Thick Red Lines in FormIt

[Anonymous]

 I'm an architecture student experimenting with FormIt, when making a basic massing model for a project I was working on and playing around with the tools and features in FormIt I noticed that the lines I was drawing were now showing as thicker and red. Does anyone know what this means?

https://imgur.com/a/55W0F Is an example of what I mean

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

This is just a visual setting that you have in Formit.

If you head over to your "Visual Styles" icon, then over to your "Edge's" tab, you will find a color option.

It looks like yours is set to red, simply change this color to black, and that should take care of the issue.

I hope this helps!

Mitch

[josh.goldstein]

Hi grannybaps,

This is a diagnostic feature called Identify Watertight Issues. It is intended to show non-manifold edges (edges that are not part of a watertight solid) so that you can clean up your FormIt model, so it works best for solid operations or for downstream workflows, like sending to Revit or a 3D printer, where geometry should be solid and watertight.

If you're using FormIt Web or Windows, you can toggle this diagnostic on/off by using shortcut DW. Otherwise, you can disable it in Visual Styles > Diagnostics on all platforms:

You should try to model using watertight solids in FormIt as much as possible - like extruding surfaces into solids and using Shell on the solid to create walls. It's probably best to check in with this Display Watertight feature from time to time, to ensure all your geometry is solid. In your screenshot, it looks like you're missing the top face/cap in the vertical "walls", which causes all the top edges to become non-manifold.

You can fix this by re-drawing a line over one of those top edges to get that top surface to draw and close the solid. You can also select one of the edges and try using our Cover tool which will try to cap that solid automatically - select the edge and hit shortcut CV, or find it in the toolbar:

Although you can "hide" these issues by turning off the diagnostic, it might be best to clean up the model before you move on, if you want to use advanced modeling functionality (boolean Join/Cut, Offset, Shell, Cover...) and produce resilient models in FormIt, or if you plan to send the geometry to another app later.

Hope this helps.