Area of a trimesh face

[Pablo San Agustin]

Hi,

I am new to the forum and getting started with this software. I have received an IFC file with some walls in it. They are trimesh objects. I have been asked to calculate the area of the side of the wall but the information panel is giving me a very high value. Is there any workflow I can follow to make the task faster. So far I have only managed to export it into CAD and measure areas one by one. I also would like to know how to change the color of the trimesh.

Many thanks in advaced.

Regards.

Pablo

[Ed Wilson]

You have v14 - right ?

utilities > Change (colour)
Once upon a time user had delve into filter and set type to 3d primitive (plus model or view etc) Not certain if that is still required

Map file ?

Area on side of a wall. Ummm I think that you would want to be 100% sure how the trimesh was formed and how many faces are you to measure ?
Inquire & Selecting a trimesh will give you t the whole surface are since thats what were usually interested in.
There are new inquire or reporting modes for the top/bottom/edge/edge but off hand, cant remember the context of where they are

[Richard Mitchell]

To get the area it might be better to have the original strings (or you could use Get strings from trimesh edges) and create a TIN, or series of. Then use the Trimeshes from TIN tool and set the depth to 1mm or less. This way you can enquire the area on the trimesh and divide by two to get the area of just one face.
It's not exact but how much area around the sides of four, 1mm or less, faces depends on the size of your trimesh.

[paul hardwick]

I’ve been playing with a few methods (Pablo sent his data to me)
The best way so far is to draw a string along the retaining wall.
Section the string with exaggeration set to 1x, plot to model with scale set to 1000.
Then you’ll have the wall face in plan and you can do area calls and label.

[Matthew Monk]

Plenty of good ideas already. Is the wall vertical? You could always trace a polygon around the area you want, Helmert translate that to non-vertical and either triangulate + surface area (if it's not flat or not planar) or direct polygon area (otherwise). You don't even need to rotate the object all the way flat- if it can be triangulated, you just need to rotate it enough to meet the tin rules (no overlapping, no verticals, etc.).

I do agree, though, that it really should have a fairly simple tool for measuring this stuff.