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

Fills, Materials and walls

Anonymous
Not applicable
Now, uit's a geat mess with all that stuff.
First of all, some notes|wishes on walls\composites:
wall should consists not of different fills, but of subwall's set.
Every subwall should be aatched it's material
An only to material i should link fills and textures.

Integrating 2d patches, such as wall ends into AC is the way to spoil very good program.
Also, where is a great need to allow free subwall linking to each other, instead of nervous and 'guess how it would be aligned' core fill algorithm.

Where is a great need to add some free user parameters to materials.
5 REPLIES 5
Anonymous
Not applicable
I'm not clear what the wish is here. It sounds like it has to do with something you are calling sub-walls.

Are you referring to the disconnect between section fills, quantity calculations, and material definitions? (This has been raised before.)
Richard Swann
Contributor
I have been looking at how to associate heatloss through composite walls, roofs etc, and find it frustrating that global properties can only be associated with composites, not their constituant parts. therefore one cannot, for example, use inherent properties of individual realworld materials, eg dense concrete blocks, as represented by the constuent fills in a composite.
It would be great if each fill could be associated with its own property objects, therefore changes to composites would automatically list their correct properties and, for example, calculate the heatloss through them, that would be a neat trick!
Richard Swann
Mac OS X 10.11.4 , 27" Imac 4k ArchiCAD 4.5-20
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Skywalker wrote:
Now, uit's a geat mess with all that stuff.
First of all, some notes|wishes on walls\composites:
wall should consists not of different fills, but of subwall's set.
Every subwall should be aatched it's material
An only to material i should link fills and textures.

Integrating 2d patches, such as wall ends into AC is the way to spoil very good program.
Also, where is a great need to allow free subwall linking to each other, instead of nervous and 'guess how it would be aligned' core fill algorithm.

Where is a great need to add some free user parameters to materials.
I agree completely, if I translate correctly.

Composites are a graphic 'patch', they do not really represent the composite wall.

Part of what Skywalker is suggesting with subwalls is that if you have a brick veneer, airspace, CMU composite, then it should be represented that way fully - with brick as the material for the veneer portion (and take-offs computed on that), etc. If you solid element subtract a niche through the brick, then you should see the CMU material (rendering) and fill (drawings). Etc.

Richard's heat loss calculations would be more intuitive and logical as well, as the materials themselves would have properties, and so subwalls (composite skins today) would reflect those properties. Building assemblies (composite walls today) would automatically join all of that information and data together.

What ArchiCAD does provided a method to represent these walls in days when computers were small, slow and expensive. It is time for this methodology to change IMHO and reflect true virtual composite walls.

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Rob
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
I think this idea of having 'real' components of composites (walls/roofs and slabs as well) would resolve a lot of extremely annoying problems as suggested above (particularly the algorithm for wall joints hasn't ever really worked and I don't think that any algorithm would ever make that working - the solution has to be flexible as there is always unusual detail in real life). + ability to define different heights (lengths in case of slab/roof) per a component would be a wicked feature.

I vote essential that's for sure...
::rk
Richard Swann
Contributor
It dawned on me that this thread could point toward a solution to another long running thread in interface wishes, Matthews 'the new working environment'.
I was interested in the idea of directly editing the model by cutting horizontal or vertical sections anywhere, the problem with the archicad interface is that there are two distinct environments;
1. plan and section windows 2D drawing; fills, lines, arcs etc
2. 3d window; surface amaterials, walls, roofs etc

The 3d environment already allows us to cut the model anywhere and make orthogonal plan and section views, but what we see from these cut views is just solid wall/ roof etc because the modelview does not contain the essential information on composites, ie a wall is a wall whether it has one leaf or 6: The 2d representations in plan and section are the only way to access and edit this information. BUT this is crucial information ie what happens at wall/ eaves, wall/floor junctions etc etc. With the increasing sophistication and performance requirements of building envelopes for thermal, space and cost reasons, the need to access and edit composites, particularly at junctions is critical.

if composites were accurately modelled rather than a 2d cover fill, we could edit in (multiple windows would be nice) the 3d window as orthogonal views, with true thru 3d hatching/materials representing each leaf of a composite.
This could be straightforward to use; composite walls, roofs, floors could be drawn as now but 3d composites would be 'grouped' leafs which are aware of each other (as gdl associative labels are aware of what they are labelling). By default they would be grouped and editable as one entity, which could be suspended to edit individual leafs; at junctions, edge of solid floors, eaves etc. in 3d.
Another major benefit of this approach, apart from ease of editing, would be in the calculate menu; if individual materials are linked to a database of physical properties, then the composite properties would be more accurate in terms of quantities(where we cheat at the moment with 2d patches at junctions) and could feedback a swathe of environmental and structural data into the design: heatloss, thermal lag, thermal mass etc.
eg: gdl lintols could size themselves and tell the designer what deadload is being imposed from the wall above for each leaf...
Both structural and environmental feedback from the database, which is totally lacking at the moment, would have enormous positive impact on tools available within the current ArchiCad environment.
I dont think this is technically asking for the earth is it?.. please vote for this as essential...
Richard Swann
Mac OS X 10.11.4 , 27" Imac 4k ArchiCAD 4.5-20