Improve the borders on the hardscape tool

[BCALJames]

I've been using the hardscape tool for a while and while I think it is already good I think a major improvement would be to allow the use of more than one different border type per hardscape. For example when we're designing footpaths the front edge usually has a 125mm width kerb, and the back would most likely be something different such as a 50mm width concrete edging unit. The screenshot bleow shows how this would look:

 

 

Our work around is to create 2 hardcapes to achieve this at the moment, with a joint hidden in the centre of the overall shape as you can see below:

 

 

The problem with this is that when we start to think about these sites in 3D we have many more hardscapes than we could have depending on how many different edges the particular surface requires. If we could assign a border type (A, B, C...etc) to each segment of the boundary then we could work with a single hardscape that we could more easily control the 3D levels within.

 

Following on from this it would also be amazing if it were possible to assign a profile style to borders that would be generated in 3D. Then when a section was cut through them we would already be able to see the profile of the particular border / edge and its fixing detail (usually a concrete bed and haunch) in the section viewport.

 

My other thought on editing hardscape boundaries is that when we use the add or clip surface tools on them the edit line segments (and some random other ones) forget their border setting and switch back on again. This creates a lot of work reassigning the borders correctly again.

 

Hope that makes sense, if I've missed any features that already exist to let me do this with one hardscape it would be great to hear about them!

 

 

[Katarina Ollikainen]

@BCALJames, thank you for your input - we are working on the curb/border/edge and hope to come up with a solution that covers all kinds of edges, including 3D profiles. However, we're not looking at a solution only for the hardscape but a more overarching approach. I can't promise when this will be introduced, but it's a high priority.

We do appreciate everyone taking the time to share ideas and requirements - this is how we can make our tools even better.

[BCALJames]

Thanks @Katarina Ollikainen, I've been using the hardscape tool a lot over the last couple of days and getting very frustrated with the show / hide edge feature: when I hide one edge, the previous hidden edge reappears and theres a constant situation of alternating between them in the hope that the right edges will display. 

 

This problem seems to have become significantly worse since I altered the name of the class that the hardscape styles themselves were on, and then subsequently altering the main component and border classes. The reason I did this is that all of our hardscape were created on a class that had a fill assigned to a particular paving hatch and whenever we exported the drawing to dwg format we were getting double hatches: one for the main component class (what we wanted to see) and the other from the default hardscape style class. Duplicating the class the style is on and renaming it so that we could assign no hatch to it seems to have caused the problems and we don't seem to be able to succesfully edit any of the affected hardscapes, but we've got a great looking export at least!

 

Its good that we've come across this issue as we can avoid it in future, but some more reliable editability of hardscape styles after they have been created is definitely needed.

[BCALJames]

Just to follow up on this, I changed the class names back to how they were previously and then selected the same hatch for that class as when the hardscape was created and things seem to have resolved themselves so our drawing seems salvageable, but we're going to have the double hatch export problem with this file at least.