by accidentally having overrides in the surface materials which were set to GENERAL. I found out that in such a case, ArchiCAD will use the color of the Uncut Outline Pen to color things. (I'm not sure how far this behavior goes back.) Setting the surface to any material but GENERAL, or turning off the surface overrides altogether (therefore using the building material), fixed things.

[Anonymous]

Richard wrote:
Actually, no. It was caused by accidentally having overrides in the surface materials which were set to GENERAL. I found out that in such a case, ArchiCAD will use the color of the Uncut Outline Pen to color things. (I'm not sure how far this behavior goes back.) Setting the surface to any material but GENERAL, or turning off the surface overrides altogether (therefore using the building material), fixed things.

You will see this behavior a lot, so I would like to give a bit of explanation.

I can't recall any of the Surface materials called "GENERAL" in any of the out-of-the-box templates in any of the localized versions. US version of ARCHICAD, I think, has has materials called "Generic - Walls Interior" and "Generic - Walls Exterior", but that is as close as it gets.

So, the material you referring to is a custom-made material in your specific template.

This custom-made "GENERAL" Surface material you have trouble with used to have at some point a texture file attached to it (Texture tab of the Surface Settings dialog box), but now — it does not. Most likely because the texture image itself was ether deleted or moved from the library path on your computer.

Now, every 3D element in ARCHICAD stores default (last used) values for Surfaces related to that 3D element.

When any texture image (the core attribute of any object in ARCHICAD's 3D view) is gone (no matter where it is missing from, a Surface material or Building material), ARCHICAD will revert to displaying any 3D element with missing textures in the only reliable way it can — by Contour Pen. Hence the color. In your case — purple. But it can be any other color. ARCHICAD Objects that are missing textures will, by default show up in 3D as green (default template Contour pen/color for objects), windows and doors with missing textures will be shown orange for the frame and opaque blue for glass... and so on.

Hope this helps.

[Barry Kelly]

Anton wrote:
I can't recall any of the Surface materials called "GENERAL" in any of the out-of-the-box templates in any of the localized versions.

It is the default surface material for when no other material is applied.
It has the index number '0'.
It is the very first material in your material list.

I think as mentioned before when used on a wall surface the 'general' material adopts the uncut line pen colour of the wall (see image).

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Barry wrote:
It is the default surface material for when no other material is applied.

Thank you, Barry.

I completely forgot about that odd GENERAL material you can specify in GDL, select in overrides, but can never find, select, edit or modify in Surface Settings dialog window as a regular surface...

True to all of the above GENERAL material does not have any texture assigned to it and thus is rendered in 3D with a Contour pen related to specific element it is assigned to. Just worth a note that the same thing will happen if the texture is missing from any other material.

[Richard Morrison]

Barry wrote:

Anton wrote:
I can't recall any of the Surface materials called "GENERAL" in any of the out-of-the-box templates in any of the localized versions.

It is the default surface material for when no other material is applied.
It has the index number '0'.
It is the very first material in your material list.

I think as mentioned before when used on a wall surface the 'general' material adopts the uncut line pen colour of the wall (see image).

Barry.

Barry,
Thanks so much for taking the time to put together this excellent explanation.

[Anonymous]

Hello I'm having trouble with my 3D view settings. Every time I go to it after updating my program to Archicad20 it show s in all purple and black checker pattern. Is there a way to fix this?