I am having problems with EQuest not being able to generate roof planes. I have a very complicated building and I get error reports that the roof is not completely generated and I have huge holes in the roof that throw the heat loads off and look bad in a 3D view. After a lot of searching and reworking I found that the program is not snapping to the Acad verticies. It get close but when you zoom in very close, the points are separated just enough to cause an error.
I drew an octagon in Acad and imported into a new project. I turned off the snap on the polygon and the grid leaving just the CAD snap on. I very carefully drew the outline and checked the coordinates to make sure they all paired up. Every thing was nice and regular and should have generated the roof surfaces but it did not.
If anyone can tell me why the programs does not work I would greatly appreciate it.
Oh, one more thing, I tried to move the Equest points over the Acad point and they would not move. They snapped back to the original location as soon as I released the mouse. I also tried to change the coordinate numerals on the left side of the screen but that did not work either. I could highlight a number and change it but as soon as I moved the mouse, the numbers reverted to the original. Even with all the snaps turned off.
Regards
Joe
LEED AP BD&C
roof wont generate
Mar 25, 2010
Joe,
When I opened your file I can't see anything, not your 2-D or 3-D view. I do
not generally trust eQUEST to snap correctly to anything, CAD file points or
even points that I manually enter on the eQ screen, and almost always retype
the coordinates as soon as I'm done pointing and clicking. I do this because
I've frequently found round off errors are present and they can create
problems as you are acutely aware of right now.
At this point, since you can't seem to fix it in the wizard, you will have
to do it in DD edit, or better yet, in your .inp file if you know how to do
that. It sounds like you know what the points should be so just scroll down
to your polygons and fix them there.
Good luck,
Carol
Joe,
when I opened your file and entered into (and then out of) the Wizard I was
able to view the 2-D & 3-D images, but as I moved through the key-strokes in
the wizard to eliminate the errors you are getting, all efforts were ignored
by eQuest. It appears that some of the buttons are greyed-out which I don't
understand which selected options are turning off these other buttons.
Although the 3-d image of the pitched roof looks like things are aligned I
can't figure out why you are getting these errors, it seems to be something
that eQuest dislikes about the shape you are trying to use. I can only
agree with Carol at this point that you will have to make the fine-tuning
adjustments in ddeit or in your .inp file.
Keep us posted if you do find something that works for your model.
Pasha
Greeting all,
I hav been trying to model a very complex building and have run into a problem getting the pitched roofs to generate. There are six sections of the building that have flat roofs and eight sections that have a pitched roof. There are two more areas that sit on the flat roof parts and have pitched roofs. There are over 500 vertices or bldg corners and I would like to add another 100+. The pitched roof sections are like fingers sticking out of a glove and there are four on the South and four on the North. All 8 run at different azimuths. The fingers are the residential portions of the extended care facility and are rectangular in shape with three bay window section on each finger, These are the portions that will not generate a roof.
I drew the building in Auto Cad very carefully and it accurate and symetricial. I imported the Cad file and drew over the three main lobby/office areas that have the flat roof. I then added each finger as a separate shell. None of the shells would generate a roof.
After a few hours of trying to fix it, I started over and left the bay windows off the rectangular shells, Two of the eight shells generated a roof. All my work was done with the polygon snap and the grid snap turned off and the cad snap turned off.
Looking at the table of vertices on the EQ coordinate page I noticed that the program did not have the correct numbers listed. I had set my Acad file coordinates to match the Eq sheet and the two sets of numbers were different. So I typed in the correct numbers into the table on the EQ page. EQ would not accept the changes and relisted the original numbers as fast as I could type them in.
I went into the SP2 file and the changed the coordinates there to match the Acad numbers. I opened the program to find that the roof still would not generate. The program ignored the SP2 file and used the original numbers again.
I started a new project and just imported one of the fingers using coordinate entry by typing in the numbers. Same results,
I started another new project and did not use the cad file, just typed in the coordinates in a blank form. Same result. Except that I noticed that this time Eq had changed all of my inputs so that the second decimal was either a zero or five. Zooming in very close and turning on the grid I can see that the program is rounding off the input to .05 ft. You cannot get the program to get any more accurate. This is not a problem on walls that are realitivly long but on short walls it makes enough difference in azimuths to cause the program to throw an error. If you try to fix the problem in the SP2 file, you have to manually change all the floor coords, all the roof coords and all the wall plane calculations and then the program throw a fit and crash anyway.
Is there a way to get EQ to use four or five decimal places in the calculations and then round of to .01?
I want to use this project as an advertisement for what I do and it looks weird to see a roof section flying off into space.
Regards
Joe Redburn
LEED AP BD&C