Changing the fabric work plane

[helgiBDNE6]

When working with fabrics, the external face of the wall seems to be the standard face for adding new fabric.  Is there any way to change this?

The reason this is an issue is that when working with sandwich walls, there may be a surface change on the external side (e.g. 20 mm thinning), which causes there to be no fabrics anywhere in the wall within that area, i.e. no fabrics in the structural wall (or anywhere else for that matter) because there is no wall on the face that the fabrics are being added to.

So far I've tried defining a different face by setting the work plane as something other than the front face of the wall, but to no avail.

Best solution I have is to split wall into parts and then add the fabric to the structural part itself.  But that still leaves the cover part without fabrics where it's been thinned.

Just in case, by thinned I mean 20 mm have been aken fro mthe cover, but retaining the concrete thickness.

[Extraneous · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately the Rebar fabris doesn't see the layers in sandwitch walls. But based on my experience I strongly not recomment you to use multy-layer wall including structural and non-structural layers. Make it as different walls: a separate single-layer wall for structural wall and two separate walls for interior and exterior sides. It's more useful for modeling (you don't need to split the entire wall if only the finishing layer is changed), reinforcing (put the fabric in the reauired layers) and making drawings (you can hide finishing layers and sow only structural, the native function for this apperared only in R2023).

Moreover, I recommend you to consider another option: not to create fabrics at all. The area of your rebar fabrics is the area of layer in the wall. If you need to count up all the fabrics you can simply use the "Area" from the wall. And if you need to show the fabric on your sections and fragments you can simply use 2D elements. 

Of course it's an extravagant advice, but it's the way how I counted the rebar fabrics. I think it's over-detailing if you create all the 3D-fabrics, because it's, we know, not so important element of the building. This workaround will be able to save much of your lifetime.

[helgiBDNE6]

Dear Extraneous,

please excuse my extremely late reply.  I never received notification via mail and too new on the site to realize there was a response.  Thank you for taking the time.

Normally, I wouldn't bother with the non-structural layers, but in this case we are preparing the fabrication drawings for sandwich walls to the manufacturer.  So we need far more details than we would normally bother with.  But I understand your point and by using area instead of actually placing Fabrics, I can get a close enough estimate for the weight of the fabrics for the manufacturer to be able to make his estimates.  I'll still need to show something in sections, etc.

However, it would be nice to be able to select either the interior or exterior face of the wall as the face reference, irrelevant of the different layers.  There is an option to select Internal or External, but it doesn't change that it uses the external face as the reference.

Anyway, thanks again for your time. 🙂