How to divide a Wall into multiple sections?

[chronofreak]

Apologies for the potentially dumb question, I'm very new to this program!

A brief background:

I'm working with simple plans for houses, where very often just the exterior walls are drawn/modeled. The company I'm working with creates insulated panels that are used to build up these exterior walls. The panels are usually 4' wide or less, span from floor to ceiling, and are erected side-by-side to form the walls.

The current process has our designer manually dividing the walls on the plans into the panel segments. To be clear, this is a purely a cosmetic process, as the dividing lines are all drawn in manually via documentation tools (dimensioning, text, line tool, etc.). Archicad still considers each wall as one long continuous structure. Then, the designer creates 2D prints for each and every individual panel based on the dimensions from the overall structure plan.

As you can imagine, this is very tedious and time consuming! And to make matters worse, if the house plans change, some of the panels need to be manually resized and redesigned. There must be a better way to model these panels.

Is there a way to automatically (or at least not completely manually) divide walls into smaller sections? Again, the preference is 4' wide or less. I'm aware of the Snap Guides tool to help measure out 4' sections but is there a better way?

Additionally, I come from a mechanical engineering background and I'm more accustomed to how programs like SolidWorks operate. I'm used to constructing an assembly from multiple individual parts, and having the ability to generate 2D prints from each part that makes up the assembly. Therefore, I'm inclined to think that actually "physically" dividing the walls into sections, not just marking the panel sections with document tools, would be better and may facilitate the creation of all those individual panel 2D plans. Thoughts?

Operating system used: Windows 10 22H2

[CosminF]

Hi,

You might try to use the curtain wall tool instead of the wall when modeling. This way you can define a wall (panel), and a frame (gap between your panels).

It can be adjusted and in the editor you can add openings in 3d quite quickly - not as quick as you would add a regular door or window in a classic wall. 

and you can then take every panel and schedule it (detail it) independently. 

You can also look into making custom panels that fit your desired aesthetics and composite materials.

hope this helps. 

[ryejuan]

maybe next to the wall itself you can frame up your curtain walls (frames and panels) then for those area that you need to have those doors and windows you can modify or edit the curtain wall that to give space the right openings for that.

[mthd]

Hi, Please show us a diagram of your insulated panel wall composition. You maybe able to create a composite wall to represent these panels. Apply a vertical fill to it that is 4’ wide that will show up on your elevations. Most of us here think in diagrams and drawings lol.

[ryejuan]

This is also another option. 😁

[chronofreak]

@mthd Sure, take a look below.

The first image is of a section of wall as seen from above. You can see where we have used notes to mark the locations of each panel--W for straight wall pieces, C for corner pieces--and the dimensions show the lengths of the panels. However, as I mentioned in my initial post, this currently all done with documentation tools; the entire wall in Archicad is modeled as a single wall and not actually built up from these panels. I have selected the long wall in the second image to show this.

In addition to marking up the plan with the top-down perspective, we also manually mark up the plan from side views as well. See the third image of the same section of wall. Again, these are all purely cosmetic markings and notes. I feel like if the individual panels were modeled, we would be able to streamline the dimensioning process and make future adjustments more easily.

And lastly, I've included in the fourth image an example of a 2D blueprint of an individual panel, this one specifically being the corner panel C-1. Once we outline where each of the panels are in the wall in the top and side views, we use those dimensions to create these 2D blueprints for manufacturing.

There must be an easier way than doing everything manually!

Image #1

Image #2

Image #3

Image #4

[Barry Kelly]

You could use separate walls.

The trick is to place them in a layer that has an intersection group number of 0 (zero).

That means they will not trim to each other, but they also won't trim to other elements either.

This will be a problem for your corners, as they will also no longer trim to each other.

So for the corners you will need a separate layer with its own intersection group number that is not zero.

Or you could maybe use complex profile columns.

The thing is, you can't easily add a hole to a column for the openings.

Either of these, the same surface if co-planer in elevation will merge without a seam.

So you will need to use alternating surface materials (can be exactly the same material, just with a different name) so they do not merge.

Another option would be to use GDL objects, but you would have to get them scripted so you can easily manipulate the openings and possible size differences.

There should be no problems in plan or elevation - you should automatically see the joins.

Barry.

[mthd]

Awesome ! I am wondering if the wall framing object in the library might be of use here to represent the separate wall panels for you ? Or the @Barry Kelly suggestion to use complex profile columns to represent them ? I do not have much experience with the curtain wall tool but that may also work too. I personally would look at drawing the floor plan with an external non connected wall and then add 3D objects like the wall frame object etc to represent those panels.

Here is an Archimaster video demonstration of using the opening tool on a wall to create a cut away detail might assist ?

https://youtu.be/s6sA37sVZDs

Another Achimaster video using the Curtain Wall Tool to design wall framing might help ?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wP9PCwRY3CY

The 3D wall framing detail object is only available if you have CI tools installed. I think you can still  have a demo version of it for one month to test it out ?

[ryejuan]

another way I can think of is using openings such as that your openings will not fully create an openings in a wall.

[BrunoH]

Hi chronofreak,

If your panels are used several times in your project or are a prefabricated construction system for several project, I would consider hotlink modules.

Create one file with your panels one panel type in each story, the design options let you create the variants of each type.

 In this file you can easily create all the construction documentation for the panels.

 Then you can place any instance of the panels in the project file as a module.

There you can create the documentation for the project.

 

 The use of modules allow you to create and document each panel once, and when modifying a panel in the module file all placed one will be updated.