MAGNET Office Modeler provides a powerful rule to convert building footprints into building models.
The Buildings rule transforms closed areas into buildings or other box shaped elements such as containers. It provides additional attributes and options dedicated to buildings, for instance number of floors, floor height or roof height.
For Building model creation, MAGNET Modeler supports
- Closed Strings
- Closed Polylines
Polygons, Boundaries, Pads or Lines have to be converted into Strings or Polylines first.
Strings and Polylines with zero elevation can be easily draped onto a surface. The highest draped vertex will be used as the base of the building.
Elevated Strings and Polylines will be considered as top of the wall when interpolate is set to No. In this case, attributes like number of floors and floor height will not be taken into account.
Buildings rule parameters

1. Layer
Layer where elements that define the material areas are.
2. Materials
Click on material to access the Material Library of MAGNET Modeler. Select existing material or insert a new material.
3. Description
Enter a description for the "Material Areas" rule. This will change the name of the rule within the Modeler Rules window. In case you have several "Material Areas" rules, this helps to easily identify them.
4. Group
Click on group to choose from a list of existing groups / sub groups or manually enter your group structure. Use the "/" character to create additional sub groups. For example: Existing/Office/Parking Lot.
5. Baseheight
Height of the base from the highest surface level. If set to 0 no base is modeled and the wall stretches underground.
6. EavesWidth
Width of eaves measured from the wall. If value is higher or equal to 0 then roof edges or specified outside of wall. If value is below 0 the inner roof edges are specified.
7. Floorheight
Floorheight allows to determine the height of one floor.
8. Nrfloors
Nrfloors allows to specify the number of floors. If left empty, the number of floors is guessed based on the building size.
9. Roofheight
Roofheight is the height of the rooflines that don't have absolute position defined.
10. Textwidth
Textwidth means the width of wall texture in system units.
11. Info text
Information text allows to add additional information, such as material, quality requirements and manufacturer. The info text information will be accessible in MAGNET Explorer via the Object Info tool.
12. Info URL
Info URL allows to add hyperlinks such as a link to manufacturers homepage or a design documentation. The info URL link will be accessible in MAGNET Explorer via the Object Info tool.
13. Interpolate
Interpolate defines whether the elevation of the String / Polyline (No) or the elevation of a reference surface (Yes) will be used. You have to have a Surface Model rule in place to drape the texture onto the surface.
14. Roofmaterial
Roofmaterial allows you to select existing material or create new material for roofs.
15. Basematerial
Basematerial allows you to select existing material or create new material for the building base.
16. Automatic_rooflines
Yes=Automatically generates roofline between mid-points of the neighbouring edges of the longest edge (Applies only for 4-corner rectangular buildings).
17. Texture_autofit
- segment = the facade texture will be always scaled to the facade defined by polyline seg-ment and from base to roof.
- polyline = the facade texture will be always scaled to the whole building length (around the building) and from base to roof.