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

Allow doors or windows to create opening in multiple elements

BB2000
Participant

It would be handy if the door / window tool could create an opening through other elements sitting adjacent to the "host"

 

In the image below of a recent project, we have the existing walls (blue) which we are creating an opening through. The existing walls are also being lined internally (yellow) and clad externally (pink). To achieve this in Archicad we placed the door object into the existing wall and then added to further empty door opening to the yellow and pink walls. It would be handy if we could allow door and windows to create openings in other elements like the opening tool can.

 

If this is not possible perhaps even if the openings could be linked so that moving one moves all?

 

Would be good to hear what other people do in situations like this or if anyone else thinks this would be a good addition.

BB2000_0-1676652954022.png

 

 

12 REPLIES 12

I do exactly the same. You could add an opening using the opening tool which will cut through all of the surfaces it touches and group it with the door. I suspect the opening tool and door and window tools will eventually become one thing. 

Lee Hankins
ArchiCAD 4.5 - Archicad 27UKI Apple Silicon 27.1.1
macOS Sonoma (14.2)
Barry Kelly
Moderator

Or instead of adding extra walls for the new skins, just replace the original wall with a new composite or complex profile wall.

Then you only have one wall to deal with and no extra openings.

 

Barry.

One of the forum moderators.
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Was going to write exactly this, but then i realized the blue wall is existing. So if replaced with a composite (which would certainly solve the main problem), the blue wall would appear as demolished, hence the need to either:

A) add renovation renovation filters to composites

B) door and window have the ability to attach themselves to multiple adjacent but separate walls.

C) both.     

 

Due to archicad current structure and workflow, maybe A is the easier to implement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tinou
Enthusiast

It is one of the most important thig to fix in the next AC. Renovating old buildings means usually that we conserve te loadbearing walls ans most of openings while changing the window frames and adding new layers inside or outside the wall.

Now we achieve that with adding 2nd wall and making empty openings in this.

Étienne - AC 24 - France

A will bring users to create really too many tipes of composites, depending on what is existing and what is added. The logic of building process is better corespondig to B.

Étienne - AC 24 - France

Don't forget you are just working on a plan (3D model).

So long as it looks correct and you can get the correct documentation, then all is good.

I would still try to avoid adding the extra wall and openings, but maybe that is just me.

 

Sure you have an existing wall.

Show this in your 'existing' plans as is.

 

For your 'new' plans, I would create a composite that includes the existing skin and all the new ones.

You can't tag the existing skin as existing, but you can set the fill pattern and colour as you want it to show as existing.

The entire wall is 'new' and you will have to add new doors and windows in it, but you can still use the renovation filters to switch between existing and new.

So long as you then document the existing skin and existing doors and windows are 'Existing', all should be good.

 

The people building it will just be reading from your plans and not looking at the Archicad model (usually).

 

Sure it would be nice to have renovation status for individual skins, and Graphisoft is aware of this and it has been discussed with them.

 

Having said all this, it is not actually something I have done, but that is how I would tackle it.

 

Barry.

One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
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Tinou
Enthusiast

Thanks for explaining. Does it mean that in this case we will no more have the possibility to choose and change the renovation status of any composite wall directly in the element options ? Do we need create at least 3 similar types of coposites to manage it ?

(Sorry that this is not my mother language...)

Étienne - AC 24 - France

I agree, but not archicad logic. hence A seems easier to implement, if they ever do something about it


@Tinou wrote:

Thanks for explaining. Does it mean that in this case we will no more have the possibility to choose and change the renovation status of any composite wall directly in the element options ? Do we need create at least 3 similar types of coposites to manage it ?

(Sorry that this is not my mother language...)


I am not quite sure I understand what you are meaning.

You can still change the renovation status of any wall.

So you would have your existing walls.

That would be one composite.

If any of those are to be demolished, you just tag them as 'to be demolished' and control the visibility of them with the renovation filter settings.

You can easily have an existing and to be demolished plan, just as normal.

 

The new wall would be a second composite that includes an inner skin to match the existing wall.

But as you can't tag this skin as existing, the entire wall is 'new' and you just make the fill of that internal skin to show as you would want the existing wall to show.

 

So I would say you only need 2 composites.

 

You aren't using the renovation filters as they were really intended for the new plan, as you will be simply hiding the existing and to be demolished walls when you need to show the new walls.

Have them on their own layer so you can turn them off easily, otherwise you have to pin them to show only on a certain renovation filter.

Then when you want to show the 'new' plan you turn on the new wall layer and turn off the existing wall layer (or again you have to pin the wall to show only on a particular renovation filter - I think layers are easier - just set the intersection group number of the layers to be different so they do not try to trim with each other).

 

Barry.

 

One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11