Classes and Objects

TAD Designer arranges the volumes you create and edit into a grouping called a “class” – Say, you have made all the spaces for the first floor of the house you are designing. In such a case, all those spaces would be gathered into a “class” that you name as “First Floor” (You can pick your own name. This one is just an example)

The word “object” is sometimes a mis-nomer. Because the word “object” gives you the feeling that it is something that you can touch and feel. However, the way we use here is that the word “object” could be a space or a piece of built-matter – in short, any meaningful entity inside TAD Designer that you create, edit and/or otherwise are interested in your design.

Or here is an even shorter explanation:

An object is simply the fundamental part of an architectural element –usually a 3D volume. (But then an object could even start off as a 2D shape –you can give the 3D attributes later at your convenience)

The advantage of gathering together some architectural elements together into a class, is that you can then assign properties commonly to the class. The objects belonging to that class would automagically pick up the same properties given to their class.

Sub-Classes and inheritence

One can have a class inside a class – in which case, the nested class would be technically called a “sub-class” of the parent class. You can form your own “tree” structure – just the way you create folders and folders inside a folder on your hard-disk, so can you make classes and sub-classes. Name each class/sub-class that is meaningful for you.

We have already given an example of “First Floor” and how you gethered all those objects that belong to the “First Floor” into that class.

You can be more detailed: For example; you could consider having a sub-class inside “First Floor” called “FFloor-toilets” to gather together all the toilets of the first floor; and so on

The advantage of making such a tree structure as you model is that you can assign properties to these classes that gets passed on to the objects which is directly handled by that class. It does not stop there. You can ask TAD Designer to then inherit some or all of the properties to the sub-class beneath this class in question.

Of course, you can decide whether you want a particular property to get passed down via this mechanism of inheritence or not. So when you set such properties inside the TAD Designer interface, we have conveniently given you two sections – one is the “inheritable” seciton and the other is the “non-inheritable” section for you to give the properties appropriately