Surface Attributes

[Anonymous]

I have spent forever trying to make a schedule that lists various finishes in my projects. Everything from paint colors to tile to clear sealed steel to walnut veneered wood paneling. It seems that the best way to do this is by scheduling surfaces. Of course, surfaces have no inherent properties apart from a texture image, hatch, and title.

I don't see why I can't add Manufacturer, Finish, Supplier, Notes, and other properties to individual surfaces. Please add this basic functionality to Archicad.

[gavinNZz]

Could you instead work with building materials? They allow a few more properties to be added.

Surfaces are just another of Archicads poor children that have been neglected as they push on to have as many children as possible. If they spent a bit more time on some of their original children then some of the base functionality of Archicad would work so much better.

[Anonymous]

I've tried to use building materials in place of surfaces, but managing that becomes so cumbersome it isn't worth the effort.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

[AlexM]

As a relatively new user (well, company of users), the final understanding that surfaces have no real properties was one of the really frustrating recent moments.

We have developed a set of wall types - one example is a simple plasterboard wall (composite material).

We want that wall type, tag, and properties to be identical everywhere it's used in the project. But the walls might have white paint, grey paint, blue paint, or yellow paint. A brick wall might be unfinished, or it might be sealed, or painted with a mineral paint, or an acrylic paint. It would be crazy to develop a new composite wall type for every different surface in an office or project standard.

The next related gripe is that we need to have a separate 'inside face' and 'outside face' version of the surface autotag label to select the right surface property to tag (yes, sometimes one side of a wall IS painted a differently to the other!).

[DGSketcher]

Have you looked into Categories & Properties? Property Manager would likely allow you through the use of expressions to extract or manually define the surface finish for scheduling.