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”
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!
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
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.
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:
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!
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.
Here is another example of how to decipher the report and keep your ARCHICAD file clean and efficient. The error report pops up for invalid geometries, incorrect GDL parameters, and missing or corrupted attributes.
In this example, the doors have an error.
we can decipher that this error is related to a Macro portion of 2 doors by the “Leaf.gsm”. GSM indicates that this is an error related to a GDL based element, and we can guess that “leaf” is a door leaf, or a sub-part to the doors. Since the error called is related to Parameters (“Non-positive parameter”), we can track it down based on possible 0 or negative values in a dimension, somewhere in the door settings.
Since this is a macro, we do not get the element ID for the door, but we can track it down based on the Unique ID given. The find and select simply needs to include part or all of the unique ID shown in brackets in the error report.
After finding the doors with the errors from this criteria, we were able to surmise that the negative value is tied to a negative door pivot offset setting. The fix is to make this value 0 or positive. If the door does need to swing past the the frame, as in this plan, we either need to accept and ignore the error report for these (not likely to cause any long term issues with the file), or script a custom door that will operate in this manner.
The role of the job captain is to keep a file clean, organized, and functional. This is done by coordinating post audit clean ups and performing regular checks on key file structures. The BIM Manual includes a self audit check list, as does this BIM Blog. There are also tips on keeping your file clean located here, here, and here.
These lists include items for file organization and cleanliness, but may not focus specifically on file functionality. Here is an abridged bullet point list for checking and cleaning items that may slow a file down and make basic operations (send/receive, reserve, update drawing, etc.) tedious.
NOTE: Before running any clean up or deletion of project items, always save a .pln to your desk top or file server as a back up to prevent lost work. A certain level of care needs to be maintained to avoid lost work during routine file maintenance
PERFORMANCE CHECKLIST ITEMS:
Polygon Count (all visible and unlocked should not exceed 4,000,000 polygons:
Check content on Temp Hide layer(s), iteration studies, etc. and remove all unused
Clear all furniture, landscape and decorations that are better placed in Twinmotion
Library Manager:
Purge Master_GDL.gsm elements from embedded library (check for “From Library 201101” folder in particular).
Delete unused embedded surfaces and objects
Check that Embedded Library does not exceed 250MB
Fix missing and duplicate reports
Project Map/View Map:
Purge unused “independent” sections and elevations
Remove unused, redundant, or empty worksheets and details
Remove any unused 2d drafted content from work sheets (iterative details, unused copies of model content, etc.)
Attributes:
Delete (and replace) outdated or iterative surfaces, composites, and custom profiles
Drawing Manager:
Remove missing internal drawings
Remove missing pdf/dwg’s placed from non-shared locations (IE downloads and desk top folders on user end devices).
WWA BIM 