Landmark Special Interest Group March 2020

In this session, we covered how to create a new line type that represents a fence, discussed the difference between Page Based Units and World Based Units, demonstrated a way to control wall textures depending on your needs, and went through the steps for reporting wall components on a worksheet.

Topics Covered:

• 00:08    The challenge was to create a new line type that would represent a fence in 2D drawings. This brought up a discussion about the difference between Page Based Units and World Based Units, which doesn’t just occur with line types, but also with symbols. With Page Based Units, a line type or symbol looks the same, regardless of scale, when they are printed. I find that the easiest way to create page-based symbols is to work at a scale of 1:1. However, anything that represents the real world, such as a line representing a railway line or the line representing our fence, should be world based. If your line type is shorter, it will look smoother if it needs to curve.
• 20:01    When I’m working on an existing building, I prefer to use an unstyled wall, rather than a styled wall. An existing plan often has walls of different thicknesses and I can quickly change the thickness of an unstyled wall from its Object Info palette—on a wall with a wall style, I need to open up the Wall Style dialog box and change the widths of the components. If you have a wall with a uniform texture or one with just interior and exterior textures, then it is easiest to control the textures by class. However, if it matters what the core of the wall looks like, you will need to control the wall’s graphic attributes with a wall style. We showed how to do this, step by step. You will also need to use a wall style if you want to report the area of a wall component on a worksheet.
• 34:37    We finished the session by creating a worksheet where we looked at the difference between the WallArea_Gross and WallArea_Net functions. We also covered what Criteria means and how to single out a wall style component. To double-check the wall area calculation, you can use the Extract tool to extract the faces of the wall and add up their areas. Another option is to use the extracted wall faces for the initial calculation and have the worksheet find the polygons instead of singling out the wall component. If your worksheet is set up to find a component, then you need to be careful that you’re consistent about naming the components. If not, the worksheet will no longer be able to find the components. There is no reason why you can’t have a library of walls and worksheets that work together and that you could reuse on other projects—without having to reinvent the wheel!

Landmark March 2020

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