Graphic Override Improvements
Performance is always in the focus in Archicad and not just the software’s speed what matters (like, how long it takes to load a View or a Layout) but also the workflow performance as well. It does matter how many clicks you have something done.
With this mindset, we improved Graphic Overrides and now RGB colors can be selected for Background Fill Pens and 3D surfaces in Graphic Override rules. This way you do not have to create separate pens and surfaces with a certain color that you would like to use to highlight elements. You can get it done in one interface without any further things to do, thus significantly reduce the number of clicks and you can avoid the creation of unnecessary attributes.
Let’s see it in action!
In this 3D view we want to highlight some elements according on their Fire Resistance Rating. But we don’t want it just in the 3D, we would like to use the same colors on Floor plan - exactly the way we see them in the 3D view. As you can see there are 2 new options in the Graphic Override rule dialog. I don’t have to pick a Surface and Pen, but I can use the Operating System’s color picker to use an RGB color. Let’s pick a red color for the elements with 120min Fire Resistance Rating. Okay, now my 3D looks okay, so let’s see what happened on the Floor plan. Since I used the background Fill type and the color, the same RGB colors are reflected here are well. As a next step in a future Archicad update we plan to continue this development to add a transparency option besides the RGB colors.
I think it’s plain to see how this can save time and effort for all Archicad users, not just designers but engineers or anyone who works with Graphic Overrides.
With this improvement, Graphic overrides became more flexible than ever, saving everyone lots of clicks, no matter if you check the quality of your own work or if you prepare a nice visualization for a client’s presentation. It helps keeping views consistent across the whole project with no workarounds