ACA Components

[Wendell Harmon]

I'm very new to Nxt and I guess I got spoiled with AR4's ability to assign materials 'by layer' since AR4 would read the layer assignment ADT/ACA components.  If I had a wall type with 3 components, each would render correctly based on how I defined the components' layer.  Now, with Nxt and my existing ACA wall styles, I'm forced to go into each wall style and assign the new Nxt materials I'm using to the components of each wall style. Even if i have a component called "Siding"  that's common to all wall styles, I have to  edit that component in each of those wall styles to get them to render correctly...very time consuming.

At least with AR2 and AR3 materials could be assigned to ACAD colors, but now, with Nxt that option is not there.  If I am going to continue with Nxt, I'll have to redefine all of my style based objects in my ACA library.  If I'm missing something, someone please tell me. 

 

Many thanks, in advance.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Assignment by layer hasn't changed that much. If you want to do it your old way you probably still can-- in fairness I haven't tried it myself nor have we had much demand for this approach.

It should work like this: In Style Manager, change the Display Props->Render Material from *NONE* (the default) to ByLayer. If it doesn't work-- let me know-- there may be something I can do.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Just to clarify a bit more-- I did just try it and it appeared to work.

I created an ACA material called MyBylayerMaterial and gave it a Surface Rendering property of ByLayer. You can assign this material to any component and that component will now pick up its layer's material.

There are probably some other ways of doing this.

[Ros. Riha]

another (IMHO more flexible) way:
1. create nXt material
2. create ACA material and assign the nXt material to it (Style manager, Display Props, the "Other" tab)
3. Assign this ACA material to any ACA component

[Wendell Harmon]

Bingo....it works perfectly. I thank you to the Nth degree, Roy.