bad fills when saving to Plotmaker

[Achille Pavlidis]

I made some details of aluminum openings with some complex fils. When saving in Plotmaker the fils become degenerated, as you can see in the attached picture. Why is this happening? Is there any solution?

[Thomas Holm]

I would guess the fill is a DWG hatch that you've downloaded from somewhere, not a true solid Archicad fill. The best solution would be to replace the hatch with a true solid fill in Archicad, then re-export.

Another solution might be to upgrade to AC10!

But no guarantees from me!

[Achille Pavlidis]

no Thomas... wrong guess the fill has been drawn in Archicad (with the magic wand of course)
as for the upgrade in AC10... i know... i'm just working on this project in 9 now and i'm a bit frightened to change...

[Thomas Holm]

Achille wrote:
no Thomas... wrong guess the fill has been drawn in Archicad (with the magic wand of course)
as for the upgrade in AC10... i know... i'm just working on this project in 9 now and i'm a bit frightened to change...

OK. Then I'd guess a scale issue, perhaps combined with magic wand sensitivity, and general precision. Increase working unit precision (Project Preferences) Magic Wand segments, and change scale. I'm beginning to forget Plotmaker, so you'll have to rely on others or experiment.

Dont' be afraid of AC10. It's better in all aspects that I use. And you can work just as in 9 if you're a stubborn conservative 😉

[Achille Pavlidis]

ok Thomas i tried all the possible different magic wand settings, but the result is always the same... the thing is that the fill is perfect in AC... it becomes degenerated when saved in Plotmaker... isn't it strange? (the scale of the two is the same)

i guess i have to overcome my atavic fears in front of AC10... oh my god!!! i don't think i'm ready yet!!!

[Thomas Holm]

Achille wrote:
ok Thomas i tried all the possible different magic wand settings, but the result is always the same... the thing is that the fill is perfect in AC... it becomes degenerated when saved in Plotmaker... isn't it strange? (the scale of the two is the same)

Weird. That is one reason it could be better in 10 - the old bit-map representation is gone, it's the same program, it should look better.

About the scale - in Archicad, there is only scale to views and screen representation - the units should be real-world. And since these are small items, you need maximum precision. Even one-tenth of a millimeter may not be enough.

The old Plotmaker I think was optimized for architectural scales (1:100, 1:50 and such) Therefore, precision might not be enough for this kind of drawing, I assume you want 1:1.
A guess: One way around the problem could be to make the PM drawing much bigger, say an A1 at 4:1 and then re-scale at print/publish time to 25% (should give you A4).

If this doesn't work, another way could be to simply draw the thing 10 times as big than reality, and shrikn it in PM.

But I'm out of ideas now. I would contact my reseller. They might have a solution. Or acknowledge a bug!

Hey, one more: Since this is a floating-point CAD program, like autocad, precision deteriorates far from the origin - see to it that you're drawing as close to the project origin as possible. If this is a problem, draw in a fresh document and save and hot-link it as module into the project.