modeling a curtain wall

[Anonymous]

i need to model a custom curtain wall but am having some problems figuring out how. i want a curtain wall that can wrap corners and can also integrate multiple doors and be able to edit length of the wall as well as door position along the wall. is there a tool for this? i've tried using the library curtainwalls within the door tool but i can't seem to get them to look quite right. do i need to build this curtain wall in numerous sections or is there a way to build one element that can be manipulated? thanks for any help.

[Dwight]

This is a bit retrograde, but if the library parts and the ArchiGlazing product fail you, it is easy enough to build a curtain wall from custom wall sections.

Step one: glass as thin wall - insert doors here.
Step two: muntins (horizontal elements) as custom wall parts - easy enough to make preset height intervals for each muntin.
Step three: individual mullions as columns

The custom profile lets you make very elaborate extrusions if you like altho this complexity slows rendering.

Muntins, if rectangular, will flow around radii.

This is faster than it seems.

[Aussie John]

Dwight wrote:
This is a bit retrograde, but if the library parts and the ArchiGlazing product fail you, it is easy enough to build a curtain wall from custom wall sections.

Step one: glass as thin wall - insert doors here.
Step two: muntins (horizontal elements) as custom wall parts - easy enough to make preset height intervals for each muntin.
Step three: individual mullions as columns

The custom profile lets you make very elaborate extrusions if you like altho this complexity slows rendering.

Muntins, if rectangular, will flow around radii.

This is faster than it seems.

And steps one and two can be combined to one custom profile (maybe that was Dwight's intent)

[Dwight]

Good point.

However, there are some drawbacks to combining the glass and muntin into one wall profile.
While rectanglar profile walls will trace a curve smoothly, complex irregular profiles (tapered or rounded, for example) will also read as mere rectangles.

For sinuous smoothness with complex, irregular profiles, the muntin wall must be magic wanded with short linear elements. So you have a dichotomy: A wall - the glass - that is rectangular and can be drawn smoothly, AND muntins that might be different.

My approach is to draw the glass wall as smooth curves, THEN magic wand a second wall made of the muntins as linear segments.