Just started playing around with the new Compound Slab tool. This is shaping up to be quite a promising tool. Billed as an update of the old Triforma Forms-based Slab, it seems to work better with Constraints which is great. Rumour is that the oldish Triforma Morph Form based Roofs and old stalwart Walls are next in line. It would be good to be able to form persistent L-T and mitred joins between Slabs and Walls and Roofs in future, something Triforma's estranged cousin BricsCAD BIM can already do.
The old Triforma slab was very flexible but was not much of team player, requiring a lot of manual tweaking. The coder did not really have to understand how the real life object that the tool was mimicking needed to behave. The new Compound Slab seems to have taken a more tailored approach and tries to automate a particular use case. I think that this is a good starting point, but there needs to an exit strategy for tools that are developed this way.
Covering even 90% of the use cases will still be a problem (the CS tool only covers maybe 20%). There should be a way to 'drop' the CS to its components without losing too much of its relationship, F&P, materials, DGS etc assignments. CS seems to be making the same mistake the Compound Walls, which added a 'guide line' object to store the group info... belatedly and half heartedly.
For example, the edge setback is a nice touch. But, in reality, you will find that some edges will need them, some won't and some will require different thicknesses. What happens when you punch a hole in the CS for slab penetrations, columns etc. Fire stopping set backs will be different to perimeter 'randstreifen' movement gaps. Not all bounding elements are vertical.The new parametrics are great... for the first pass.
Typical for screeds to be sloped to falls in wet WC, shower and kitchen type areas. R*vit had to add all kinds of clumsy tools to its slabs to handle this. CS seems to ignore this altogether? Over the course of the design, you need to let the modify the components without losing the classification, F&P etc info... while preserving certain parametric controls like thicknesses which willl be good to be able to bulk edit.
Geometric flexibility
As mentioned, the old Triforma Form tools are quite flexible. A 'slab' could be vertical or sloping. But, the Triforma APIs seem to fallen into maintenance mode after the Bricsys split? And never really interacted very well with Mstn regular solids, constraints tools. Rewriting using Mstn APIs is long overdue. But this should be done with 'extreme modeling' XM 2.0 in mind. Mstn was the tool of choice over a lot of other apps including R*vit, ArchiCAD etc because it could model just about anything... albeit not parametrically.
So, it is worrying to see how badly the CS tool deals with sloped slabs.
The Compound Slab Direction / Angle parameter seems to be a structural parameter to do with the way the slab spans. This is a bit silly for screeds and floor covering build ups. If this is included because one of the slabs could be structural then this needs to be made clear in the Modify Properties panel which has a single parameter for all the component slabs. This parameter should be about what direction the component slabs are extruded: vertical or an angle from the vertical. The old Triforma slabs do a much better job here. Hopefully to be corrected in U10.... I think this will definitely be required for roof modeling.
Flooring: need to look beyond the residential market. It would be good to be able to extrude meshes and facetted shapes. This will be much more the norm that flat / level floor buildups in small resi or BoH rooms. Sure, I can see starting with something simple is the 'Agile' way, but the main event awaits.
Mstn is well placed to deal with hard landscaping / paving where the paving plane is inevitably facetted to allow for falls / drainage, drop kerbs etc. Mstn's slope thematic Display Style is still pretty unique; its CAD orientation is much better suited to coordinating with site surveys and 2d info.
Compound Slab - sloped.dgn
Another thing about the compound slabs that puzzles me: Can I edit the slab composition after it has been placed? Or is it only layer-by-layer?
Also to "copy" the slab settings when placing a new slab. I know I can save and recall the compound slab settings. But what if I forgot to save? I don't see a way to retrieve the settings. For almost any other building component I can "Alt+Select" to take over the properties ... For the compound slab that does work to take over the properties, but not the slab composition.
Hello Johan,
Johan De Cock said:Can I edit the slab composition after it has been placed? Or is it only layer-by-layer?
Yes you can definitely do that. You can either select the whole compound slab and then do modify property that way all the layer would be listed in the dialog.
Or you can select the layer you want to edit and then click on the modify then it will let you edit that layer.
Regards,Alifur
Hmm, I think it's a bit confusing that it doesn't show the same window as where to set the compound slab in the first place. But I'll probably get used to it.
The downside is that it is not possible to "create similar" slab by using the "Alt+Select" when in the CS placement tool.
I experimented a bit more with this. I guess it's not too bad once you get used to it. Am I correct in assuming that the way it is placed right now each layer of the compound slab is a separate "element" and that they are somehow linked together? Contrary to the compound walls that are one Element for the assembly and rather some kind of "parts" for the separate layers?
Anyway, what I really want to ask. When placing a slab we have multiple placement options "Core Top/Bottom", "Assembly Top/Bottom". It's great! It looks like the "Base region" is used as a placement plane and then the different layers are aligned to that base region depending on the placement setting.