Arch - windows and doors

[Brutha]

Hi All,

I was thinking again about the issues we have with being able to use external constraints when placing doors and windows.

It occurred to me that it might be better if it worked more like the part design workbench.

That is: when I create a window in a wall using a sketch, a NEW piece of geometry would be created, and the old one hidden. This is how part design avoids circular references - the sketches are all based on geometry unaffected by the sketch itself.

I'm not sure how that might be organised in the tree, ideally you would just keep one top level wall object, and have the actual geometry as other objects inside it.

The caveat here is that I have no idea whether that's possible or the amount of rework that might be involved in doing it!

Cheers

Brutha

[yorik]

That would indeed be one way of doing it, but there are several problems to this approach, basically that, contrarily to PartDesign projects, Arch projects tend to be huge, with a big number of objects. This will inflate it exponentially and could quickly make projects too heavy to be manageable. Another problem we would have is that it will after a while become very hard to "sort" the project into separate elements, for example to export to IFC.

But I'll keep thinking to this, it might be possible to implement this as an option, if the user is ready to cope with the consequences...

[Brutha]

Yes, I was thinking that you might end with an enormous amounts of objects!

Another thought I had was that when you create a wall, it would create a (hidden) solid purely for the purposes of hosting window and door sketches.

The actual displayed solid would be made from the combination of the wall definition, plus the sketches defined on the hidden solid. I don't know if there would be some clever way of hiding that from the user, and making it look like you were simply sketching on the wall itself.

The downside of that approach is that you couldn't use already defined windows as external geometry I guess.

[Jee-Bee]

That is: when I create a window in a wall using a sketch, a NEW piece of geometry would be created, and the old one hidden. This is how part design avoids circular references - the sketches are all based on geometry unaffected by the sketch itself.

This is a part of FC i don't like… some times i wanna go back in the model try and that is a bit un handy work around…
Specially when i want add some changes earlyer in the model trie...

[Brutha]

That is: when I create a window in a wall using a sketch, a NEW piece of geometry would be created, and the old one hidden. This is how part design avoids circular references - the sketches are all based on geometry unaffected by the sketch itself.

This is a part of FC i don't like… some times i wanna go back in the model try and that is a bit un handy work around…
Specially when i want add some changes earlyer in the model trie...

Yes, I know what you mean! Ideally all those old geometries would be hidden away somewhere the user doesn't have to look at.... but the sketches should be easily found and edited.