Parametric cladding?

[Anonymous]

Hi.

What do you people do when you need to model the cladding of a house? Here I have modeled it with pillars.

Is there a plug-in that does this, or a smarter and less time-consuming method?

[alemanda]

Did you use pillars because it's a corrugated cladding?
Other method is to use walls and make the corrugation as 2D fills and texture, also because the model becomes heavy to handle in 3D navigation, Section re-build ...
Of course there are addon (cadimage coverings for example) or wall accessories.
Every method has PRO and CONS ... depends on your needs.

[mikas]

I would imagine you could do that kind of a cladding with curtain wall tool. Make the outer frame invisible or 0,0,0 (the boundary), use a custom panel to model those three pieces of vertical planks, and those thicker out-sticking pieces would be the mullions. Transom would be invisible too.

It's not perfect though. You would have to get over with the fact that you can't make holes in to it very intuitively. You can take parts out of it by defining a fill and then cutting the curtain wall with it. But it must not be inside the curtain. It's got to intersect the boundary somewhere.

Or you could use SEOs too, of course.

One nice thing with a curtain wall approach is that you can manipulate the dimensions of the components, and transfer their adjustments with a syringe (option click, and cmd-option click).

In the picture I adjusted the height of the mullions, and used the syringe method to make their heights vary a little. That selfmade custom cw-panel is flying there on the floor.

That's just a thought. There should be a few other different approaches out there.

[Karl Griffith]

You might want to look at this thread...

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=58432

I haven't tried it, but it looks interesting.

[mikas]

Definitely an interesting link, thanks for pointing that one out. I might have to try this one.

I don't know if you (OP, the original poster) are familiar with Rhino and Grasshopper yet? I am sure you know about those though.

I think it (Rh-GH-AC) would be the most flexible and configurable of all methods to bring parametric cladding to ArchiCAD as of today. Unfortunately I am not of something even near to even slightly knowledgeable enough to be of any help about those tools. But I've got them installed already.

I love all the possibilities. I have tried the tools, and I am waiting that I have more time to spend with those. It's a tool with endlessly unimaginable possibilities.

[Anonymous]

Thank you everybody! Really!

Super comments, tips and links.

I had the feeling when I was doing this that it was not very smart, but I had to get it done in an hour with no time to do any research. Next time...

Thanx!.

[Steve Jepson]

Roof Accessory Tool - if you want to convert it into a Morph, rotate, and cut some holes.

[Anonymous]

Cadimage do cladding / covering add ons for roofs, walls, slabs etc. They're not perfect, but much much quicker than any other method we've found and include the framing, flashings, trims etc.

http://www.cadimage.com/Tools/Coverings

Einar wrote:
Hi.

What do you people do when you need to model the cladding of a house? Here I have modeled it with pillars.

Is there a plug-in that does this, or a smarter and less time-consuming method?

[Anonymous]

Thank you.

CadImage looks promising.

Einar