AECOsim BD Roof Builder - Holes

Mark: penetrations do work, but you'll need to crank up the sense distance in the DG dialog.  Also, I have found ( and have put in a SR) that the roof element only supports one single penetration.  That isn't too helpful to me...

Try these tools (from another forum that we're not supposed to link to):

"Cut Solid by Curves proves vital far too often in 'old' ABD because of the unco-operative deficiencies, fussiness and weird results of the main ABD modification tools.

So also does Subtract Solids get heavily resorted to; and so also would Trim Solids and especially the Push-Pull tool, if these weren't arbitrarily (lazily, it seems) deemed illegal on BD Solids.

Continually using these MS tools alongside BD tools, leads me to seek removal of the lazy demarcations between BD and MS, between Forms and Solids, between MS tools that work in BD and the ones that inexplicably don't.

Also adding to this desire to unify, is the arbitrary way that some ABD tools result in BD history-based Features and some don't; the cumbersome way of accessing BD Features; that BD Features appear to be quite different from 'new' MS Features, which are different again from 'old' MS Features (which were advertised as being abandoned - but they still seem to be here)."

Thanks Guys.

@Shawn, I tried penetrations both with our workspace and out of the box and I could not get them to work.  The message center even states the "Element is not valid for tool". I did a bit more testing and found that the Construct Opening tool does work (Form Modeling Task Tab > Last tool in Manipulate Features).  It also allows multiple openings.  For novice users I would suggest reading the help as there are few accept/reset steps involved with selecting the opening and form.

@fostertom, I tried most of the tools you mentioned first.  The Construct Opening tool was the last one I was going to try.

Thanks again.

@Mark, here's the image of what I did with a roof element and a penetration.  You can check the DGN file attached as well.  HTH,