I’m working on 3D models of houses.
I need to show interior elevations of each room, so I’m making each room as a separate Component, so I can bind 4 Section Planes to each one (and then don’t extend to the entire house).
So I have separate room Components hanging out, and instances of them on the main floorplan.
(If I need to add elements (furniture or w/e) to each room, they magically show up on the main floorplan; if I need to fine-tune something based on where 2 rooms meet, I do that on the floorplan and it magically shows up in the “components corral”.)
So far, so good.
The problem is, when I need to do a horizontal plan take-off, like a cross-cut of all the wall coverings, or the wall structures, in a single file, there’s a TON of overlapping lines and duplicates, which takes forever to clean up in vector.
Is there a way to automatically (or with a script on command) HIDE any elements that 100% overlap?
Or possibly another solution to this workflow? (E.g. Section Planes than can be limited to a specific distance, or like a “4-way Camera Inside The Room” type of plugin)?
Either one, they’re identical, it’s the same wall / window that would exist in both Components. But when they’re placed on the floorplan, parts of them will overlap.
Or maybe there’s some approach to “show only combined geometry, without intersecting lines”, like a “draw an outline around ALL of this”, that I’m not aware of?
So you want to show each room alone? why not just do that in Layout? You can make a clipping mask to shape the viewport to just show the one room at the time, or just manually draw a masking shape to hide the geometry you dont want to show for each room. I find it unnatural to start to make components of each room, because, as you state, you get repeating geometry that represents the same thing. walls with fill for the section cuts require the sectioned walls to be properly build as closed " solid" geometry.
It seems to me that you are making things more difficult for yourself by duplicating geometry. You wind up making model management harder and more prone to errors by doing that.
Or maybe you are in a early stage where you just want to move rooms around freely, and easily change position between different rooms?
Are you sure you need wall geometry for this stage? I would just show floors with different colors, and maybe a furniture symbol, so say, an office would be a component with a floor and a furniture symbol, and this would be represented only in 2D at that early stage.
That’s the thing, it’s a very asymmetrical process. We get the floorplan from the architect, but there are always changes to the room layout, whether it’s from the client deciding on something else, or from one of our team saying “welp, this is idiotic, let’s do it like this instead”. So walls do move around. But in the meantime, the rooms that ARE confirmed are being worked on, so we have a house that’s, in essence, a collection of components, in wildly different stages of the process, and it’s so much easier to have them outside, separately.
When you combine the furniture and other elements for a specific room, you can make that a component and leave all the walls in a separate component or file, it doesn’t need drawn geometry for it (while you could create a ‘Space’ though.)
Perhaps, when @corney or @vladimir_bajic is in the room, you might want to chat about your workflows with spaces.
I will sometimes do variations of this and do it with tags. The excess ‘maybe later, maybe never’ geometry just gets assigned an ‘X-BlahBlahBlah’ tag so I never see it, but I can bring it back easy enough.
That would be amazing. I’m a big fan of figuring out the process properly, and avoiding wasted time/effort/nerves that comes with doing things inefficiently. Problem is, figuring out the process properly when you’re a total n00b, doesn’t work that well.
I’m slowly chewing through the books, but it’s a lot to absorb and I’d rather have directed advice on shaping the workflow based on our specific process.
