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Materials


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

So... Materials, or Building Materials.

This is a big one, and a concept/feature we are actively looking into developing. For me personally this is a more difficult feature to properly frame out, as I feel I may lack sufficient industry knowledge to detail what such a feature would include. To that end, I am requesting your comments, concerns and any other input regarding the scope of your needs and how we can best meet them.

Now, this is not to say that as of this post we BEGIN developing Materials, talk about this internally has been going on for a long time and many of our distributors (some of them accomplished architects and designers in their own right) have been providing us with wishes and other suggestions, but this thread will concentrate on specific user needs that I will curate and add to internal planning pages for use by engineering since I am sure there will be a great deal.

I won't merge the other existing threads since many of them have tangents to things I feel are a bit outside the scope of this feature, so this will be the new home for this discussion.

I have pulled input from many existing threads, (Special thanks to @digitalmechanics, @zoomer, @Chris D, @Dieter @ DWorks, @Christiaan and many others whose threads and posts I stole from) as well as from competitors feature lists. Feel free to link in any I may have missed that have missing key points to advance this initial list:

1) Materials must be assignable to any object, 2D or 3D, with the 3D aspects of the Material simply left out of 2D scenarios.

2) Users must be able to not only rely on an extensive default catalog of Materials, but be able to add new Materials themselves from scratch.

3) Materials must be a resource type available in the resource manager with all the current share-ability of current resources via workgroup folders.

4) Users must be able to update a source Material resource and have that push the update to all instances where a Material is used.

5) Materials must include Line Styles for both the 2D and 3D edges of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

6) Materials must include Hatch settings for both the 2D and 3D faces of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

7) Materials must include Tile settings for both the 2D and 3D faces of geometry, separate control for section vs non-section views.

8) Materials must include Textures.

9) It must be possible to generate reports on the volume, weight, density, cost, surface area, exposed surface area, and thermal properties.

10) The same Material needs to be applicable to wall, slab, roof components as well as solids. Duplicates should not need to be created for each type of object to inherit the Material's settings.

11) Materials need to (optionally) have the ability to determine the joins for wall, slab and roof components contextually. Each of these types of joins needs to be user definable.

12) What aspects a Material inherits from the resource should be controllable similarly to Door and Window Types, where users are able to select certain fields that use the Material resource and then allow for overrides for that particular object's particular field value.

If I have completely or partially missed the mark with this list, feel free to correct me.

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Depends on how Nemetschek plans to implement materials.

Will VW have the inbuilt intelligence to determine if an object is cut or is in section?

If so, then all of the graphical attributes of an object (2D plan, 3D, section attributes, fills, textures and hatches) could all be incuded in the class - VW then intelligently determines how to display the object depending on the view. This approach could support how users currently use classes. So essentially, "materials" is an additional feature/function of a class, which a user initiates depending on the need.

But in developing materials, you also need to think about how it will work with live sections, as these two features are twins IMO.

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Hi Jim,

So after a fair bit of time for the concept to sink in and hopefully be subject to some in-house development.

 

How do you see Materials handling different "states'  for Existing, New and Removed/Demolished?

 

Will we need 3 versions of the same or will each material a number of states procedurally?

Could a material know to tone down line-weight, Plan/Section fill to black or dark, Turn off the surface hatch when existing not new?

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11 hours ago, Matt Overton said:

Hi Jim,

So after a fair bit of time for the concept to sink in and hopefully be subject to some in-house development.

 

How do you see Materials handling different "states'  for Existing, New and Removed/Demolished?

 

Will we need 3 versions of the same or will each material a number of states procedurally?

Could a material know to tone down line-weight, Plan/Section fill to black or dark, Turn off the surface hatch when existing not new?

That seems like it would be handled by classes.  Maybe New is the default but then have class overrides for existing and demo.

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fitting together items that are not made to go together...do Insert-a-tees work with DR11 pipe or only SDR35? so this little config took some time to work out & and I'm still not sure...this is not machine drawing (ie Onshape) and its not Architectural (using lines to represent pipe CL) this is somewhere in between...

 

"It is the middle ground between light and shadow, ... This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone."

 

everything is going to be about BOM...clients are going to want a shopping list...

 

and this, the request for a BOM will change your world.

 

(the purpose of this post is that Material & Products need to work with a BOM. while material, like PVC can be universal, Products in 3d are very hard to come by.  You can not call up a pipe manufacture and ask for a 3d model of their pipe that has a bell end.)

 

1470982703_ScreenShot2018-12-31at3_38_10PM.thumb.png.a21da8584567063a5f90d6deaf0ac44e.png

Edited by digitalcarbon
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i read the above posts and there is a very simple way of doing this Materials thing.

 

1. separate materials from products.

(a material is PVC, wood etc. Products are Pipe SDR35 15" & Plywood 0.75x4x8 CDX)

 

2. all products, like a 4x8 sheet of plywood, starts out as a symbol.

3. that symbol get tagged as a "Product"

 

 

4. this Product ie Plywood 0.75x4x8 CDX can be cut and modified in anyway,  but the source symbol stays the same.

 

this means that if you had 50 sheets of Plywood 0.75x4x8 CDX and had 50 different hole patterns cut into each sheet and then realized that you had a mistake in your source product (pretend its 0.70" thick) all you would need to do is update the source product to 0.75 and all your 50 sheet would update...

 

now when you do a BOM then the computer counts how many Products you have viewing the 50 unique parts as a single Product  ie Plywood 0.75x4x8 CDX but 50 pieces...

 

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now these material & products are cloud based and can be made public or not...at any rate the names will be made public so when you make some plywood and type in Plywood a list of all the Plywood product names pop up as a suggestion (see example below)  

 

in OpenBOM when I wish to create a new column and type in a name it shows me what others have typed in...this way I may find a more suitable name than the one I was originally thinking of...

 

424326259_ScreenShot2018-12-31at4_22_46PM.thumb.png.8d4dbca0dad9abcb9a172b1d665cddf7.png

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so i would be happy to share my Product library with everyone, BUT...

 

1. we would all have to ref the same Materials.  this means that if I make SDR35 Pipe with a bell housing and give it a material of PVC Green (that is the way it comes  green and not white) then we all ref the same PVC Material data base which of course is cloud based at VW HQ.

On a side note...a materials data base really seems to be a Google type of thing. In that the world needs a master Database Library that everyone can ref

 

 

2. no one can mess with my Product Symbols that I share...we would have 5 star ratings and a way to leave comments on a Products...

 

1078523311_PipeSDR35.thumb.jpeg.096c869eaaca15fc70c3c6a13a571579.jpeg

 

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so I'm ready to do this now...instead of VW spending lots of time developing things and then releasing a big new thing why not contact me and we will work out baby steps in the real world.

 

the purpose is not just to create a clean 3d model but also to produce clean BOMs

 

I understand that people like to show fancy renderings to wow people but the "how much does it cost?" is the very next question that they ask....and we have 0 ability on that front...if we could at least have an accurate BOM then we can at least say "here are the Products for the project...we will need a contractor to generate costs"

Edited by digitalcarbon
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so here we have a mythical Product Symbol.  the 3 colored circles are 3 holes that need to be drilled in on site (the blower is an off the shelf item from Grainger)...so after placing the Product Symbol I can then cut some holes in it w/o the need to make 3 different symbols...

 

also note the coloring of the blower...very simple. carbon steel, ss & rubber...I do not need a photo realistic materials system...

maybe start with generic materials...maybe call it "Paint" this way the original Material can have the true color for @Luis M Ruiz type renderings... but for my purposes I can "paint" it so my carbon steel always looks like what you see in Open GL whereas you may want to "paint" it a different color. "Painting" does not affect the original Material color/texture

 

23-33 31 13 Blower.vwx

 

 

1073342628_ScreenShot2019-01-01at2_58_55PM.thumb.png.0f2a380911057b4d6e7dcde83ded3aa6.png

 

 

 

 

Edited by digitalcarbon
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here is another example of symbols that represent a product but need the ability to cut out holes in different spots...

but when doing the BOM we need to keep the symbols intact so we can count them...

 

So for starters, nothing fancy...just need to subtract solids from symbols and we could have all our products just be symbols for now...

 

1624821979_ScreenShot2019-04-30at10_26_59AM.thumb.png.44dd355a1575e4a97aee94ba5f35b832.png

 

Drop-inlet-36-x-36-plan-profile-d493.thumb.jpg.93d2e76d2246bc75bd1ebc66a5263604.jpg

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