Room Divider Fail --- with Workaround

[JMarkey]

In the attached sample plan, I wanted to divide a Kitchen/Living Room area into two parts, to allow different flooring materials to be placed. However, when I snap a "room divider" wall between Points A (lower right corner of the wall) and Point B (the lower left corner of the cabinet) the interior wall shrinks to the left. It also looks like the room divider is snapping to the center of the wall edge rather than the corner.

 

I made a before (left plan) and after (middle plan) of the same area to illustrate the problem that occurs. I put in a couple of CAD lines to show how the wall is shrinking. If you grab the end of the room divider wall and try to move it back to the lower corner of the wall, the wall just shrinks more. Note that the room divider wall also extends from Point B to Point C for room division to occur, because cabinets never participate in Room Definition.

 

The right side plan has a 1/32" line collinear to wall that is then extended down to Point B and on to Point C. 

 

WORKAROUND PROVIDED BY SUPPORT

 

Start by drawing a short collinear line segment from the corner of the wall and then extend the room divider down to the corner of the cabinet. I found this collinear line can be around 1/32 inch which makes it cosmetically a non-issue. Making it smaller will probably work, but it gets hard to snap to the collinear line.

 

Support has submitted this issue to the developers.

 

Maybe someone knows another way to do this.

 

Hope this helps.

 

John

Room Divider Question - X8.plan

[Alaskan_Son]

I'm not at my computer to open up the plan, but here are my quick thoughts…

I'm usually able to make those types of connections work but they are often times a little tricky. The thing that I think is probably easier for those tricky situations where all you are doing is changing floor material is simply using a floor material region.

[DavidJPotter]

Here is a video of my take on your post:

 

https://youtu.be/IwNzspzLTiw

 

 

I am the first to agree that Chief is far from perfect, when I see perfection, I know some users made it perfect and not because Chief is soooo good. Some of the things Chief does are annoying but 99.9% of the time there is something you CAN do about anything.

 

DJP

[Alaskan_Son]

Hi John, I finally had a chance to open your plan up and take a look. I didn't actually understand what you were talking about with regard to the collinear wall but now I see...

I wouldn't call anything you've demonstrated a "fail", and I wouldn't describe Chief's solution as a workaround. Rather, I would say that's it's simply working as it was designed. Unless Chief comes up with somethung different than the room divider (which I think is unnecessary), what we really have is just a zero thickness invisible wall. The thing with walls inside Chief is that they want to make automatic connections. The reason for the super short section of collinear wall is simply to control where that automatic connection is taking place. Without the auto connections we have a very different program.

Also, just to reiterate...A simple material region would also work great for what you were trying to accomplish, and with a lot less potential conflicts.

[JMarkey]

Michael / David... thank you both for your feedback.  As you might guess I'm nowhere near learning all the nuances of CA and reading posts here is one of the most enlightening things for me and I’m sure, all of us in the early stages of learning CA.  

 

I now have to agree that using a Material Region is the way to go.   This was very simple and was easy to break the material region lines to get to the actual effect I wanted to achieve.

 

My initial thought that this was a “Fail” was based on watching the CA’s “Room Divider” training video #5220. I had thought the room divider they showed tied to the bottom and end corner of the wall, but upon closer review it actually ties to the center of the end wall (not the effect I was after).  It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.

 

Again thanks for your insight and help.  In the future, I’m going to come here for input before wasting Support’s time.