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Door positioning snaps

Paul King
Advisor
In any given project, doors typically end up being in consistent positions with respect to corners or centres of walls.
It would thus be very useful/save a lot of redundant typing if these could be recorded and act as snap points during door placement - for example, if doors near corners are mostly always offset 150mm from corner, it is just too painful to be eternally typing this offset manually every time you place a door in a 200 room project!

There should be a range of recorded snap points that appear along wall during placement, say 5 or 10, to cover the range of typical wall / corner/ door placement relationships.

The whole idea with ArchiCAD should be to notice patterns in how designers work, and then intelligently reduce the number of steps required to achieve these patterns - quietly taking out the drudge work behind the scenes!
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
10 REPLIES 10
Eduardo Rolon
Moderator
What's wrong with using the Distance parameter in the Control Box Palette?
Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB ram, OS X 10.XX latest
another Moderator

Paul King
Advisor
Hi the main reasons are that it only works for one distance - every time you want to swap between one standard distance & another (even while using unrelated tools) your info is lost & has to be re-entered - and the very need to invoke that at all introduces another step!

It is all about reducing the number of steps, or things that have to be pre-considered & set up in advance to get from A to B, especially for often repeated situations.

ArchiCAD should perhaps quietly notice patterns in user behaviour like the the way doors are often positioned , and record them and use them as the basis for assistance later on - many little opportunities like this exist to make the day flow so much smoother!
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Anonymous
Not applicable
ejrolon wrote:
What's wrong with using the Distance parameter in the Control Box Palette?
See image. Distance works from end of wall element (on reference line) but not from adjoining wall.
Picture 15.png
Anonymous
Not applicable
s2art wrote:
ejrolon wrote:
What's wrong with using the Distance parameter in the Control Box Palette?
See image. Distance works from end of wall element (on reference line) but not from adjoining wall.
You can set the special snap points to work to the nearest intersection rather than the end of the wall (or line or whatever).
Paul King
Advisor
Matthew wrote:
s2art wrote:
ejrolon wrote:
What's wrong with using the Distance parameter in the Control Box Palette?
See image. Distance works from end of wall element (on reference line) but not from adjoining wall.
You can set the special snap points to work to the nearest intersection rather than the end of the wall (or line or whatever).
True - but still requires the extra steps and pre planning to set up, the data is lost every time you need a different standard distance, and with that snap mode on, the rest of your editing experience is severely degraded (walls showing hundreds of divisions whenever your mouse passes over, massive display slowdown on large projects with trace reference on etc)

All needless !
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Rod Jurich
Contributor
Just completed a project with some 260 doors.
The wall types are all steel framed. Governed by frame module size
the framing manufacturer required that distances the frame be set off
a returning wall by a given minimum dimension.
In order to ease this process of correct placement I added hotspots
offset from the frame edge.
The parameters were to show/not show and distance.
Requires some GDL knowledge but relatively easy to do.
Rod Jurich
AC4.55 - AC14 INT (4204) |  | OBJECTiVE |
Paul King
Advisor
Rod wrote:
Just completed a project with some 260 doors.
The wall types are all steel framed. Governed by frame module size
the framing manufacturer required that distances the frame be set off
a returning wall by a given minimum dimension.
In order to ease this process of correct placement I added hotspots
offset from the frame edge.
The parameters were to show/not show and distance.
Requires some GDL knowledge but relatively easy to do.
A good workaround - let the doors have the intelligence, if ArchiCAD does not - though I use CADimage doors, and so user customisation like this not an option for me, or many others I suspect.
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop
Rod Jurich
Contributor
Paul wrote:
/..... though I use CADimage doors, and so user customisation like this not an option for me, or many others I suspect.
Paul, it wouldn't hurt to ask Andrew Watson at Cadimage to add this.
If you don't ask........
Rod Jurich
AC4.55 - AC14 INT (4204) |  | OBJECTiVE |
Paul King
Advisor
Rod wrote:
Paul, it wouldn't hurt to ask Andrew Watson at Cadimage to add this.
If you don't ask........
Will do - though I do think the best place is in ArchiCAD itself, to accommodate ALL users...
PAUL KING | https://www.prime.net.nz
ArchiCAD 8-27 | Twinmotion 2023
Windoze 11 PC | Intel Core i9 10900K | Nvidia Gforce RTX 3080 | 32 Gb DDR3 | 2x4K monitor extended desktop