BIM Coordinator Program (INT) April 22, 2024
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Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

Do the Mark-Up Tools work?

Laura Yanoviak
Advocate
The tools within the Mark-Up palette remain grayed-out regardless of active tool or selection -- is it broken?
MacBook Pro Apple M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM
AC26 US (5002) on Mac OS Ventura 13.5
16 REPLIES 16
Laura Yanoviak
Advocate
OK -- looks like the "Show Mark-Up items" box needs to be checked within the Model View Options Dialog.

EDIT: The AC10 Help refers to the View > On-Screen View Options which is incorrect.
MacBook Pro Apple M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM
AC26 US (5002) on Mac OS Ventura 13.5
Link
Graphisoft Partner
Graphisoft Partner
You answering your own questions now Laura?

Seriously, it will be interesting to see what you think of the Mark-up tool. I think it is an underutlized and subsequently undersupported tool, with limited reliability. Hopefully it is working better these days.

Cheers,
Link.
Anonymous
Not applicable
I have very good experience with this tool, if I use for minutes of meeting with the client.
I mark the check point with marker tool, you can save it with date, and you can confirm this point.
Please use it
Laura Yanoviak
Advocate
Link wrote:
...it will be interesting to see what you think of the Mark-up tool. I think it is an underutlized and subsequently undersupported tool, with limited reliability. Hopefully it is working better these days.


Well, investigating this tool has been on my "To Do" list for a while, and I'm finally getting around to it for tomorrow's BUG (BIM Users' Group) Meeting. Deciphering the ArchiCAD Help on the subject has been challenging -- this would be a great topic for an ArchiWiki tutorial.

I think this could be a very handy tool for some of our larger project teams.
MacBook Pro Apple M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM
AC26 US (5002) on Mac OS Ventura 13.5
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
I had not spent much time with the mark-up palette until recently because I dislike the interface so much.

However, I came across this on page 385 of the AC 11 US (INT too?) PDF reference guide a few weeks ago, and have to say that this worked well for me last week trying different alternative designs:
(c) wrote:
Version Management with Mark-Up

The Mark-up tool can also be used to compare several design
proposals to each other. In this scenario, architects create corrections
elements organized in Mark-Up entries. Each Mark-up entry
represents a version. To view one proposal, the corresponding
Mark-up entry has to be set visible, while the other entries have to be
hidden. When the architect is ready to present the different ideas, he
or she assigns all the mark-up entries to the senior architect who is in
control of the project. The project leader still does not have to
reserve workspace. He or she signs in as Mark-Up user and gets the
Mark-Up entries assigned to him/her. After the final decision is
made, the project leader changes the style of the chosen version to
“approved” and assigns the entry back to the teammate who created
that. The teammate can turn the approved set into final elements. The
discarded versions can be deleted or marked as “rejected” and kept as
hidden mark-up entries for later use.
You can easily convert existing building elements into mark-up elements, controled by the markup group visibility, and vice versa.

Among the bigger negatives are that each mark-up 'group' is for a particular story, so multi-story revisions require multiple groups. Also, in reviewing design alternatives, the materials of the displayed markup elements do not display. Rather, the assigned mark-up color is shown. So, it is a little tough to see an accurate OpenGL representation of the design alternatives.

But, hey, its 'free'/included in the package. 😉

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
I've just been exploring this tool for use in creating different plan options within one shell. I ran into a few problems - here are the probelms I ran into that I posted in the 'alternate schemes' thread:

Problems:
1. Biggest problem - doors and windows don't become part of the mark-up. When I try to place them, I get an error sound and the door/window is placed in the plan, but not as part of the mark-up. I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong, but what??

2. Some entries auto-update when I turn them on and off and with others I have to double click the viewpoint to get it to update. This may also be something I'm doing wrong, but I'm not sure what yet.

Any ideas what's going wrong?
Anonymous
Not applicable
I also found that it would be really nice if mark-up items could be set to their orginal pens/colors as well as the single mark-up pen (just like trace does)

The other problem I ran into is that walls in different mark-ups clean up with each other so you end up with gaps in walls where other walls (that are turned off) intersect them. The only solution I can think of is to create a different wall layer for each mark-up.
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Chris wrote:
1. Biggest problem - doors and windows don't become part of the mark-up. When I try to place them, I get an error sound and the door/window is placed in the plan, but not as part of the mark-up. I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong, but what??
This looks like a bug to me. I'll report if nobody else has already?

Here's what I did to replicate what you observed:
- drew two walls in plan
- with mark-up tools active, created a new mark-up group, selected one wall, and added it to the group
- with door tool, placed a door in each wall
- turned mark-up group visibility off - mark-up wall is gone, but the door is left orphaned on the plan (!). This has to be a bug, as AC has no method for doors/windows to ever be displayed as orphans.
- created another mark-up entry and added the other wall to that group. Turned off visibility for that mark-up entry and the wall AND door became invisible (correct)

So, the workaround seems to be to use the Mark-Up Tools dialog to temporarily make the wall NOT part of a mark-up entry/group, place the door, and then select the wall and add it back to the group.

Sure seems like this has to be a bug.

Comments? I'll submit a bug report, unless someone else believes this is proper behavior or has already sent in the report.

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Laura Yanoviak
Advocate
Does anyone know what the
special redlining objects provided in the ArchiCAD Library
are?
MacBook Pro Apple M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM
AC26 US (5002) on Mac OS Ventura 13.5
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