Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Favorite reform

James B
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
Woo, thanks guys

I think that the whole favourites thing needs to be replaced with sytles (like in InDesign). I tried out the favs thing but never really used it - didn't really seem to save time when you can easily pick up and inject properties from one object to another anyway - a feature which I love.

And another thing I thinks need major revision is how hotlinks work. Pretty much anything should be able to be linked - like an image, dwg, pdf, eps etc. Plus the whole interface needs improving, I like how Adobe Illustrator etc does it with a window that's always on the screen and it just shows a list of the linked drawings - oh, and when linking a pln, do we really need to choose every story and bring each in seperately, this should be show and only need to bring in the one file which contains all stories.

I think these are my main 2 gripes (at the moment anyway)
James Badcock
Graphisoft Senior Product Manager
9 REPLIES 9
Anonymous
Not applicable
Wow, nice list! )
James wrote:
I think that the whole favourites thing needs to be replaced with sytles (like in InDesign). I tried out the favs thing but never really used it - didn't really seem to save time when you can easily pick up and inject properties from one object to another anyway - a feature which I love.
Oreuplulos and James
What do you mean styles? Like in InDesign if you change a style, all the objects made with that style will change automatically? This means, that I don't have to redefine all the time the walls, just once, and than just refine them?
How many styles will I have to make so?
However, I like your idea!
Anonymous
Not applicable
Jay wrote:

What do you mean styles? Like in InDesign if you change a style, all the objects made with that style will change automatically? This means, that I don't have to redefine all the time the walls, just once, and than just refine them?
How many styles will I have to make so?
It simple.
Now you have favorites but the relationship is broken after its applied.
You create an window for example using a bookmarked favorite.
Thats ok. You dont have to set every time the same parameters or alt-pick them. You have them stored in a favorite.

Unfortunately tha link is broken.That is , if you change the favorite all instances stay as before. You have to change them one by one.
If it the link stayed you just could change the favorite and all would change.

Imagine you make a GENERICWINDOW as a favorite. You just instert it when you want and when you are in the finishing proccess you just redefine the favorite.
Everything changes at once.

Of course you could still continue to work as before but with that functionality i wonder if there is someone who want adopti it.

It like bringing parametrics to buildings and not only to objects.
Till now you have parameters for object but the way i describe it above the GENERICWINDOW would be a BUILDING PARAMETER.

And its not that hard to be implemented
Link
Graphisoft Partner
Graphisoft Partner
While I like the idea of linking favorites, you should be aware that you can, in your case, select as many windows as you like then double click on your (redefined) favorite, and it will 'inject' the properties.

Give it a try! But yes, linked favorites would be nice, although I fear theymay create a strain on the program.

Cheers,
Link
Anonymous
Not applicable
Link wrote:
theymay create a strain on the program.
It could be implemented in various ways,
One simple is that each object can have an internal variable tha will hold the favorite id or null if none exist.
Changing a favorite will just loop though all objects with favorite id and change them.

The other option could be that each favorite retains a database of objects linked. But that is more difficult because if i decide to change one object i should check every time if its on some's favorite list. That solution is impractical. So i go for solution A. Witch is simple enough. Just increase the variables of each object by one..

Thx
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Jay wrote:
What do you mean styles? Like in InDesign if you change a style, all the objects made with that style will change automatically? This means, that I don't have to redefine all the time the walls, just once, and than just refine them?
Composites provide a hint (and only a hint) of what styles could do for production. In a given project, for example, define a composite for each 'type' of exterior and interior wall and define those walls with the corresponding composite. Note: a composite need not have more than one skin! A one-skin composite is sort of a style.

So, what the (one-skin, or multi-skin) composite is doing for you is storing wall width, contour line type, fill, fill pens and line pens.

If later in your project you want all walls of one type to have a different width, pen, etc., just change the composite and all walls change ... just like a style. (This is not a complete style for obvious reasons ... material, height, and more are not part of the composite settings. That's why I say this is just a hint or a taste of what styles could do.)

The alternative, without composites, is to use Find & Select and change the wall attributes from the settings dialog.

A 'plus' of the composite/styles approach is that the composite can be easily used in other projects. But, of course, Favorites provide that same option...

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
Composites are walls-only solution.
The favorites system could be a general solution about everythink.
From walls to text to dimentions.
Of course most can be done with search and replace but its a great great great time saver.

For example dimentions. You can create 3-4 differnet styles- favorites
and change according to what you want. From text height to metric system to ... And you can just change style this to style that. Powerfull i guess
Anonymous
Not applicable
oreopoulos wrote:
For example dimentions. You can create 3-4 differnet styles- favorites
and change according to what you want. From text height to metric system to ... And you can just change style this to style that. Powerfull i guess
I was thinking about how much would this be timesaver for me. Forexample I used to have 6-8 kind of walls in a project, so that would be usefull. But the text blocks I never counted, I just refine them when placing.
In 9.0 you can change the favorite of a text in a block, but I don't use styles in one block even in Word
And the other thing is when you want to change just one wall, but not all of them, wich was made with the same style/fav. All of them will change or just that one, and itt will loose the favorite feature?
Anonymous
Not applicable
Jay wrote:
And the other thing is when you want to change just one wall, but not all of them, wich was made with the same style/fav. All of them will change or just that one, and itt will loose the favorite feature?
As i wrote in my mind the implementation is adding a variable-parameter to each object witch links it to a favorite.

If you want to change one wall , you will have to go to the wall and alter the parameter FAVORITE setting it to another instance or null witch will be the default (as is now).
You see its a two way link.
Link
Graphisoft Partner
Graphisoft Partner
As i wrote in my mind the implementation is adding a variable-parameter to each object witch links it to a favorite.
This sounds very similar to an idea I posted quite some time ago:

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=10586&highlight=variable+manager#10586

This could be one all-encompassing variable manager (including dims styles, composites, etc), and do pretty much everything that has been suggested in this post. It's still a poll!

Cheers,
Link.