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Option to NOT move elements when adjusting Story elevations

Anonymous
Not applicable
Currently, when adjusting the elevation of a Story Level, say, in Edit Story Levels, once you click OK, all elements that belong to that story move with their changed story level.

I'd like a tickbox option on the Story Editing Mode palette that gives me the option "Don't shift the elevation of a story's elements", so after clicking [OK] the elements don't move.

As an example of when I'd like this to happen....

I've cut/pasted out a secondary building from a combined file, and want to make it a separate project. All the story levels inherit the story levels from the combined project. These would need adjusting if they were originally set to be story levels of the "main" building in the original combined project. The elevations and heights of storys would all be different. Easiest thing would be to just drag the Story Levels in Edit Story Levels, but not have to re-adjust the elevations of all the elements of the project manually once you'd done that.

***EDIT: I've since illustrated this scenario in later posts within this thead, with uploaded images. Scroll down...
15 REPLIES 15
Change the story of the element from "automatic" and hardlink it to the story You need.

Best Regards,
Piotr
Anonymous
Not applicable
Adjusting the heights of the elements on revised stories is rather trivial (select all elements on the story and elevate by the delta) and the need to do this is rather uncommon. Hard to justify an added feature for this.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Matthew: In my case, as I described in my first post, it hasn't been "trivial": 5 storeys, all with different heights relative to each other and all different from the project I pulled it from. Plus finding and adjusting the elements that were incorrectly assigned to the wrong storey, and hence were caught in the "select all on this storey" process but shouldn't have been. Plus the post-process cross-checking to make sure everything was as it was, in relation to each other.

I spent at least an hour on doing this, so I wouldn't call it trivial.

And by comparison, I'd argue - having a good deal of programming experience - that the programming to include this option is a rather trivial matter. Particularly, if you compare it against the sum of all the time that all users have to spend doing adjusting elements after such a shift in storey levels.

The trade off of one-time "programming resources spent" vs. multiple "users productivity gained" would make this a no-brainer, in my opinion.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Piotr wrote:
Change the story of the element from "automatic" and hardlink it to the story You need.
It's not the assignment of elements to storeys that is the issue. It's that the "Edit Story Levels" process changes the elevation of the adjusted storey's elements, so they remain in the same position, relative to the adjusted level.

I actually want them to remain in their position relative to Project Zero, and only change relative to the adjusted storey level.
Anonymous
Not applicable
peter_h wrote:
Matthew: In my case, as I described in my first post, it hasn't been "trivial": 5 storeys, all with different heights relative to each other and all different from the project I pulled it from. Plus finding and adjusting the elements that were incorrectly assigned to the wrong storey, and hence were caught in the "select all on this storey" process but shouldn't have been. Plus the post-process cross-checking to make sure everything was as it was, in relation to each other.

I spent at least an hour on doing this, so I wouldn't call it trivial.
An hour spent cleaning up multiple stories of incorrectly placed elements does not seem excessive to me. It also seems that the auto-adjustment would not work with elements that were incorrectly assigned. Elements on the wrong story would get the wrong delta.

Functionally I don't see any difference between the automatic function you are requesting and what can be done in a few seconds with a 3D view filtered by story. Doing it in 3D also quickly shows up elements that were on the wrong story which can then be locked out (by layer or element locking with Find & Select) or selected and move to the correct story. There can be a problem with walls and columns set to display on all relevant stories, but these should not be too difficult to isolate, lock and manage separately.
And by comparison, I'd argue - having a good deal of programming experience - that the programming to include this option is a rather trivial matter. Particularly, if you compare it against the sum of all the time that all users have to spend doing adjusting elements after such a shift in storey levels.

The trade off of one-time "programming resources spent" vs. multiple "users productivity gained" would make this a no-brainer, in my opinion.
If it is truly trivial to implement then it might well be worthwhile, but I also have a fair amount of programming experience and I wouldn't presume to know how much difficulty there would be in writing back a change in elevation to all the elements on each of the altered stories, nor what complex ramifications this might have. For example, if this were implemented would there also be a restriction to apply the change only to the current selection/marquee?

I generally distrust automatic functions that act invisibly on large numbers of elements. The potential for inadvertent errors seems too high. This is one of my biggest issues with Revit. While it is occasionally a bit of extra work to put things where they belong in ArchiCAD, once placed they stay put.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Matthew wrote:
I generally distrust automatic functions that act invisibly on large numbers of elements. The potential for inadvertent errors seems too high. This is one of my biggest issues with Revit.
It's one of my biggest issues with ArchiCAD too, and I think it's going to be a staple of BIM tool simply because the concept of BIM is all about making changes to large collections of data in arbitrary ways, and with a heavy focus on GUI tools many of these functions will be invisible to the end user.

As for the original poster, why are you changing stories if the elements aren't moving? I'd assume the "real world" elevation of the floors hasn't changed, so the if the elevations are based on the project 0 they should be preserved. If you're interested in defining a new "main" floor, couldn't you just change the name of the story in the story settings? I guess I don't see the motivation for moving the story independently of the objects assigned to it.
Anonymous
Not applicable
I've just extracted another neighbouring building out of my orginal project, and thought I'd illustrate with some pics, what I believe to be - compared to what it could be - a long-winded process. (This is a very simple example, compared to the last model I did it with, which had twice the number of storeys and many elements with incorrect home storey assignments)

Either:

a) In "Edit Story Levels", just drag the Story Level lines to wherever you want them; tick the proposed " Lock all elements together and hold, when changing storey levels" checkbox, and click OK. Done!

...or the current process:

a) In "Edit Story Levels", drag the Story Level lines to wherever you want them. Click OK. (You can also get the same result by adjusting "Story Settings" numerically.). See Fig 2.
b) After that, all the elements of each storey have had their elevations changed, by differing amounts, depending on the new storey level of their home storey. See Fig 3.
c) Now we have to adjust all the element elevations:
i) On paper, calculate the delta (change in elevation) for each story level - from its original elevation to its new elevation.
ii) Turn on all 3D layers.
iii) In 3D view, filter the view by one storey only.
iv) Select all, and change the elevation by the amount you wrote down for that storey.
v) Go back to step iii, repeating for each storey.
d) Though the elements are now back in their correct elevations, relative to each other, if we want the floor level of the ground floor to be Project Zero, then we also have to adjust their "absolute" elevation (which really means, relative to Project Zero). Adjust all the storey levels again, individually in Story Settings. See Fig 4.

The end result is illustrated in Fig 5.

So which process do you vote for?

------------
PS. Thanks Matthew, for the tip about using "Filter by story" in 3D view to change elevations of a storey's elements. I hadn't used that feature before, so it hadn't occurred to me before to use it. It did make it a lot quicker than before.
Anonymous
Not applicable
...Alternatively, you can also do this graphically, in the "Edit Story Levels" mode.
Anonymous
Not applicable
...Fig 3. Note that all the elements of each storey have now moved by differing amounts, depending on the change in its home storey. It's as if the actual elevation of an element is locked to its home storey, not Project Zero.

You can't really tell very well - it's not as obvious as the roof - but the lower brown storey has also moved apart from the storey above it by around 20mm.