Drawing new & exist. walls, with openings

[Anonymous]

I've been trying to figure this one out for some time, and I've come up with some workarounds, but I'm wondering what the proper way to accomplish this is.

The scenario: There is an existing exterior wall of varying thicknesses, which needs to be furred out with studs and drywall. Normally, we show the existing walls with a solid fill and independent of the new construction (so we can pull demo drawings, etc). The new walls would then be composites, and would be added right next to the existing walls.

All works great so far. Problem comes when you try to insert a door or a window. If you insert it into the existing wall (as it is with existing openings), the furring wall covers them up, and the same is true if you insert it into the furring wall - not correct, but... The only way this seems to work is if you insert it into the exterior wall, and insert an "opening" in the furring wall. I suppose this would work, but the window won't detail appropriately, and if the window size was to change, the opening doesn't update automatically.

So is there a correct way to deal with this, is there a "correct" workaround, or... any ideas? Help is much appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Karl wrote:

s2art wrote:
Wouldn't it be nice if you could have variable widths for your composite walls? Adjust the widths in wall settings instead of in Composites......

Anybody care to make a wish? (for AC11?)

Not me. (I'm not sure what it would mean to vary the width of a composite?...)

I think the idea was to have ONE skin or material that would be changeable, which would be the "existing" wall and would be adjustable to conditions in field. However, I think Daniel might be onto something.

Daniel wrote:
I think what we really need is a unify wall comand, maybe I'm crazy.. but that just makes sense to me.

Though I can't think of how this would be implemented (would walls just "snap" together, would there be a setting,... ), I think this would at least solve some of the issues.

Another option would be for the windows/doors to be able to "span" two walls, or have an opening connect to an adjacent door/window. Get's crazy when thinking of how to implement, but then again, I'm wouldn't be programing it - this is just wishing....

[Anonymous]

Karl wrote:
Not me. (I'm not sure what it would mean to vary the width of a composite? The skins presumably correspond to some actual materials. Which skin(s) would you thicken/shrink and how would that be interpretted?)

....

Again, I don't understand what variable widths could mean (or depths for slabs/roofs) in a real-material sense?

Cheers,
Karl

I'm not saying do away with composites, just have the settings in the Wall tool instead of as a separate entity. By combining them this way you could have walls with the same skins, but be able to set the thickness of particular skins individually for each wall if necessary instead of having to create another composite.

Eg. a typical timber framed wall with brick veneer (in NZ) would be 100mm framing, 40mm cavity and 70-90mm brick, but if you go over a certain height you need 150mm framing instead of 100mm. New composite or change a setting in the wall tool, which is easier?

[Anonymous]

Daniel wrote:
I think what we really need is a unify wall comand, maybe I'm crazy.. but that just makes sense to me.

cheers,
dan

This is already (partly) available. A selection of connected walls will behave like a polyline (or polygon if closed). The only difference is that unify would allow single click selection.

[Anonymous]

Matthew wrote:
A selection of connected walls will behave like a polyline (or polygon if closed). The only difference is that unify would allow single click selection.

How is this again? Is this different from the "Group" command? Can't say I've ever seen or heard of this before.

[Anonymous]

Sergio wrote:
Another option would be for the windows/doors to be able to "span" two walls

I'm having similar problems, and windows/doors that would cut a hole through more than one wall would solve most of my problems.

But I think Stuart's idea is a good one. It would be great if, when making a new composite, you could specify a variable width to one (or more, but one would be a start) of the fills. Another idea would be to have the ability to add a skin to a wall. In my office about 99% of our work is restoring historic buildings, so there are heaps of different existing wall thicknesses. On these walls we usually apply a lining, but again, this can vary, sometimes it's 40mm, sometimes it's 70mm etc... What I'd like to be able to do is select my existing wall, and add another composite (the lining) to it, keeping all the door and window holes all neat and tidy.