One Wall - Multiple Thicknesses

[Anonymous]

Hi, my objective is to create an internal concrete structural wall about 20cm thick & 11m long (the wall supports the spine of the roof) At about the midpoint of this wall I want the wall thickness to increase to about 40cm to accomodate for a fireplace (about 1m wide).

So I have one wall at 200x11000, with a thickness of 400x1000 in the centre.

My question is: Am I able to modify a wall element to achieve this as one seamless wall? Is it easier to use the slab, column or complex profile tool for this purpose? I was hoping to maintain the wall as a 'wall element' for the purpose of layers and schedules later on.

Thanks.

[Barry Kelly]

I would use 3 walls end to end - 200mm thick walls at the sides and 400mm thick wall in the middle.
With the same building material and surface materials they should blend together seamlessly.

Or you could do it as one wall using the polygon wall option.

But would that really be a 400mm thick solid concrete wall for the fireplace?
I would model it as it is built.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply Barry.

It won't be 400mm solid when finished modelling. My first step was to have the structural wall in place with the varying thicknesses, then subtract from it as needed after adding other objects and elements.

I wasn't able to select the polygonal wall method initially. I had a composite structure selected instead of a basic structure.

Thanks.

[Barry Kelly]

Yes I should have noted if you are using composite walls then you will have to create a new wall composite for each thickness as this thickness is stored in the composite.

Or you can use 3 basic walls where you can just set the thickness you want for each.

And the polygon wall method can not be used with composites so you need to switch to basic wall method to use that - as you mentioned.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Cheers. That's very helpful. I appreciate the quick response.

[David Collins]

Just to add: you can expand the width of composite walls by making them trapezoidal and giving them the same width at both ends.

[Erwin Edel]

You can plop a collumn in the middle there and if you've set up the composite with core and finish layers, it should expand the finish around the collumn, if memory serves.

https://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/guides/archicad-20/archicad-20-reference-guide/elements_of_the_vir...

[Anonymous]

Great, thanks David & Erwin. I'll give those methods a go as well.