I have been experiencing issues with Roof From Surface for custom roof geometries.
The documentation says that roofs can be created from existing surfaces and that these surfaces can have any shape.
What I would like to achieve is very simple: model the desired roof reference geometry freely in Rhino, and then use that geometry to generate a VisualARQ Roof with its defined layers and thickness.
Interestingly, VisualARQ Walls can already do something very similar. Using Wall Extend, I can use custom Rhino geometry — including an open polysurface or an open extrusion — and the wall adapts correctly to it.
However, I cannot use the same geometry directly with the RFS tool. The only solution that worked was to use separate surfaces, but this breaks the continuity of the roof at the joints.
I’m not sure whether this is an issue with Roof From Surface or a limitation of the current implementation.
I think this is already a very powerful concept, and it could become a general solution for complex roofs without adding more predefined roof types. Rhino would provide the geometric freedom, while VisualARQ would provide the roof composition, BIM information, sections and quantities.
Hi @badileanu the Roof from surfaces command doesn’t work with polysurfaces. But I agree it would be great to work with open polysurfaces, similar to your examples. In fact, for this particular case, you can explode those polysurfaces and create the roofs from the resulting faces. We need to revise the cases where the joints are not calculated properly.
Thanks @fsalla. Exploding the polysurface into individual surfaces could work as a workaround if the joints are fixed, and I had already tried that.
However, I don’t think it is a practical workflow. Ideally, I would like to keep the original open polysurface as the common reference geometry: use it to define the top of the walls, and use the same geometry to generate the roof.
If I explode it into separate surfaces, I lose that single continuous reference and then rely on VisualARQ to reconstruct the joints between separate roof objects. For curved roofs this is simply not feasible. It also unnecessarily complicates project management, since I would need to break apart the roof geometry just for the roof covering, instead of keeping a single coherent source geometry for the whole roof.
The geometry itself is not really the issue, since Rhino already gives us all the tools needed to create these forms. What would be extremely useful is being able to turn that geometry directly into a VisualARQ Roof, so that it can then be properly documented and quantified within VA.
So I think supporting Roof from open polysurfaces would be a very powerful enhancement for VA, especially for complex or non-standard roof geometries, keeping the workflow fast and precise while keeping everything in sync.
