Dear Community Members,
This month’s tip is inspired by a question from @elshareef about placing a door or window exactly where segmented curved walls meet. Community member @Lpalma shared a smart solution that rebuilds those segments into one or two continuous elliptical walls, allowing openings to be placed freely anywhere along the curve without being interrupted by joints.
The challenge
When you model an elliptical wall, it’s represented by many small, curved segments instead of one continuous surface. This means that when you place a door or window at a joint, it belongs to just one of those segments, and the neighboring segment will still block part of the opening.
The solution
The idea is to replace the segmented arcs with polygonal walls that follow the ellipse, giving you one continuous wall element per half ellipse.
With this setup, the wall behaves as a single host, so any door or window can be placed anywhere along the wall without being clipped at former segment boundaries.
Step 1: Draw the wall outline as drafting geometry
- In the floor plan view, activate the Circle tool, select the “Ellipse” geometry method in the Info Box, and draw an ellipse.
- To work with only half the ellipse, draw a straight line through the center along the major axis, and trim the half you don’t need
- Offset the half‑ellipse by the desired wall thickness, connect the ends of the inner and outer curves, and consolidate the linework so you get one clean closed polygon ready for the Magic Wand.
Tip: Place this construction geometry on a separate “Guides” layer, so you can hide or lock it later without affecting the actual walls.
Step 2: Create a polygonal wall using the Magic Wand, and place doors and windows freely along the curve.
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Activate the Wall Tool and switch to the Polygonal method in the Info Box.
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Magic‑wand (space‑click) the closed polygon to generate one continuous polygonal wall that follows the elliptical shape.
- Place doors and windows along the curved wall wherever needed to define openings around the ellipse.
Tip: Before using the Magic Wand, set wall height, structure and reference line position so you do not need to adjust those parameters on multiple walls later.
The result
With this workflow, you create a continuous elliptical wall, and can place openings freely anywhere along the curve.
If you try this workflow on different curved designs, share your results and tips with the Community! Here’s the link to the original forum discussion where you can leave kudos to @Lpalma for his helpful answer.
Do you have a clever solution or a favorite tip for everyday challenges? Share it with the community and you might just land a feature in the Insights blog 😎
