Generate Location Prisms Along Alignment

Generate Location Prisms Along Alignment creates location prisms automatically along alignment objects. This can be used with infra models to efficiently prepare the model for splitting or defining locations.

Settings

Objects

Select Object Class, Group, Group Category, Top Most, or Part-level objects. The objects must be alignments. The location prisms are generated along the alignments given to the tool. 

Creation Type

Full Length

Full Length creates prisms to the full length of the alignment. The number of prisms created depends of course the Length setting and the length of the alignment object.

Single

Single creates one prism along the alignment. Note that you can define the exact position with the Distance from the Start setting.

Propertyset Name

The name of the property set where your Identifier Property exists, or where you want to add it.

Identifier Property Name

The name of the property where you want to set the identifier Number. If the property already exists in the model, then that one is used. If it doesn't exist, a new one is created in the Propertyset, defined above.

Identifier Number

The generated prisms are numbered so that you can differentiate them later for further processing. You could use this number, for example, to map some more specific location identifier to the prisms.

Profile Width

The tool generates location prisms, whose profile is rectangular. The Profile Width is the width (horizontal dimension) of the prism geometry perpendicular to the alignment.

Profile Height

The tool generates location prisms, whose profile is rectangular. The Profile Height is the height (vertical dimension) of the prism geometry perpendicular to the alignment.

Distance from the Start

Distance from the Start is used when the Creation Type is Single. This allows you to offset the prism from the alignment start, and thus place the prism in any position along the alignment.

Length

The length of the generated location prism(s), measured along the alignment.

Derived Object Class

This defines the object class of the prism objects. The object class can be any basic object class from the IFC. For example, Covering, Beam, Member, Building Element Proxy, and so on… This is also the object class, in which the derived object is exported to IFC. Use the name of the object class as it is written in the Objects palette.

Connection Name

Connection Name defines the Connection property name, where the references between the alignment and the prisms are assigned. Make sure you use unique names if you want to run the tool multiple times on the same model (and don’t want to update or override the existing connections). You can use the connection to further analyze the duplicates, or add a property to the duplicates to indicate that they are in fact duplicates.

Override Connections

Use this option to choose whether you want to override (checked) or update (unchecked) the Connection Property, if it already exists in the model.

Create Group

Turn on Create Group if you want to create a group for the prism objects. The groups can be either a generic group or an IFC group. A generic group can only be used inside Simplebim. IFC groups are exported to IFC.

Groups are a convenient way to find prism objects from the model, but you could also feed the group to other tools to further process the prism. For example, if you want to enrich the prisms with location identifiers, or colorize them.

Group Name

Group Name defines the group to which the prism objects are assigned. If you use a group name that already exists in the model (under the parent group defined below), then the objects are added to this group. If the group doesn't exist yet, then a new one is created.

Parent Group

Groups can be hierarchical. Use Parent Group if you want to assign the groups under a specific parent group.