How do I apply a solid fill to AEC doors?

[leewh246]

I am trying to create an AEC Door Style with a solid fill to distinguish new doors from existing doors in a remodel project. It appears that the only way set a solid fill is to create a Material with a solid hatch. Doing this, the Door Style does not display the solid hatch in the Top (Plan) View but if I make surface hatch visible, the solid hatch does appear in an isometric view. I also created a second Material with the ANSI31 pattern and it also did not display in Plan View but creating that new Material, changed the Material with the solid hatch to ANSI31, even though the two Materials have different names. Why does that happen?

Is this question and other similar questions best posted to the Architecture Customization Forum or the Architecture Forum?

[David_W_Koch]

You are customizing, so this forum is fine.  I  am walking home in the rain right now, so a detailed answer will have to wait.   The short answer is that the Plan Display Representation for Doors is linework, so there is nothing on which a material could show.  (Let me verify that when I am in front of ACA.)

You can get a solid fill by adding a custom display block.  I can explain how to do that when I am in front of ACA.

[leewh246]

Your reply " the Plan Display Representation for Doors is linework, so there is nothing on which a material could show" is what I have found but I hoped I was missing something. I am not familiar with "a custom display block". Currently I am applying a solid hatch to the new doors.  I discovered that I cannot apply the hatch by selecting the Door Object but I can apply individual hatches by selecting a point inside each door component.

Just for your information; I have cleaned up my new Wall Styles per your comments in my last post. I wanted to do some fine tuning before I started using them but I got busy with a new remodel project and needed the new Style for existing walls to remain and also putting that Style on a demotion layer with dashed lines for walls to be removed.  I have also used what I learned from that last post to create additional Walls Styles new Door and Window Styles as needed for this new project. For the new Wall Styles, I will probably post a new question regarding wall cleanups. I do not want existing walls, demolition walls and new walls to merge but instead display a solid line where they meet. I have found some crude solutions for this but it gets tricky when all three wall types meet or the length of a segment is very short. I will save this for a future discussion.

[David_W_Koch · Accepted solution]

I can answer the clean-up question from memory:  Set up Wall Cleanup Group Definitions for each subset of Walls that you want to have cleanup with each other but not with other Walls.  So you can have a New Construction Wall Cleanup Group, a Demolition Wall Cleanup Group, and an Existing-to-Remain Wall Cleanup Group.

There are not a lot of settings for a Wall Cleanup Group Definition.  Besides the name, you can specify whether the group allows Wall Cleanup between host and externally referenced drawings (which also affect cleanup between externally referenced drawings) and whether or not objects (like Doors and Windows) that are anchored to a Wall in other Cleanup Groups can be added, moved, or copied to Walls in this Group.

One note - continuous Walls in different Cleanup Groups will just cross over each other, as the horizontal Wall and the vertical Wall at the left of the image above.  At the other places where vertical Walls stop at the horizontal Wall, the vertical Walls are two separate Walls, drawn to the face of the horizontal Wall.

You set the Cleanup Group of a Wall on the Properties palette, on the Design tab, under the BASIC category, General Subcategory.  You can select multiple Walls and set this value for all of them in one operation, if desired.  If you always want a Wall of a particular Wall Style to start out in a specific Wall Cleanup Group and you use a Tool Palette Tool to start the Wall Add command for Walls of that style, you can specify the desired Wall Cleanup Group in the tool properties.

[David_W_Koch]

Door Panel in Plan:  A quick test, setting the Panel component of a Door Style to display "By Material" and then assigning a material with unique colors for the Plan Linework and Plan Hatch components of the Material Definition, and Solid Fill as the Plan Hatch Pattern showed the Plan Linework color but not the Plan Hatch.

I believe my previous supposition that the components of a Door in a Plan view are only linework is correct.

[David_W_Koch]

As I work through this, I am reminded that for the Plan Display Configurations, you can only add Custom Blocks to the Frame component.  That limits the options for having a block representing a Door Panel scale automatically to changes in the Door Width, if you want to show the Door Panel in any position other than closed.

I will put together an example of what can be done, and you can decide if it works for you.  If precise sizing of the panel thickness is important, you will need to have a separate style and Custom Block for every Door width you need.  (And if you need the panel at angles other than 90 degrees, each of those will need to be a separate Door Style with a separate Custom Block, for each width, also.)

[David_W_Koch · Accepted solution]

Here is one way to get a solid Door Panel.  I have turned off the out-of-the-box Panel and Swing Components, leaving only the Frame component on.  For the sake of understanding what the Custom View Block is providing, I set that component to Color 200 (purple).  You could set it to ByBlock and it will pick up the color of the Door (which could be By Layer) and look the same as the Frame component.  (All of the other attributes can also be set for the Custom Block.

I left an instance of the Custom Block (DoorPanel_P) in the drawing file.  It is "small" as it is set up as a unit block, with the width of the Door being represented by one unit in the block.  The arc for the swing has a one-unit radius.  The rectangle is one unit in the panel width direction (perpendicular to the host Wall).  The rectangle is set up for a 3'-0" wide door, so the rectangle "thickness" is 7/144" (1.75" divided by 3'-0").

This block is set up to show the panel at 90 degrees open.  There is a polyline rectangle, a solid hatch, and an arc for the swing.  All components are drawn on Layer 0 and have ByBlock color, linetype, plot style, and lineweight.  That allows them to display/plot per the settings assigned to the Custom Block component.

The Custom Block is added to the Plan Display Representation [DR] for Doors, by setting a Door Style Override for that DR.  Edit the override.  On the Other tab, in the Custom Block Display area, select the Add button.  (To make changes in the future, select the Custom Block in the list box and chose the Edit button.)

Here are the settings I used for the DoorPanel_P block.

The unit block is placed at the inside of the Frame Component (Component section, bottom left).  My Doors are measured to the inside of the frame, so scaling by the Width uses the nominal Door Panel width.  The Lock XY Ratio toggle is checked so that the unit block is scaled in both the X and Y directions.

The insertion point is at the Left/Back/Bottom of the Door Frame, with no insertion offset.

Once a Custom Block is added, it appears as a Display Component on the Layer/Color/Linetype tab, and settings you make here will be respected by elements within the Custom Block that are on Layer 0 with ByBlock attributes.

You can see the Color 200 setting here on DoorPanel_P.  I would typically change that back to BYBLOCK so that it looks like the other components, once I am certain it is behaving as expected.

As previously noted, this only works precisely for Doors that are 3'-0" wide.  Wider or narrower Doors will have a different panel thickness than the designed 1.75" because wider Doors are scaling up by more than 36 and narrower doors are scaling up by less than 36.  You can see that in the example instances I put in the drawing.

I have attached the drawing file that generated the graphics above so you can see it live.  Post back with any questions you have; the above is a quick explanation rather than a step-by-step.

[leewh246]

A Cleanup Group is what I needed and was an easy solution. Thanks.

[leewh246]

The residential remodel project I wanted solid door fills for has many door types, hinged, sliding, bi-fold and more. These doors have many different sizes and some may end up with different swing angles than other doors of the same type. Your solution would require numerous Custom Blocks and may a bit more complex and time consuming than I want to get into right now. I am assuming a 3-panel sliding door may be a bit trickier than a standard hinged door. I will be leaving for the holidays soon and will look into this more when I get back in January. I do understand the process as you explained it and do have experience creating similar scalable blocks.

[David_W_Koch]

Enjoy your holiday break!

It certainly is not ideal.  I wish the Plan display representation could associate a custom block with the Panel component, not just the Frame.  If it were me, I would consider whether another way to distinguish new doors from existing-to-remain ones would be acceptable.  My office half-tones existing items, and we also show existing doors open to 45 degrees, rather than the 90 degrees used for new construction doors.