Zones: identifying overlaps?

[Anonymous]

We are currently evaluating a number of BIM packages, including Archicad. The biggest issue we have come up against in Archicad is the non-complementary nature of zones.

In itself, the use of a single generic zone element for all types of measured area is very elegant. And clearly, between the various sets of measured areas in a building (function/activity zones, gross building zones, fire regulation zones, security zones, etc.), zones must be able to overlap. Within most of such sets however, zones certainly may not overlap.

Is there some way to verify whether or not all zone elements within some drawing-organisational structure or other are complementary?


(As an aside, it would be great if there was a method within the Zone tool to create associative rooms based on manually specified boundary elements, as opposed to the current limitation of either fully manually drawn or fully flood-fill to the first encountered boundaries.)

[Erich]

I'm not sure if this is what you are after or not, but if you want to check if your zones overlap, you can set the background pen to transparent and set the fill to a % fill. That way where zones overlap the fill will be darker.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply. <Tries it out>

It is indeed a solution to what I'm after, but I was hoping for a more automated one :). In other words, I would like to avoid visual inspection of drawings being required; the computer should identify the overlapping zones itself.

(What it does after identifying them is a secondary issue, for which many options are imaginable. For instance a simple list; or the overlapping zones could be moved to another layer, or could have a particular custom parameter set, or they could change colour, or some identifiable element (e.g. a piece of furniture) could be placed in the overlapping zones, etc. That choice is not so important.)

[Erich]

Unfortunately there is not an option to have the program automatically identify such overlaps. I think a number of folks would like to see such functionality for more real items (walls columns, objects, etc.) anyway before we gained it for zones which are treated more as an identifier of spaces than physical objects.

I believe that the MEP Modeler add-on begins to offer such functionality with it's collision detection, but it is limited at this time. Perhaps we will see this feature expand in the future. Just don't hold your breath until that time as you might turn quite blue.

[Anonymous]

Oh, I hadn't realised there wasn't a clashing algorithm for structural elements in Archicad. (Not functionality we're especially interested in.) Still, if they implement one in future, I imagine there will be no significant technical hurdle to implementing it for zone elements as well. It is a question of geometry interference in both cases.

Perhaps we should convert all zones to MEP objects and see what that gives us 😄