Paint tool renders material volume inaccurate

[heterarch]

I'm surprised that I couldn't find a post about this here, but let me know if I missed it...

When you use the paint by face tool, the resulting scheduled material volume gets junked.  I can see how this would be reasonable in a case where you split the face of a wall or something similar, and paint a different materiality on it - since then the volume of the overall piece is no longer truly 100% the material be quantified.  However, if you are using the paint tool to more literally "paint", as in the wall or object being painted remains the same material as the un-painted faces, but you simply want a different surface representation, then it would be very useful if the material volume calculation still gave you the volume of the object as dictated by the object-level material.

For instance, I'm using the paint tool in creating families that represent individual pieces of stone in a project, which are then laid out for shop drawings and fabrication tickets.  One important piece of information is what faces of stone are "covered" vs which are "uncovered" (finished/unfinished).  The overall object is a single piece of stone, obviously the same material, but certain faces need to be shown differently depending on whether or not they're covered.  It works great except for the "material volume" calculation in schedules - which is unfortunate because without that information we can't compare the original stone block volume to the finished stone piece volume, which gives us the net amount of 'wasted' or 'lost' stone, as well as the final weight of the stone, which helps organize the loading of the stone on trucks to be sent to the job site.

Am I missing something here, or are we going to just have to throw out the paint tool, and use anno hatches (like cavemen.. : ) ?

[loboarch]

Maybe i am not completly understanding the problem, but a family with a "painted" face will still report the volume of the element.  Here is an image of a stone with one painted face and the corresponding schedule.  I am seeing the full volume of the stone reported along side a 0 volume line for the painted face.

[heterarch]

Lobo,

That's mostly correct, which causes its own problems.  One can exclude from a particular schedule a particular Material that has been applied by paint to the family, but then, in more complicated schedules where several other things are already being filtered out for one reason or another, you run out of "room" to add a filter out "xxxx material"...  Besides that, I've found that when more than one face on an RFA is painted, or especially if a face is split and one part of the face is painted and the other isn't, there can be unpredictable results, sometimes including the ORIGINAL material reporting as '0', and the painted material for some reason reporting the total volume...