Missing Text

Some projects have been seeing text (text tool, labels, and dimensions) go missing. There are several work-arounds and even solutions for this. More than anything, this further emphasizes the need to review all pdf’s before sending documents to plot or email.
If your documents look like the screen shot here (there should be a LOT more than just “HRDWR” in this detail); you can try one of the following:
-Print to pdf, seems more reliable than save as or publisher.
-Use Arial font. Helvetica seems more susceptible to this glitch.
-Reload the project from the server (teamwork > project > reload from server). It seems to be tied to the local data and font file communications
-Have another team member publish, or publish from their computer. It is device, not file, specific.
-If all else fails… restart. Turn it off and back on again fixes everything!

Skylight Schedules

It has long been assumed that skylights, much like a lot of AC elements, will not associate to zones, or at least not show their association in the schedule field. A thread on a forum I recently stumbled across pointed out that using the “trim to roof” option to crop zones to the roof, rather than the normal Solid Element Operations, will effectively show the zone/skylight association in schedules:

Drafting Fill Types

Drafting and masking fills are occasionally necessary to make our plans clean and tidy in final documents. It is important to use the correct fill category though. In the attached screen shots, we are preparing marketing and presentation plans, and fills are helping out the stairs; but the fills applied were cut fills, so they show as black pochè when the presentation plan Graphic Override is applied. Cut fills should be reserved for building materials, cover fills for surfaces, and drafting fills for drafting.

Clean up fills set to “Cut Fill”

Switching fills to “Drafting Fill”

Multiply Along Path

The multiply tool is a great feature for quickly copying multiple elements along equal divisions or distances, but you can also use it to make multiple copies along a pre-defined vector!

Cadimage Covering – Migration Bug

There is an issue in migrated files using the Cadimage roof covering add-on that has resulted in many of our projects showing a 0″ thickness plane offset below the roof plane.

Plane showing on roof coverings is a 0″ thickness soffit

This is a result of the soffit subsection not wanting a value of 0. You can set the soffit thickness to any positive value and the soffit goes away, as long as all other values in the soffit section remain at 0″.

Set Value A to > 0″ (ie 1/8″)

Soffits no longer show

ARCHICAD 25 Dimension Tick Mark Bug

There is a bug in Archicad25 that causes dimension ticks to not show up on the layout. The issue stems from dimensions segments too short to fit the tick marks between the nodes. All dimension segments after the problem segment also show with missing dim ticks. The issue is compounded by the problem that they show fine in the view, but show missing when that view is placed as a drawing to the layouts.

The solution is to cut the segment that is too narrow and replace it with its own separate dimension string. This fragments our dimensions out a little, but gets the graphic results we need. The issue appears most prevalent using our open arrow (face of finish) dimension graphic style.

Cadimage Door Glitch

We have found a glitch, where some c/i doors lock out settings for frame dimensions. While sometimes this is tied to model view options, it appears that it is sometimes a buried settings under “all parameters”.

If you see frame settings in your door locked out like this:

Open the All Parameters dialog and scroll to the frame settings and change frameStatus to 1:

This will unlock the frame settings:

Creating rafter tails with a single beam

Custom Awning Pivot Line

We have often needed a window with an adjustable pivot line; such as an awning that rotates not at the head, but offset. The options for Cadimage pivot style windows are: awning (top swing), pivot in/out (center rotation), casement (left/right swing). But the Cadimage window element has a hidden parameter to “rotate” the window within the wall. This allows us to set the window operation type to “door”, then change the door swing line to reflect an offset pivot, and lastly, set the window unit to be rotated 90º in the wall to work like an offset pivoting awning style window!

Here is a 5 minute clip on how I made this work!

Cadimage Door Leaf

Cadimage doors are great in that they allow us to have separate operations and number of leafs on the left/right portions. However, the door leaf settings may be set to the wrong side if the left or right leaf quantity is set to 0. This will result in changes to the leaf settings reverting to the default setting. To make changes to the leaf setting, make sure the “Different Left and Right” is unchecked, and that you are editing the correct Leaf side.