Super-Primitives (aka, "Blocks")

What's it all about?

If you are designing a school you're likely to need a lot of desks. Wouldn't it be nice if the program came with a "desk" primitive? Or several -- left handed, right handed, student, or teacher? That's what "super-primitives" are about. They're more often called "blocks" because that's what Autocad calls them or "symbols" but the idea is the same: you define them, and they can be placed like a primitive and then scaled, rotated, moved and all the rest.

Creating them

It is, of course, impossible to guess all the needed super-primitives, so vendors provide a means of making your own. You create one of them, give it a name and define an insertion point (and possibly other attributes, like cost or color). Then you can place as many of them as you want.

Changing them

If you change the super-primitive "master copy" after you've placed a few of them, the neat thing is that all the existing placements (called "instances") are changed too. That means you can manage a certain amount of ambiguity (we know it's a 30" x 60" desk, but not much else....) in the project with a minmum of fuss (just update the block once the decision has been made!).

Of attributes and BIM

Of course, the desk might actually be an office cubicle, and there might be an occupant, phone number, and computer ip-address associated with it. Those will be different for each desk. The very best super-primitives begin to represent database systems, with both variable and inflexible parts. BIM software is the extreme example of this these days.

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