Need an Arch Test File

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wandererfan
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

Post by wandererfan »

yorik wrote: Wed Apr 03, 2019 6:48 pm More arch test files:
Thanks for the files. Are Cedric, Alice, et al, kids or cats?
paullee
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

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brjhaverkamp wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 11:14 am 1) The scaling factor of a section view can only be set wit 2 decimals. Going from a building in meters to a drawing in cm, that takes up most of the precision already.
I can only use the 0.02 scale. 0.01 is too small, 0.03 is too big. An extra precision would be nice here.
Notice this 'problem' also - using formula e.g. 1/80, 1/250 ... to workaround at the moment.

Hope wandererfan can do something :)
Screenshot from 2019-04-05 19-38-46.png
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vocx
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

Post by vocx »

wandererfan wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 12:14 pm
brjhaverkamp wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 11:14 am I noticed two small practical issues with techdraw atm:
1) The scaling factor of a section view can only be set wit 2 decimals. Going from a building in meters to a drawing in cm, that takes up most of the precision already.
I can only use the 0.02 scale. 0.01 is too small, 0.03 is too big. An extra precision would be nice here.
That should be controlled by Edit>Preferences>Units>Number of decimals.
...
I noticed what brjhaverkamp is talking about as well. And of course, I solved it the way you propose, by changing the precision.

However, I personally think that this is not intuitive for new users and should be changed. Either the default FreeCAD precision goes to 4 decimals, or better, the Scale factor of TechDraw pages is independent of that value. I think when making drawings we want to use an arbitrary precision, because things in the 3D model may be an order of magnitude larger than we want them represented in the page units.

For example, with buildings, you really need to have access to scales 1:20, 1:100, and even 1:1000, and any number in between. That means that the number of decimals that works for modelling the 3D objects is far too restrictive in the page view. We want to have the freedom of using scales like 0.02341, 0.0085214, 0.009905, or whatever, if it makes sense for the page that you are creating.

Another slightly related improvement would be a way of setting the scale by an integer proportion, say "1:20", "4:7", "9:23" or whatever. Obviously these are fractions and can be input using the formula editor as paullee says. But again, it's not very intuitive. In other programs you can set the scale like this, and the interface will show you this exact fraction instead of the decimal representation. Personally, I'd like a more visual indication, maybe in the toolbar or in the status bar, that shows me the scale of the currently selected View. When you have many views, it sometimes becomes messy to know if all of them are already set at the scale that you want.
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yorik
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

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wandererfan wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 12:17 pm Thanks for the files. Are Cedric, Alice, et al, kids or cats?
The first clients of an architects are always their family, who have to suffer the first epic failures of one's career :D
But these are all "normal" clients of mine... That's something I like much in Brazil (in the US it's like that too), you call everybody by the first name, your clients quickly become your friends, etc.
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wandererfan
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

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vocx wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 2:56 pm However, I personally think that this is not intuitive for new users and should be changed. Either the default FreeCAD precision goes to 4 decimals, or better, the Scale factor of TechDraw pages is independent of that value. I think when making drawings we want to use an arbitrary precision, because things in the 3D model may be an order of magnitude larger than we want them represented in the page units.
Will take some digging to sort this out. I don't know if there is a way to tell the PropertyEditor that a given property should use a different number of decimals. Might have to wait for a NewView task dialog where we could accept input in any form we like.

Can we talk Expressions into accepting ':' as a valid symbol for division? ;)

Where would you display the scale on a page that has 4 views, all with different scales?
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

Post by vocx »

wandererfan wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 5:44 pm ...
Can we talk Expressions into accepting ':' as a valid symbol for division? ;)
I guess you could try, but this Expression thing is global, is it not? Maybe if you change something, it breaks hundreds of entry fields everywhere.

The TechDraw NewProjGroup allows you to set the scale with two spin boxes, "1 (spin) : 10 (spin)". Maybe something like this can be designed for the regular TechDraw NewView as well.
Where would you display the scale on a page that has 4 views, all with different scales?
I thought about some possibilities.
  • Somewhere in the toolbar. A simple label showing the scale of the currently selected View. If not in the toolbar, in the status bar (below). So, it would show you the information of only one view. Each time you click on a view, it shows the corresponding scale of that projection. Select nothing, at it shows you the scale of the page.
  • If you select multiple views, maybe it can iterate over the list selection and report multiple scales. "View, scale 0.2; View001, scale 0.002; View002, scale 1:10"
  • Button or right click menu to show information on each view. A balloon pops out showing you the scale of the view. Button or menu to toggle on and off for the entire page. Then I could quickly see the scale of all objects.
TechDraw_scale_popups.png
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Re: Need an Arch Test File

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I made a couple of TD modifications that are mostly for Arch users:

Page Scale Default git commit afe21f739c.
You can now specify a default parameter for Scale so your buildings don't over flow the page on first view. You'll have to use Tools>Edit parameters... to change it for now.
defaultScaleParm.png
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Shape Search Improvements git commit 827f6c420e
The routines for finding shapes belonging to the Source object(s) have be upgraded to inspect the objects for "Group" property (in addition to GroupEx extension) and "Shape" property (in addition to descent from Part::Feature). This should help with "Building" objects. I'm looking for real world feedback on this one.

These are in Master branch now. Now sure when they will make it into freecad-daily.
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