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

Smart dashed lines for roofs

Rick Thompson
Expert
This is an old wish, but still sorely needed. Any time roofs join you end up with a solid line on other stories. We need that fixed. It is not acceptable to have solid lines pretending to be dashed. Dashed mean above or below. Solid means something else entirely.

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Rick Thompson
Mac Sonoma AC 26
http://www.thompsonplans.com
Mac M2 studio w/ display
26 REPLIES 26
Anonymous
Not applicable
I agree - essential .
I always explode a roof copy for 2d representation.
I select lines and fills ( roof layer ) and merge and clean all overlapped lines and fills . I customize the look of 2d roof and import entirely or partially in different story levels .
Please give an cleaner ,easier 3d(model) to 2d (documentation) translation .
Anonymous
Not applicable
So I have found a fix in the mean time, whilst Graphisoft get off their bottoms.

I use the roof accessory tool, turn it off in 3D, make my roof OUTLINE white in plan, change my accessory tool outline to overhangs, your roof needs to be home story ground floor as you roof accessory will only show on the home story of your roof.

Then when lines don't align the way they should, you add a node to the edge of the roof, because with the roof accessory tool where ever there is a node you have a line start and finish either side.

Reply with questions and ill add some screen shots soon, but as a whole it works well, with minimal user input and it is heaps better than 2D!!!!
Anonymous
Not applicable
Shingleback wrote:
So, Graphisoft still haven't made a move on this. How very disappointing.

Its been a year since the last post on this, just letting Graphisoft know we're still here and we're still screaming for a fix. And your woeful excuse for a way around
....
http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/archiguide/roofedgelines.html
....
is not a fix, especially if your using more than 2 roofs elements.
The whole point of Archicad is to avoid doing 2D as much as possible.
Get off your behinds and fix this
Shingleback,
I couldn't get this link to work. Do you have a working link or copy of this article?
Mahalo,
John
Anonymous
Not applicable
Karl wrote:
I believe this is not a roof problem, but just another case of the even longer wished-for issue of ArchiCAD not displaying dashed (or any non-solid linetype) in a sensible way - so that two dashed lines on top of each other can result in a solid line.

Trying to reproduce this just now, I only had one valley that showed as solid. I dragged all of the roof planes away from one another, and all displayed properly as dashed.

My roof settings were for:
Show on Stories: all relevant stories
Floor Plan Display: Projected with Overhead
Show Projection: Entire Element
Uncut Lines: Solid Line
Overhead Lines: Dashed

and my Floor Plan Cut Plane was adjusted to include the entire roof.

Maybe I'm missing the problem though?

Thanks,
Karl
Aloha Karl,
I've been searching the forum for an answer as to how to show only the roofs eaves as well as a bit of the lower part of the hips and valleys on the stories below the roof story. In the old pencil drafting days on plans of stories below the roof story we only showed the roof eaves above with a dashed line as well as few feet of the bottom of the hips and valley lines to indicate the roof layout above.
In ArchiCAD, when I show a roof that is above a story all of the roof's lines (eaves, hips, valleys and ridges) show up. The upper part of the roof's lines are uneeded on a floor plan.
Can this be controlled with the Floor Plan Cut Plane setting?
Thanks,
John
Anonymous
Not applicable
Sorry John I do not have a copy of this article.

It was a while ago, I believe it was a Graphisoft demonstration from their support archives. It showed that in order to get your dashed roof lines you needed to add extra nodes to the edges of your roof. Each roof plane (prior to Archicad 15's complex roofs), the outlines of that roof plane would be a "polyline" in plan starting at a node on the roof, by adding extra nodes you would manually change that start/end location until it align with the adjacent roof plane.

The issue with this is it only worked when you had 2 roof planes adjacent to each other, add a third or fourth, etc. and you had a major head ache.

Now of course, this has been resolved (kind of) by the "complex roof" option within archicad 15. The outlines of the roof element are still acting as a polyline and don't always join at the corners, but at least where different planes of roof meet they show correctly.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Shingleback wrote:
Sorry John I do not have a copy of this article.

It was a while ago, I believe it was a Graphisoft demonstration from their support archives. It showed that in order to get your dashed roof lines you needed to add extra nodes to the edges of your roof. Each roof plane (prior to Archicad 15's complex roofs), the outlines of that roof plane would be a "polyline" in plan starting at a node on the roof, by adding extra nodes you would manually change that start/end location until it align with the adjacent roof plane.

The issue with this is it only worked when you had 2 roof planes adjacent to each other, add a third or fourth, etc. and you had a major head ache.

Now of course, this has been resolved (kind of) by the "complex roof" option within archicad 15. The outlines of the roof element are still acting as a polyline and don't always join at the corners, but at least where different planes of roof meet they show correctly.
Aloha Shingleback,
I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say they join correctly. Do you mean that a dashed (not solid or partially solid) line is shown where two roofs that have a common edge such as a hip or valley?
If it is easy, please upload an image.
I'm making a list of reasons why to upgrade to v15 and this is one of the issues in the "Not Resolved" pile that is holding me back.
Mahalo,
John
Anonymous
Not applicable
First of all I highly recommend version 15. There has been many things upgraded and added that initially did not take my interest but after spending some time getting to know them (much like every other facet of Archicad) I found that they are quite useful and time saving. Such as the complex roof tool and the renovation filters, which once set up to your liking make doing renovation and addition work very nice.

So I did make a mistake in saying that the roof edge lines in V15 are a polyline, they aren't. They act as a single line from one corner to the next. sometimes they do not join.

In the screen shot I have 2 roofs, the same apart from the left one is the new archicad roof tool and the right is single plane roofs like in the previous versions of Archicad.

The key difference is, with the new roof tool it's all one element as opposed to the older way which is every plane is is own element. there fore 2 edges share the same coordinates and most of the time dashed lines appear solid due to the overlap.