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]

Same goes for overlapping any other "perimeter" objects like slabs.
Adobe Illustrator has a raft of effects like this
UNITE
DIVIDE (LIKE SPLIT USING ANY SELECTED POLYLINE)
SUBTRACT FRONT FROM BACK (&VICE VERSA)
...

[Dwight]

What we have is a one-at-a-time grow a polygon.
The attached image shows the pet palette for this function, next to the whack-a-mole.

It "Grows a polygon" over top of the underlying perimeter. The old polygon(s) remain(s).

[Anonymous]

There is the add/plus icon in the pet palette followed by a magic wand/space bar click, but this has to be repeated for each element to be joined and then the extra bits have to be deleted.

A single merge command would be nice, but how does it handle elements that are somewhat dissimilar? Such as uniting/merging fills of different patterns, slabs with different thicknesses or materials or whatever.

The magic wand/space bar has the advantage of being consistent and predictable. I am not sure adding a new command to speed up a few special case situations would be worth the added complexity.

Perhaps the best thing would be to augment the magic wand with apple/ctrl and option/alt for repeated adds and optional deletion of the target element(s).

[cremsberg]

Dear Matthew:

What may be a rare case for you would be quite useful for me.

If I wanted to combine 50 fills or slabs with different parameters into one fill or slab, with a not-yet-available COMBINE command, couldn't they all be combined to match the default tool settings?

Graphisoft has recognized the need to UNIFY lines, arcs, & polylines. Why not be able to UNIFY 2D & 3D elements as well?

[Anonymous]

It is more occasional for me than rare and I do agree that it would be useful as long as it doesn't add unduly to an interface that is already overly complex (complicated). And of course one purpose to this forum is to find out what people need. Perhaps the best thing would be some sort of generalization of the Unify command.

[Dwight]

I voted essential on this since there's been more than once where I was frustrated by the numerous shadow fill bits generated in a complex elevation.

I can see that the command would be simple:
Select fills: UNIFY.

If you diidn't use Find and Select to select only one fill pattern/color, and you had more than one in the selection, the tool would ask which one to apply. That COULD get complicated.

[Anonymous]

Dwight wrote:
I voted essential on this since there's been more than once where I was frustrated by the numerous shadow fill bits generated in a complex elevation.

I can see that the command would be simple:
Select fills: UNIFY.

If you diidn't use Find and Select to select only one fill pattern/color, and you had more than one in the selection, the tool would ask which one to apply. That COULD get complicated.

Fills could simply acquire the current tool settings as the author suggests. Even if its not what was desired, its a simple fix. Slabs and roofs could be a little more troublesome what with thickness, slope, elevation, material settings, etc... But as long as the function were consistent (using the default tool settings) it would be easy to get comfortable with it.

Properly implemented as an extension of the unify command I would bump my vote to important or even essential (if it does not take too much resources away from other more important efforts).

[Laszlo Nagy]

When Unifying connected linear elements, the new element will inherit the settings of the last selected element.
This could also be a modus operandi when unifying polygonal elements. Essential for me.

[Rob]

Yep, this is a good idea and especially it uses already existing tool [unify] and makes it more universal as oppose to introducing a new one.
I really think that GS should make existing tools more universal (therefore more logic) and possibly get rid of the single-action oriented ones. As an example - 'trim to roof' should be included in SEO tools.
I would suggest that the common editing tools like Trim, Stretch, Resize, Split, Adjust, Explode and Unify should be applicable over all elements or eventually they should be merged with other more universal tool whatever that would be.