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Best practices for architectural modeling - walls ?


-andrew-

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Hi everyone, 

 

Back at trying to use formz for some home renovation stuff.

 

This time, I'd like to model my whole first floor. 

 

Two main things I'm trying to figure out:

 

1) Best practices for drawing walls. I know FZ doesn't do some of the more "traditional" layout things (e.g. specifying exterior/interior walls, sliding wall positions, etc.) but I'd like to hear more from those of you who may use it for this.

 

2) We have a sunken living room (14") - keeping walls in mind, what's a good way to incorporate this into the model?

 

thanks!

Andrew

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You have multiple ways to build a 3d floorplan in FormZ. Rather than using the parametric wall tools (which are limited compared to BIM tools, but FormZ isn't a BIM tool so this isn't really a weakness,). Draw out your floor plan as a set of connected line segments/splines with as much information specifying as much compound wall information as you see necessary interior/exterior/air gap etc. 

 

Personally I'd just build a massing model starting from the floor slab and use a mix of the Reshape and Derive tools to sketch out my plan. You can keep things loose and annotate as you see fit for your needs.

 

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Thanks Jon-

 

Wow- quick reply!

 

I don't really need wall construction info - just dimensional info to the outside surfaces.

I did start by trying to mass out a general model using rectangles, but an issue I'm running into is trying to create walls from the rectangles - I don't want to do them on-center, so where they meet, i'm getting 2 walls. 

Might have to derive them separately, I suppose...

 

cheers

Andrew

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If you start with the known floor dimensions to build a slab you can extrude outwards to the known wall thicknesses the reshape up to the wall heights. That should keep everything accurate without having to worry about walls being drawn from center, left or right. It's it still a very friendly SketchUp style workflow.

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Thanks guys - 

 

Jon - will consider that!

 

Spacer - there are a lot of videos out there... I searched first, and have watched a number by Matt, but don't recall any that seem to address a more "traditional" architectural approach yet.

 

Can you be more specific?

 

thx

Andrew

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If you start with the known floor dimensions to build a slab you can extrude outwards to the known wall thicknesses the reshape up to the wall heights. That should keep everything accurate without having to worry about walls being drawn from center, left or right. It's it still a very friendly SketchUp style workflow.

 

That sounds very complicated to me, why not select the outline of the slab and use the extruded wall command on that preselected outline, to the left for building the exterior wall, and to the right for the interior wall.

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That sounds very complicated to me, why not select the outline of the slab and use the extruded wall command on that preselected outline, to the left for building the exterior wall, and to the right for the interior wall.

 

Either method is simple enough. The beauty of FormZ -  multiple ways to skin that proverbial cat. :)

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Hi Andrew,

 

The methods outlined above should be quite easy.  Perhaps you just need a little more practice with the basic tools and operations?  Here are also a couple Webinar Replays that can help you get up to speed:

 

http://www.formz.com/webinars/webinars_html/2d_into_3d.html

 

http://www.formz.com/webinars/webinars_html/30_Minute_Model.html

 

Does that help?

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Well, not really - that brings me back to one of my original challenges - 

 

When laying out slabs as ingoerik suggests, the trouble is that the rooms of a given size don't include wall thickness. 

 

I suppose the workaround is to lay out interior rooms with +2" on each side (assuming 4" interior wall thickness).... I'll try that out next.

 

BTW I'm OK with using any of these techniques - just have not done so specifically for architectural modeling with walls where I need to be pretty close to construction dimensions.

 

[edit] I'll check out those videos if I haven't seen them yet

 

thanks!

Andrew

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If you start with the known floor dimensions to build a slab you can extrude outwards to the known wall thicknesses the reshape up to the wall heights. That should keep everything accurate without having to worry about walls being drawn from center.

 

Or you could do what Jon suggests...

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Or you could do what Jon suggests...

 

I may try that, and will experiment a bit anyway.

 

Some of the walls meet at 45 degree angles, so I'm not sure that extruding faces of slabs is the best method for those (but maybe creating a solid will be fine and wouldn't matter anyway)

 

But as noted... lots of methods to play with :)

 

 

 

thanks

A

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...

 

When laying out slabs as ingoerik suggests, the trouble is that the rooms of a given size don't include wall thickness. 

 

....

 

Sorry for the misunderstanding, my method i use only for exterior walls, means exterior wall plus the interior part of the exterior wall. For exterior vis i simply put a floorslab onto the massive slab and put the interior walls on that floor. For interior viz i put the interior walls on the massive slab and draw the floorslab around the interior walls.

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