automatic room finish schedule...fantasy???

[kallen-altus]

how close is autocad architecture to being able to have a space extract finish information from its defining walls?  change a wall from cmu to stud/gyp and the finish schedule automatically updates.  just curious.  in my mind i see a location anchor (like that for doors) that has four "tails" to it - N,S,E,W.  stretch these to the anchored walls and it sees which wall component is at the wall face (maybe that component can have an abbreviation like GB and finish abbreviation like PT - maybe it's driven by the material assignment???)

that would be fantastical....

[David_W_Koch]

I have no idea what new things are planned for the program, but I could see possibly being able to get something similar to what you describe for associative Spaces, since they already have a "connection" to the bounding Walls.  One thing that would need to happen is that there would need to be Property Data access to the individual Wall components of a Wall, and a way to get the data for the component that is "closest" to the Space.  You could then use a Material Property Definition to get at the material of that closest component.

Of course, then people will want to be able to schedule the exact color/finish as well.  It would be nice to have a way to override a material property at the object-level, so that you do not need a Material Definition and a separate Wall style for every combination of finishes and colors.  For example, painted GWB is a common finish, and many projects have ten or more different paint colors.  If any given color on one side of a Wall could be paired with any of the other colors, you would quickly have far more Wall Styles than I would want to manage (and then multiply that by the number of different GWB Wall types you have).

I am also not certain that I would want to break up corridor Walls into short, room-length segments in cases where the finish on the room side varies from room to room.  But if it made finish plans easier, perhaps once the plan is "set" and there are not likely to be major changes, I might buy into doing that if the finish plans then became "automatic".  (You would still have a lot of work to do to get the correct data on the Walls.)

Additional things that would have to be considered and accommodated:

• Not all designs feature rectangular Spaces; the system would need to allow for more than just four Walls.
• You can define Walls with stacked components, so there could be more than one component that is "closest" to the Space for a given Wall.  Some means would be needed to deal with that.
• Some way to process the list of gathered finishes would be needed, and a means of displaying it in tags and schedule tables would be needed.  A matrix column could show all of the Wall finishes in a Space, but would not tell you which Walls get which finish, where there are more than one.  My firm's current standard is to list finishes in a tag in each Space, so a list of the finishes, separated by commas, would be useful to us.  It would be really great if multiple instances of the same finish were only reported once in that list.
• It would be great if you could tag a Wall and get the "closest" finish designation to appear in the tag.  This would provide an efficient way to call out accent walls.  If the finish list indicated "P3, P7" and one Wall was called out as an accent color of "P7", it would be understood that the other Walls were "P3".

[kallen-altus]

you bring up some very good points.  i believe that you start with the primary associations (space to wall,  wall component to material assignment) and build from there.  wall components could be assigned materials and finish designations or this could be assigned by the material (in the same manner as display data for a wall component.)  i would guess that industry standard is a north-south-east-west approach to finish schedules but that could be a bad assumption.

it doesn't seem like it would be that far off based on the existing program structure but i'm not a programmer - it could be the biggest nightmare ever from a programming standpoint.  maybe we'll see something down the road.