Control the extent of a fill that applied to an object

[Anonymous]

It would be great to be able to control how much of an object is covered by a fill pattern. In the days when construction documents were drafted by hand, only a portion of a wall, roof or floor would have been hatch. Not only did this not clutter the drawing with superfluous detail, it also left room for the inclusion of notes and dimensions.

In ArchiCAD, and other CAD programs, the option is basically an all or nothing approach. This create an image that is sometimes less than desirable. We really do not need to see an entire roof covered in shingles. We are constantly striving to maintain the hand drawn character of our construction documents.

There are work arounds, like manually placing a cover fill in the view, but this defeats the concept of being able to automatically update a model.

Our wish is to have a series of settings added to the Model section of the Selection Settings for Walls, Roofs and Slabs for controlling how much of the surface is covered with a fill pattern. Maybe the control could be a check box at the four corners of the object and a fill-in box for distance. For instance, the lower left and upper right boxes could be checked and the extent of the fill would extend say 4' from the corner. This would fill only the two corner of the object the specified amount.

A real bonus would be a check box to place a small amount of fill around openings, (door, window, stair, etc.) in the object. These were typically the areas that were rendered by hand.

[Erich]

I too would like to see such an option for many of the same reasons. However, it seems a graphic device for delineating where fills occur or not would be much better than an check box. Perhaps a polyline that could be toggled on and off in the construction element and then moved about to limit where fills occurred or did not and which could have nodes added or removed as necessary. This would function much as an overlaid fill but would be part of the construction element instead of separate element.

All this said, I also think there are many other issues I would rather have GS work on or fix first....

[Djordje]

jfa_ra wrote:
We are constantly striving to maintain the hand drawn character of our construction documents.

Why?

Does your car sound like footsteps?

[Rod Jurich]

I'm old enough to recall the days when CAD first appeared.
And the thoughts of automating all those laborious/boring parts
of the documentation was fantastic.

Now the want is for some return to that hand input, well for some.

I doubt that your wish for the main elements of AC, walls/roof/slab etc
will be made to achieve what you want.

On the other hand objects, are relatively easy.

[Anonymous]

Djordje wrote:

jfa_ra wrote:
We are constantly striving to maintain the hand drawn character of our construction documents.

Why?

Does your car sound like footsteps?

I am sorry, but I do not see the correlation.

[Dwight]

I remember working in 1980 at a fine firm in Victoria, BC [the conceptual centroid of British California]. We were renovating a small masonry candy store and my doofus colleague drew every brick on the elevation. Took hours. Didn't add any construction info. It looked great, all those tiny graphite shadows in the mortar joints. The boss saw the work. There was a loud British epithet we could hear, even in the tea break room. The British are especially good at cussing-out negligent underlings due to their time in India.

So now that we have computers that draw all the stuff in without wasting time, a colleague wants to go back in time. We should not encourage Graphisoft to use development time to solve this problem.

[Erika Epstein]

Djordje wrote:
Why?
Does your car sound like footsteps?