Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

3D model distortion in Save As...

Greg D
Participant
During the Save As... routine, the 3D model distorts certain elements, in this case the roof. (Notice the roof distortion adjacent to the bell tower and near the ridge of the roof to the left.) This happens in jpeg, pdf, tif, etc. Any ideas as to how to prevent this?

SJLC - SW Revised Image2.jpg
Greg Danskin - Architect
http://www.danskinarchitecture.com

AC 19/20/21
iMac Retina 5K, 4 GHz Intel Core i7, 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB
OS 10.13.4 High Sierra
10 REPLIES 10
Erika Epstein
Booster
Down at the bottom of the screen where you type in your question/response you BROWSE to the image you want to post then click ADD ATTACHMENT. Then SUBMIT
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"
Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi Greg, welcome to the forum!

What does the image look like in the 3d window on your screen? Can you do a printscreen and attach the cropped image so we can see what is distorting.

Are you using the internal engine or openGL engine to produce the image? Check in the 3d window settings that you haven't got contours set to 'draft' perhaps. I don't know if this effects the save-as output or not.

You could also try turning off the trees before saving the image. Maybe the extra polygons are doing something strange to the model!

Also, please add your AC version and computer specs to your signature, as some problems are version/platform specific.
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
What I see in the image is that there appear to be multiple roofs occupying the same space. You get that 'shimmering' business when one or the other is trying to show itself.

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Greg D
Participant
Wow, thanks for all the imput already!

I am on an Intel Mac, ArchiCAD v12, OpenGL, contours set to 'Best'. The Trees are important, as this is for a regulatory review. I have saved a very similar view a couple of months ago and it came out fine. The only remarkable differences are fewer trees before and different sun angle.

I am using small roof pieces for metal roof battens over a standard roof. I raised all the battens 1/4" and that seems to have done it! They were resting on the main roof plane, and now they float.

Thanks for all your help!

Greg
Greg Danskin - Architect
http://www.danskinarchitecture.com

AC 19/20/21
iMac Retina 5K, 4 GHz Intel Core i7, 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB
OS 10.13.4 High Sierra
Erika Epstein
Booster
Glad you solved the problem. For the roof you might have used the roof addon
Design>Design Extras>Accessories>Roof Accessories
There is a standing seam roof option.
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"
Chazz
Enthusiast
Karl wrote:
What I see in the image is that there appear to be multiple roofs occupying the same space. You get that 'shimmering' business when one or the other is trying to show itself.
In our experence this is a major bug. Even when an element is physically above another (ie a slab located an inch or two above another slab) you can still have parts of the lower element "peek" through the upper. This only happens with the open GL engine. It is a total drag and basically breaks the ability to save (for example) interior flat shade perspectives (typically saved as a series of PNGs as part of a fly through).

Erika, Karl, are you saying you have not seen this (bad) behavior before? Hard to believe it's just me.....
Nattering nabob of negativism
2023 MBP M2 Max 32GM. MaxOS-Current
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Chazz wrote:
Erika, Karl, are you saying you have not seen this (bad) behavior before? Hard to believe it's just me.....
Hi Chazz,

Yeah, I've only seen this behavior when two elements are co-planar.

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Chazz
Enthusiast
Karl wrote:
Yeah, I've only seen this behavior when two elements are co-planar.l
Maybe I'm just cursed. To clarify: everything looks good in the 3D window, it's only when you SAVE from the Open-GL window to a raster format like JPG, GIF, PNG that things start to look funky. Definitely not WYSIWYG.
Nattering nabob of negativism
2023 MBP M2 Max 32GM. MaxOS-Current
Erika Epstein
Booster
The other example of similarly confusing archicad is when you have library parts with the same name loaded.

For example some years ago there was the same chair in the AC library and in a 3rd party library. Although I placed the chair from one library as I navigated around in the 3D window, the material of the chair flickering back and forth between solid(per choice in the AC library part and striped (per the settings in the 3rd party chair).
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"