Advice requested

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pmullans
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Advice requested

Post by pmullans »

Hello,
I wonder if you would be kind enough to comment? I’ve been using freecad for about two weeks, and I’ve managed to do a design for a house+conservatory which I’m quite pleased with, but I’m having some serious problems. I’m using v0.19 with Mac OS Monterey on a Mac Mini M1.
Mainly, I find that, for example, if I create a window and put it in a wall, it may go really well, but I often find that suddenly half my objects just disapear. No amount of ‘recomputing’ will get them back.
Sometimes they jump around, so a wall that was on one side will move several metres or a window that was in a wall will now appear five metres away.
I have to back up every couple of minutes to avoid losing work.
Is there something fundamental that I’m doing wrong? Is the program just flaky? Am I just too old to be doing this? Should I consider retiring to a care home?
Any comments would really be appreciated.
Thanks, Peter
TheMarkster
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Re: Advice requested

Post by TheMarkster »

Could be the dreaded topological naming problem.
pmullans
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Re: Advice requested

Post by pmullans »

Thanks.
I doubt that it's the TNP, although I don't know enough about it to be sure.

It can happen if I have 200 elements on the page, or it might happen if I have just 2. For example, I might have a wall and a window, with nothing else. I might try to rotate the window with the rotate tool in the BIM workbench, and the wall might disappear!

It would be interesting to know if others have experienced this, or maybe I have some basic misunderstanding of the prog.
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onekk
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Re: Advice requested

Post by onekk »

Without a proper file, it is difficult to say what is wrong.

BIM is rather complex, and I'm not an expert, but without a file posted no expert could guess what you have done.

Plus take in account that walls have been recently modified in some part, so if you have used some old documentation around to learn how to create them maybe, you have used some old "kept only for compatibility" code or followed a wrong "building method".

If I remember well there are some new tutorial around in the Arch part of this forum, about walls, windows and doors, recent mean not much old that 1 year or slightly more.

Regards

Carlo D.
GitHub page: https://github.com/onekk/freecad-doc.
- In deep articles on FreeCAD.
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Kunda1
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Re: Advice requested

Post by Kunda1 »

Moved to Arch, Draft and BIM subforum
Alone you go faster. Together we go farther
Please mark thread [Solved]
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paullee
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Re: Advice requested

Post by paullee »

Yes, please post the model file and the steps to reproduce the problem so experts here may have a look :)
pmullans
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Re: Advice requested

Post by pmullans »

Good point Paul, here’s an example:

This is just a training file. I was following the BIM tutorial. I made a wall along the x-axis and put a door in it. No problem.
I made another wall at an angle of 30deg to the x-axis and followed the instructions, but this time the door refuses to go in the wall, but remains at an angle to it, even though I’ve changed the working plane to match that of the wall surface.

So I tried rotating the door to the same angle as the wall and then using the “+” command. This failed very many times, but then suddenly it worked!
So I placed a couple of doors and windows successfully, by rotating them to match the angle of the wall.

Then I tried to rotate the wall and it disappeared.
Then I tried to move it, and the wall moved a long way, but the windows/doors only moved a short distance.
Then I tried to rotate it and the wall disappeared but the windows/doors moved some distance away.
Then I tried making a compound of the wall+doors and moving the whole thing, but the wall disappeared and the doors moved some distance away.

I was working on this file for about six hours, because every thing I did resulted in some error or a crash. For example, I placed windows in a wall, and a few minutes later I would get an error saying the sketch was over-constrained (these were all standard items from the library - I didn’t edit them at all).

So I'm really at a loss as to what to do...I've re-installed the prog several times, but that hasn't helped.
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Tests2.FCStd
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paullee
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Re: Advice requested

Post by paullee »

pmullans wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 9:27 pm This is just a training file. I was following the BIM tutorial. I made a wall along the x-axis and put a door in it. No problem.
So I tried rotating the door to the same angle as the wall and then using the “+” command. This failed very many times, but then suddenly it worked!
...
Before BIM WB experts would comment, just a few quick suggestions rather then point to point resolving the exact problem :)
  1. follow the BIM tutorial, @yorik youtube video and get acquaint to the suggested workflow first
  2. there are other worflows you can later explore
  3. try click 'recompute' button if nothing happened after an action, e.g. opening in wall do not follow when a window is moved
  4. seems there are bug reports Draft Move does not move Arch Objects correctly (there are attributes like Move with Host etc. which makes thing complicated), personally I do not use Draft Move at all
  5. instead of '+' command, just find the 'host' attribute in the Window object, and click it and select the target Wall for it to make an opening automatically
  6. not suggesting to make compound for this usecase
BTW, your model seems okay. As I do not like using Draft Move, I am experimenting a workbench to help placing Window in Wall object parametrically and hopefully more intuitively, it is an experiment and hope you may later try and find it helpful.

Good luck at the moment :D
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Roy_043
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Re: Advice requested

Post by Roy_043 »

pmullans wrote: Tue Jan 11, 2022 9:27 pm Then I tried
We really need a detailed scenario. I do not know where the glass door comes from, but AFAIK it is not a standard door.
pmullans
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Re: Advice requested

Post by pmullans »

Thanks, Roy.
I might be making this harder than it should be...the file was just a test file where I put up some walls and stuck some doors/windows into them and then played about with it. All the elements are from the library and none has been edited by me. The glass door is just a door I took at random from the parts library.
My point is that the file (and all the other files I've been working with) behaves in a strange, erratic way. When I make changes to the positions of doors/windows, things jump around, or the program crashes.
I've since seen some posts by Regis and others, which suggest that the whole business of adding doors/windows is a lot more difficult than I had thought! It surprises me that nobody else apparently has experienced the instability that I'm having, so I'm wondering if there is some problem with the installation of the prog, or maybe my OS..? (I'm using a Mac Mini M1 with OS Monterey).
It might be that it's just much harder than I thought, but if nobody else is having similar problems, then either nobody is putting windows/doors into walls and expecting to be able to move them around, or there's something wrong with my setup or my skill level, or...?
Anyway, I'd like to say thanks for the comments, and I'll just keep plugging away and keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. :idea:
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