Search elements by material

davide445
davide445
in BricsCAD BIM

Got a IFC model with 95 materials and 324 blocks.
Wanting to render it in realtime I need to map the materials to their components at least for the architectural exterior part, so to understand if the specific material is relevant for my scope.
Didn't find a way to select a material and highlight in 2D and 3D view all the components using this specific material, pardon me for being really basic.

Comments

  • Michael Mayer
    Michael Mayer

    I hoped it could be done by Structure Panel and custom sorting.
    It failed for me.

    You could try by sorting for IFC Materials.
    That didn't work for me with the Materials included in Compositions.
    Searching for Visualization-Materials either.
    Maybe that would work for Materials directly assigned to Objects.
    (I assign mainly by Layer only, or from Compositions.

    Looks like the whole Material System doesn't get much love in general.
    Bricscad does export it Materials but does not seem to read them when
    opening DWG exports.

    But if you export FBX,
    Materials from Composition Plies stay assigned to all Objects.
    So in Modo, I could select all Faces of a special Material and dump them
    into a single Meshe Item.
    Tedious though if you have 3 digit # of Materials and second because
    Materials lose their naming.

  • davide445
    davide445

    Hi Michael
    sorry for the delay I was traveling and need to rebuild my PC after the relocation to holiday location.
    About selecting by material I tried also with QuickSelect but seems it recognize only BC materials and not imported from DWG.
    Another approach: there is any script or plugin that will enable to select by material? Or also by geometry (as the Select Similar but more strict in his work in evaluating two components that need to have exactly the same geometry).
    In 3ds max I can use this script http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/select-similar-objects to select objects using various parameters, needing someting similar in BricsCAD (want to migrate my 3d work in Linux and 3dsmax it's not available on Linux).
    Noticing you are using Modo, is working well with DWG files?

  • Michael Mayer
    Michael Mayer

    @davide445 said:
    Hi Michael
    Noticing you are using Modo, is working well with DWG files?

    Not at all.
    I have a DWG importer which brings in Geometry and Material
    Assignments in fine.
    Like correct Face Normals, even translates ACIS Geometry.
    Unfortunately non-welded separate Faces and all Naming or
    Hierarchy gets lost.
    So I can't do much with it in Modo, beside manually separating
    Geometry by Materials. So for static, kind of referenced Data
    only.
    (Basically what Bricscad's FBX does.
    Except that at least Objects have welded Faces)

    No when bringing DWG to Modo, I need a 3rd Converter App.
    In my case I use Vectorworks to bring DWGs in, do all organization
    including some pre-visualzation work and finally have a 98% lossless
    import into Modo or any other 3D package.

    I have no clue about any scripting.
    But I am a bit jealous about 3DSMax, which I used until 12 years ago.
    Since bought by Autodesk, DWG support, including Layers was
    great of course.

  • davide445
    davide445
    Vectorworks it's out of the possibilities for this project, good enough I discovered BricsCAD for dealing with cad formats.
    For conversion there is any other suggestion you know apart 3dsmax or Vectorworks?
    Regarding the selection topics I read about Express Tools (available only for Windows :-( ) did you ever used it?
  • Michael Mayer
    Michael Mayer

    No, never tried Express Tools because so far I was Mac only.
    As I don't like Windows much beside that 3D Apps run better
    I am more ambitious about Bricscad on Linux.

    I also played with Quick Select as it looked promising.
    That does not really select/sort by the Materials assigned to Objects,
    but those assigned directly "by Object" in Properties only.
    So all I can do is select all my Objects at a time when I select for
    "Material : by Layer"
    ;)

    But in that case I could select all such Objects by their Layers.
    As long as these are not hidden inside Blocks.
    Just more tedious.
    I think the same would happen with Structure Tree.

    I think I have no other idea than exploding all Blocks to get access
    to all components.

    Maybe you can post a File Example.
    You wrote about IFC import.
    So far my experience was that Materials from IFC are pretty useless,
    as the same Material comes in Duplicated for every Object Assignment
    with useless naming (?)
    I saw no way to avoid or control these Materials so far.