making new empty fill

[Anonymous]

I know there was a "trick" to make a new empty fill and call it something else but I can't seem to find the explanation.

Thanks for any help,
Michele

[Laszlo Nagy]

This works for me:
1. Place a Fill on the Floor Plan, assign Empty Fill to it.
2. Slect it, copy to Clipboard.
3. Go to Fill Types, rename Empty Fill to Empty Fill-2 or something. OK Dialog.
4. Paste Fill. The referenced Fill type (Empty Fill) will be created among the Fills and now you have two Empty Fills.
If you had not renamed your fill type before, no new fill type would have been created because the program would have found the Fill type it referenced by name.

[Link]

Just keep in mind that you won't be able to delete this fill. Not in the Fill Types dialog or even in Attribute Manager.

Cheers,
Link.

[__archiben]

Link wrote:
Just keep in mind that you won't be able to delete this fill. Not in the Fill Types dialog or even in Attribute Manager.

but what you can do is rename the new "Empty Fill" to something different and then re-rename the original back to "Empty Fill".

this maintains the "Empty Fill" with an internal ID of 65. once this has been done you can create as many 'empty' fills as you want from the duplicate you've now got. any of these can be deleted.

note: you have to do this from the fill settings immeadiately after the new fill has been created. do not open the attribute manager until the re-naming is done.

HTH
~/archiben

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the helpful hints! Is this in the tips & tricks and if not Please someone put it there!!!

Thanks again,
Michele

[Djordje]

Michele wrote:
Thanks for all the helpful hints! Is this in the tips & tricks and if not Please someone put it there!!!

Done!

[Link]

I just tried testing this again, and it seems that GS has changed how these fills behave.

I don't know when it changed, but it looks like we can now delete all fills except for Air Space (ID 2) and Solid Fill (ID 84).

If only it was documented, GS

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

You can delete all fills, but Archicad seems to keep one solid and one empty fill (regardless of their names and numbers). The other thing about them is still not being able to bring solid or empty fills into a project through attribute manager.

[Link]

Tell me about it. Hard coded fills have always been a cause of frustration. And now GS is changing the fills that we can and can't delete, without any documentation!

I wish we were simply allowed to create empty & solid fills as we do any other fill, and get rid of hard coded fills altogether. How hard could it be?

From a purists point of view, there is an inherent problem with deleting fills that are set up as defaults within library parts or tools. (Or any attribute for that matter.) At my last count there were about 24 fills that would come back to haunt you if you deleted them. And don't start me on materials! A consciencous CAD Manager cannot simply delete every attribute (allowable) and not risk having MISSING attributes appear constantly as they are accessed. Parts in the Extras menus are especially troublesome when it comes to fills, and just about every 3D part accesses an ArchiCAD material.

One solution would be if GS listed any missing attribute's name. Eg. MISSING (Common Brick), instead of just MISSING. Then at least we could use Attribute Manager to bring them back in.

Maybe somewhere in the future, attributes will optionally be brought in with each part, as they are with merged files, which will give us much more control over what is brought into our clean templates.

It would also be nice if Attribute Manager correctly & concisely indicated whether and where a used attribute (ie. indicated by a tick) was actually being used, but I don't want to flog that dead horse again!

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Hello,
Recently I needed a third "Empty Fill" one that was not "Air Space"
and not "Empty Fill" which are the two choices in AC 8.1.
I did a search on this forum and found a discussion about
making a new Empty Fill.

Laszlo Nagy recommended the following to make a new empty fill.

1. Place a Fill on the Floor Plan, assign Empty Fill to it.
2. Slect it, copy to Clipboard.
3. Go to Fill Types, rename Empty Fill to Empty Fill-2 or something. OK Dialog.
4. Paste Fill. The referenced Fill type (Empty Fill) will be created among the Fills and now you have two Empty Fills.
If you had not renamed your fill type before, no new fill type would have been created because the program would have found the Fill type it referenced by name.

I did these steps and found that the pasted fill was not a true empty fill
but a symbol fill where the fill color and background fill color
were enabled unlike "Empty Fill" and "Air Space" where
changing those pens makes no difference.
The option to duplicate is dimmed for all of the first row of
fills. I tried everything I could think of but nothing worked.

Finally I decided to open a new project in AC 6.5 and create
a duplicate of "Empty Fill 1" which it allowed me to do in the
Attribute Manager with the name "Empty fill (2)" and an index number
of 201. It is a true empty fill in the sense defined above.
Just to be sure that the index number would not conflict with
an index number in AC 8.1 I made another duplicate that was named
by Attribute Manager as "Empty fill (3)" with an index number of 202.
I drew an instance of "Empty fill (3)" in the plan with the fill tool
and saved the project and quit AC 6.5.
I launched AC 8.1 and opened the AC 6.5 project and copied the
fill and pasted it into an AC 8.1 project. Sure enough I now had
a new fill that was a true empty fill named "Empty fill (3)" and its index number was 202. I renamed it "Empty fill 2" and it sits just to the
right of "Empty Fill" in the fill list.
I hope someone finds this interesting.
Peter Devlin