Why do some surfaces have an asterisk next to their name?

[Bill]

I've looked all over and don't see what this signifies...

Thanks

Bill

[Karl Ottenstein]

Screenshot showing where you see this?

[Bill]

Here you go...

[Karl Ottenstein]

I see that now ... in the AC 19 US Template. (Please post the version in which you found an issue when bringing something like this up in the future.)

Attribute Manager shows the same asterisk suffix... so it is truly part of the Surface name and not a flag to indicate something dynamically special about the surface. (I had thought that perhaps it indicated "in use" like the checkmark in Attribute Manager - but it's not.)

I've no clue why these things got named that way. If I were to guess, I guess it is a release error by Graphisoft... surfaces that were supposed to be verified in some way after which the asterisk would be removed?

Does anyone with a non-US release of 19 (e.g., INT) see these same names?

[Anonymous]

Tried the demo of 19 for mac...no asterisks..

[Karl Ottenstein]

Rlcosta wrote:
Tried the demo of 19 for mac...no asterisks..

Thanks for checking. Must be a US template glitch. I'll contact support.

[Bill]

Thanks for the responses... I was going crazy searching everywhere trying to figure out what they meant!

Bill

[Karl Ottenstein]

I'm told that we'll get some info on this next week.

[Ransom Ratcliff]

Friends,

Admittedly, the asterisk is an undocumented feature. (There are others because we ran out of time.)

The asterisk indicates the first 48 surfaces by index. These surfaces (formerly materials) have been in ArchiCAD for so long that they have become a Graphisoft Standard. All the ArchiCAD Libraries going back to at least 4.55 depend on the character of these surfaces and default to them by index number.

So the asterisk indicates that the user should not change the essential character of these surfaces. I.e. don't make glass look like brick or all the window glass in the library will have brick surfaces by default.

However, all the surfaces can be edited to make them look better or even be renamed. Indeed, all the surfaces were reengineered for the two US 19 default templates in order to make them look much better in OpenGL and to make the OpenGL and CineRender results, match each other in terms of unit sizing and color.

BTW, another undocumented and incomplete feature is the colon at the end of composite names. We were developing an NCS wall label that would display whatever was added after the colon. That way, the user could simply add a letter or number code to the name and it would display in the automatic label. The key here was that the wall type, rather than its user ID, would drive the associated labels. Alas, our label did not make it through final approval. But we expect something soon.

[Anonymous]

COOL - I like that 🙂

Ransom wrote:
Friends,

Admittedly, the asterisk is an undocumented feature. (There are others because we ran out of time.)

The asterisk indicates the first 48 surfaces by index. These surfaces (formerly materials) have been in ArchiCAD for so long that they have become a Graphisoft Standard. All the ArchiCAD Libraries going back to at least 4.55 depend on the character of these surfaces and default to them by index number.

So the asterisk indicates that the user should not change the essential character of these surfaces. I.e. don't make glass look like brick or all the window glass in the library will have brick surfaces by default.

However, all the surfaces can be edited to make them look better or even be renamed. Indeed, all the surfaces were reengineered for the two US 19 default templates in order to make them look much better in OpenGL and to make the OpenGL and CineRender results, match each other in terms of unit sizing and color.

BTW, another undocumented and incomplete feature is the colon at the end of composite names. We were developing an NCS wall label that would display whatever was added after the colon. That way, the user could simply add a letter or number code to the name and it would display in the automatic label. The key here was that the wall type, rather than its user ID, would drive the associated labels. Alas, our label did not make it through final approval. But we expect something soon.