Suggestions to model beaux arts facade

[David Bearss]

I am not trying to replicate every profile of the facade. I am looking for advice on how to build up the piers and base. I have started with the basic mass of the building which is a 16" masonry wall at the plane of the windows. The columns, piers, base, cornice, and trim are built out from that building face. To model I am thinking to simply add more layers of walls. Then merge walls??

Suggestions? Thanks.

[Anonymous]

As usual, silence on a real-life matter. Certainly not intended to be a comment on the wonderful AC users and their extreme and continued generosity in providing free consulting to us newbies, but rather a direct comment towards Archicad and its inability to enable an efficient solution to a common, real world problem.

[Anonymous]

Objective?
http://www.encina.co.uk/sw-download.html

[Dwight]

The solution is easy if you know it.

The piers and base, solved, using complex profile, again:

[Anonymous]

Close, but no cigar.
The stones are staggered (running bond) in real world image.

[Dwight]

Considering that you aren't the original poster, we'll let him decide if we are close enough or not. Like, we should worry about verticals when the bas-relief panels and other carved work are missing?

But, whining veteran beginners are welcomed to take the complex profile with horizontal mortar joints and use little SEO's to cut the vertical joints, or actually model the individual tiles if more accuracy is required.

[Anonymous]

Sorry Dwight , but sounds like a sore losers whining to me.

[Anonymous]

Dwight, thanks for the tip. As I alluded to in my original post, sometimes the idea that the forum is really a distribution center of free advice gets lost/forgotton/ignored.

Trying to stay focused on the original question/topic, while the complex wall you describe works well, how do you handle the insertion of doors and windows into a complex wall? I don't think they show up in plan view.

Also, any thoughts on how you handle the myriad of complex profiles that one could invariably generate. Favorites? Special folders?

[Dwight]

I know what you mean. His post affects me like the yawning of a toad.

In answer:

I'd make a plain wall with the doors and windows. Then they show.

I'd figure out each complexity by cutting a section at each new condition, drawing each special stone/tile profile as a fill and then copying that fill [or group of related fills] into the complex profile window.

As for managing these separate profiles, it is easy to use the actual project as your reference, since you just eyedrop the value of any complex profile wall to engage those settings. But favorites would work, too. I prefer eyedrop back-referencing myself since I am a bad clerk.

[Anonymous]

Again, thanks for the thoughts. I will try them out.