uniting fills?

[cremsberg]

Is there a way to quickly “unite” a bunch of adjoining or overlapping fills into one fill? If not, I sure wish there was. This would be handy for simplifying fills in an unlinked elevation with cast shadows.

[Anonymous]

Look for the "+" button in your pet palette. select one fill and click on the edge of the fill and chose the "add to polygon" button from your pet palette. You can then magic wand the fill you would like to add to this fill. You will be left with two fills - one which is a combination of the two and one that you will need to delete. It would be nice if you had the option to truly combine the two and not had the extra step of deleting a leftover fill.

[cremsberg]

Thanks Mike. This technique (+) that you mention is the one I have been using., and it is a tedious way to clean up a bunch of little fills, as you get with shadow casting in a in a section/elevations cut. I would love to have a quick way to unit a bizillion fills together using one quick command.

[TomWaltz]

I guess my questions then are:
1) why do you want to join so many fill together?
2) why are you unlinking the elevation?

[cremsberg]

I am accustomed to unlinking the elevation after I have moved beyond my reliminary-modelling phase of the project. My construciton drawings are done in unlinked elevations, where I can clean up graphic anomolies vreated by the model. I know not everyone works this way. I wish to unite the cast shadow fills so that it is easier to manage and edit and the file size is not so huge. Thankse.

[Link]

I know not everyone works this way. I wish to unite the cast shadow fills so that it is easier to manage and edit and the file size is not so huge.

A lot of users work this way, as it is often simply unavoidable, especially with log homes. And shadows, much to my dismay, are still made up of many individual fills in unlinked elevations in AC10

The bad news is that there is no easy way to join them back together again. This is just one of a number of unresolved usability bugs still in existence. GS is aware of it FWIW.

Cheers,
Link.

[Djordje]

cremsberg wrote:
I am accustomed to unlinking the elevation after I have moved beyond my reliminary-modelling phase of the project. My construciton drawings are done in unlinked elevations, where I can clean up graphic anomolies vreated by the model. I know not everyone works this way. I wish to unite the cast shadow fills so that it is easier to manage and edit and the file size is not so huge. Thankse.

Try not to unlink, but to trace down the "graphic anomalies" - usually a rethink of a modeling technique removes them.

As for the shadows - it is faster to do a new one on top of the previous ones, and remove the culprits (Find&Select, Clear)

[owen]

I've just had to go through a similar task on my project where we show shadows on the DA sections/elevations. All drawings are linked to the model, but I had to unlink the shadows due to:

1. The unbelievable time blowout shadow casting causes when generating. An elevation with no shadows would take a couple of minutes, but blew out to 15-20 with shadow casting turned on - and this was with all high-polygon objects like trees, people, furniture, etc turned off and using facade objects which have context sensitive levels of detail. Turning shadows off until the final rebuild was an option, but given there are 14 sections/elevations to rebuild I figured it was safer to have something unlinked as a backup. Minor modeling changes can have their shadows fudged.

2. Sections make no distinction between the exterior of the building (which we want shadows on) and the interior (which we dont). So all our sections appeared with odd-looking shadows inside, for example an enclosed lift core and fire stair. It would be nice if there was an option to turn off shadows for the interior .. but i guess how does AC know where 'inside' is?

But going back to the original topic ... it would be good if GS could take another look at shadow casting in S/Es. At the moment in a linked S/E the shadow fills aren't selectable and when unlinked turn into a million split polygons. Generating the shadows of a linked section as a selectable (but locked?) fill would be good, along with uniting joining/overlapping fills into a single fill. It would really improve the handling of these drawings. Opening a PDF of one of these shaded elevations and a G5 sounds like it is about to take off.

[Link]

It seems that you can avoid these problems simply by adjusting your Section-Elevation settings. You can turn the status of your Elevations into Manual-rebuild and you can turn the shadows off for sections.

You could also tweak the layers assigned to the views of your section/elevation views to turn off everything you don't need, like internal information for external elevations.

Lastly, you may want to redefine your elevation views with 'Transparency in Shading' turned off in your 3D Window Settings (yes they do affect S/E's!).

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link wrote:
Lastly, you may want to redefine your elevation views with 'Transparency in Shading' turned off in your 3D Window Settings (yes they do affect S/E's!).

This may be the most under-documented aspect of the view settings. Just so it's clear, the section/elevation views store the status of the transparency setting in 3D when they are created/revised. (This seems so obscure that I though it could stand some emphasis.)