403 Poyntz Avenue, Suite B Manhattan, KS USA Extracting Rooms from a 2D DXF

Transcription

1 403 Poyntz Avenue, Suite B Manhattan, KS USA Extracting Rooms from a 2D DXF Pathfinder 2018

2 Extracting Rooms from a 2D DXF This example demonstrates how to import a 2D DXF file and automatically extract rooms to create a Pathfinder file. The DXF used is the floor plan for the Thunderhead Engineering office. Figure 1: DXF of the Thunderhead Engineering office This example uses the English unit system. To ensure the English unit system is enabled in Pathfinder: on the main toolbar, click EN. Import DXF File First we will import the DXF file: 1. You can access the example DXF file on the Documentation page of the Pathfinder web site. Download the ThunderheadOffice_acad_2000.dxf file and save on your computer. 2. In Pathfinder, on the File menu click Import From the file chooser dialog, select the DXF file you just saved, then click Open. 4. The DXF units dialog will open. Select in (inches) as the unit then click Next and then Finish. Prepare the DXF Data for Room Extraction As can be seen in Figure 2, there is quite a bit of extra information in the DXF that we do not need, including several different layouts of the office, side views of the wall construction, door symbols, etc. The only data we really need are the lines that form the boundaries of the rooms. 1. On the main toolbar, click to enable the Selection Tool. Delete everything but the bottom left room configuration by drawing boxes around the geometry to delete then pressing DEL on the keyboard. The data remaining should look like that in Figure 1. 2

3 2. On the View menu, click Reset View to All Objects. 3. Press and hold the ALT key, then click the door symbol in the upper-right corner of the office, then press DEL. Holding ALT while selecting an object will cause the object's parent group to be selected, which will in turn select the object and all the siblings of the object in the hierarchy. 4. Now delete any other objects that do not contribute to obstructions or room boundaries or that should not otherwise be present in the simulation, e.g. furniture. In this example, we will delete the table on the right side of the office, the furniture in the conference room, and the desk chairs. When finished, the DXF data should now appear as in Figure 3. Figure 2: The imported 2D DXF contains extra information 3

4 Figure 3: After removing the extra information Extract the Rooms Now that the DXF data has been trimmed to the desired set, we can extract the rooms. To extract room information from the drawing: 1. From the Floor drop-down menu above the Tree View, select the floor into which the resulting rooms will be added. For this example, the floor is Floor 0.0 ft. 2. Double-click the 3D Extract tool ( ). 3. Single-click anywhere in the hallway. This will create a room that fills the hallway and adjacent rooms. 4. Single-click anywhere in the conference room. 5. Press ESC to exit the extraction tool. There should now be two rooms as shown in Figure 4. 4

5 Figure 4: Rooms extracted from a 2D DXF We now observe that the main room in the office spills outside of the office. To remove this outer gap from the office, perform the following steps: 1. Select the Thin Wall Tool ( ). 2. Click a point on the top edge of the doorway, then click another point on the bottom edge of the doorway (Figure 5). The main office room should now be disconnected from the outer gap. 3. Click to select the outer "room", then press DEL. The model should now look like that in Figure 6. 5

6 Figure 5: Disconnecting the outer gap from a room-extracted 2D DXF Figure 6: Extracted office with the outer gap removed Add Doors We will now add doors that connect the separated rooms. First we will use the door tool to fill doorways that are internal to the main office room. 1. Double-click the Add a new Door tool ( ). 6

7 2. The office has no doorways greater than 45 in wide and 6 in deep, so in the property panel, enter 50 in for the Max Width and 10 in for the Max Depth. It is good practice to set these values slightly greater than expected to allow some tolerance. 3. Hover the cursor over the doorway for the northwest room of the office. A preview of a thick door should appear in the doorway. Left-click once to place the door. This will automatically subtract that area from the main room, disconnect the northwest room, and create a thick door. 4. Do the same for the doorways to the southwest room, the two southern rooms, and to the closet in the northeast corner. You should now have seven rooms and five thick doors as shown in Figure Press ESC to exit the door tool and revert back to a navigation tool. Figure 7: After extracting rooms and adding internal doors We will now attach the conference room to the main room with two more thick doors. 1. Because the conference room is detached from the main hallway, we will have to draw the thick doors manually. We still want them to match the DXF, however, so expand the tree view so that the "ThunderheadOffice_acad_2000.dxf" group is visible. Click on the group and in the property panel check the box next to Visible to show the DXF data. 2. Double-click the door tool ( ) to select it and make it sticky. 3. For each door on the angled walls, click and drag the cursor from the corner of the doorway on one of the rooms to the opposite corner on the other room, using the DXF lines as a guide. This will create two more thick doors connecting the two rooms. 7

8 Finally, an exit door can be created on the office entrance. The resulting model should look like that in Figure 8. The model is now ready to be filled with occupants and simulated. Figure 8: The final model for 2D DXF room extraction Complete the Model and Run Simulation Proceed to add occupants and any other model features, then run the simulation. View Results A screenshot of the 3D results is shown in Figure 9. In this image, occupants are shown as disks, with the original DXF image as a background image. 8

9 Figure 9: 3D Simulation Results with original DXF image displayed Notice that occupants are able to move freely over some areas of the model that, in the original DXF, were obstructed by furniture (e.g. the conference room sofa). This is because those elements were removed from the model and do not affect the movement mesh. Also notice that, for some occupants, the shortest path to the exit takes them through the conference room. If you need to prevent occupants from taking short cuts through internal rooms, you can define a behavior with a waypoint to prevent additional occupants from entering the conference rooms. 9