Wall Junctions - Stop the Headaches

[Patrick M]

every project seems to be a trouble shooting adventure, where these are some of the "best possible results" for wall junctions. short of a complex profile column at every other wall juction, we just have to settle for 'good enough'.
Wishlist item: make it easy and automated to clean up wall junctions in plan!

   

[Laszlo Nagy]

@Patrick M,

It looks like in your last scenario, if the Intersection Priority Number of the Wall structure and the Slab structure is the same (either because they use the same Building Material, or because they use different Building Materials with the same Intersection Priority Number), then the Wall structure will be stronger and will not let the Slab structure extend further into the Wall. However, if you create another (maybe a duplicate) Building Material with a higher Intersection Priority Number for the Slab structure, then the Slab structure will be able to extend into the Wall beyond the Wall's structural skin.

[Patrick M]

@Laszlo Nagy  

but if I create a new building material, I get a line between the wall and the slab... which circles back to the original intent of this thread; that is, building material interactions need to be fully developed and realized into a complete solution so that we no longer need work-arounds.
I met with a firm yesterday that told me every one of their projects has fills patching over lines in their sections and even in plans. Another firm mentioned that they use the wall patch plug-in, which is just another 2d work-around to a baked in system that doesn't work.

...
i understand that these kinds of wish list items are difficult to get into development; but there are so many "new" features that get thrown in and never completed. When were building materials introduced, wasn't it like AC14 or 15? 10+ years, and we still can't get roofs and walls to interact without hidden opperators. Nothing recognizes a mesh without an SEO and/or Merge function added. And to the point of this thread, even wall to wall interactions are wrought with headaches that force extreme work-arounds or ignoring graphic mistakes in our plans.
...
the great thing about archicad is, there is pretty much always a way to get it to look the way you want. But the with the growing demand for more detailed and elaborate modeling, the tools simply are not keeping up without a level of expertise and/or third party additions that people are not able to commit to. Most archicad users are architects and designers, not software gurus with the time to commit to trouble shooting mundane things like "why don't any of my walls intersect properly?"

[SeaGeoff]

If memory serves BMats were introduced with AC17. At the time there was a debate as to whether Graphisoft should first introduce manual or automatic junctions. Obviously their choice was automatic. The more important bit of history is that we were promised manual junctions would shortly follow. They did not. Nor did completion of the project to include all parts of the model. This chart comes directly from Archicad Help and shows how half of the common junctions are not included at all.

Even this embarrassing diagram does not tell the whole story. Meshes are not listed at all, nor are the errors generated when walls overlap each other vertically, as we often need to do for correct sections.

Everything in Archicad flows from clean, water-tight modeling. As @Patrick M notes, most designers today expect that to extend to the skin level. That is what BMats and Priority Based Connections are supposed to be all about. Graphisoft needs to refocus a significant portion their efforts in this area, which should also include bringing SEOs—the ugly stepchild of intersection methods—in line with the more modern connections.