[Equest-users] Roof wont generate

[jredburn at mindspring.com]

>From: jredburn at mindspring.com
>Sent: Mar 28, 2010 2:55 PM
>To: 
>Cc: equest-users at lists.onebuilding.org
>Subject: Roof wont generate
>
>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
>E3 Building Sciences