Learn how to create a brick veneer on a wood stud construction building using the A-Wall Masonry layer in a drafting program. This professional tutorial delves into the process of drawing the veneer around the building and making room for doors and windows.
Key Insights
- The brick veneer is represented on the floor plan with a 45-degree hatch and does not cover doors or windows. The veneer is drawn around the entire building and then specific sections are cut out for the doors and windows.
- To create the veneer, an outline of the building is traced using a polyline to all major corners of the building. Afterward, a four-inch offset is applied to create the veneer.
- After the veneer is applied, it is necessary to make room for the doors and windows. This involves pulling the brick back from these areas using a two-inch offset and trimming the masonry geometry. Care must be taken to avoid trimming the door or window geometry during this process.
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In this video, we will begin to work on our brick veneer. This house has brick that is a veneer on our wood stud construction on all sides of the building.
We can see it represented on the floor plan with that 45 degree hatch, and you'll notice that it doesn't go over our doors or windows because, well, there's no brick in front of our doors and windows. In this case, we're going to start by drawing the veneer around the entire building, and then we will need to cut out specific sections of those geometries to make room for our doors and windows. And we'll talk more about each of those specific situations when we get there.
For now, let's go to our layer dropdown and choose A-Wall Masonry, M-S-R-Y. Brick is a form of masonry, and that's why we're using the masonry layer. Now, to start, I want to create a new outline of the building, and we could have done this a long, long time ago before we put in our door and window openings by using our join polyline, but we're a little far past that point now.
In this case, I'm going to start up here at the top left corner of the building and just trace around with a polyline to all major corners of the building. So let's go polyline. I'm going to start with this endpoint here, and we're just going to choose endpoint after endpoint, working all the way around the corners of our building.
Make sure you get the fireplace. I'm using zoom and pan as I go and go right over the door openings. We'll talk about that later, all the way across the front of the garage.
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Again, use zoom and pan as you go. It's going to make it much easier. I'll come up the side of the building here, and I'll click the inner corner here.
Before I click the top, I want to use the close option. You can see it here in my command prompt. So I'll go C, enter to close, and that closes the polyline from this point to our starting point and makes one closed object.
There we go. We can see it going all the way around the floor plan. Now, the veneer is going to be a four inch offset.
So let's go O, enter for offset, four, enter. An easy place to grab this polyline is in any of our exterior doors. You can see here in this door, it's very easy to grab just the polyline.
So I'll click the polyline, go out, and click enter to say that I'm done. Zoom extends, control S to save. Now, at this time, the polyline is covering our entire door and windows.
We can see that here very obviously. We can't have this brick running in front of the door. Same here.
So what we need to do is to pull the brick back from our doors and windows and make sure there's room for our openings so we can see through and walk through our walls. In this case, we want to use a two inch offset and trim out and clean up our masonry geometry. Now, in this case, you can see that some of our doors are going to intersect, specifically this one.
So please be careful to not trim out your door geometry or window geometry as you go through this process. Let's go up to this window and let's talk about some functions for the offset tool. I'm going to activate offset.
And here we can see specify offset distance or through a race and layer. Let's activate the layer option by going L enter. There are two options for offset geometry.
We can either use the current geometry or the source geometry. And this is specific to the layer. You can see that source is the suggestion.
And this means that when you make an offset, the new geometry will be on the same layer as the source geometry. If I offset a wall, it will remain a wall. Now, if we switch this to current, any new geometry created with an offset will go to the current layer.
And that's what we want in this case. C enter for current. Now, when I set my offset distance to two enter, I can offset from this window to the left and from this window to the right.
Now, it's a little hard to see with the green and yellow. Let me change this layer color very quickly to red. And now you can see it quite clearly.
These offsets, because we used current layer instead of source layer, have gone to the a wall masonry layer instead of the a wall layer. I'll undo my color change. And now with the two inch offset already on a wall masonry, we can simply use our trim TR enter shift to extend release to trim shift to extend release to trim enter to say that we're done.
We're going to go around the entire floor plan with that procedure, offsetting on both sides two inches, and then trimming with shift to activate extend and then trim by releasing shift. I'm going to zoom extents control S to save. And in the next video, I'll walk through it with you as we go around the perimeter of the building, cleaning up this geometry.
I'll see you there.
