Aligning the Hatch of an Exterior Siding with a Building-specific Grid

As a default, the hatch of a wall's exterior siding is aligned so that the hatch origin is in the bottom left corner of the siding layer seen from outside.

You can set a building-specific grid for the building model, with which the wall's exterior siding hatch is aligned. The grid is set relative to the absolute origin of the model. You can set individual grids for each type of exterior siding.

A model may include walls with exterior sidings for which the hatch origin has been set using a separate function; see Relocate Material. In these walls, you can either use the hatch's own origin or force the hatch to be aligned with the grid.

You can set a building-specific grid as follows:

1. Open the PARAMETERS file of the building for editing in a text editor.
2. Add WALL_HATCH_Z[N] keywords to the file, where N is a sequential number starting from 1. The format of the keyword is the following:

   WALL_HATCH_Z[N] "CODE|Z|FORCE"

   • [N] is a sequential number starting from 1. When there are several keywords, they must be numbered in order, 1, 2, 3, etc.
   • CODE is the code based on which the exterior siding is searched for. The wildcard characters question mark (?) and asterisk (*) are allowed. The question mark stands for a single character, and the asterisk stands for several characters, for example "BRICK*".
   • Z is the height of the grid origin from the model's absolute origin.
   • FORCE is an optional parameter. It forces the hatch to be aligned with the grid in all exterior sidings matching the search criterion, regardless of whether a hatch origin has been set for the siding or not.

     If the FORCE parameter is not used in the keyword, the hatch's own origin is used, if one has been set. Otherwise, the hatch will be aligned with the grid.

   Example:

   WALL_HATCH_Z1 "BRICK*|20|FORCE"

   WALL_HATCH_Z2 "SIDING*|0"

3. Save the file.
4. Update the geometry of the existing walls in order to display the change.