Discover how to create interior walls in your designs using efficient techniques such as offsetting and exploding polyline geometry. Learn how to maintain orthographic accuracy, use the noun-verb workflow, and gain insights into the unique challenges that come with designing walls for spaces like kitchens and bathrooms that involve additional elements such as plumbing.
Key Insights
- When creating interior walls, using offset is an effective way to retain orthographic accuracy, particularly if you started with a rectangle. This ensures parallel or perpendicular walls in your design.
- Before offsetting walls, you might need to explode your polyline geometry. This process involves selecting all objects (the noun) and applying the explode command (the verb) to break the geometry into its component parts, enabling further modifications.
- Designing walls for bathrooms and kitchens presents unique challenges, such as accommodating plumbing. In such cases, your wall might need to be a different thickness (5.5 inches) compared to standard walls (3.5 inches). This necessitates specific offset distances when creating the wall in your design.
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I'm about to start creating interior walls, and because of that I'm going to use offset a lot. When we have parallel or perpendicular walls, like we do in this project, using offset is a great way to ensure that your walls remain orthographic, especially if you started with a rectangle in the first place.
Because we are going to start offsetting our walls, we have to remember that we might need to explode our polyline geometry. If I'm going to offset using this line here, I cannot because it's currently a rectangle. So what we want to do is a select all, which is CTRL A on your keyboard, CTRL A, I'll select all, and then I can go to explode.
This is a noun verb workflow. The noun is all objects, and the verb is to explode. Now I can hit the explode button, and you can see that I said five found, two were not able to be exploded.
This is fairly common. The two lines I had drawn here and here were already lines. Lines cannot be exploded.
But now I can see that my outer rectangle has been exploded into its component parts, and these two interior polylines have also been exploded. I'll hit escape, escape, escape, and CTRL S to save. Now we can start working on our interior walls.
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I'll zoom into the top portion of my floor plan, and let's look at the handout very quickly. We can see that these are two closet walls creating a shape in here. The first wall comes from the outside edge 11 feet, and this bottom wall comes from the outside edge as well, 11 feet.
Just like we did for our toilet, we can use one offset command to bring both of these wall segments in. Then remember, both of these walls are three and a half inches, so we can offset again inside and inside three and a half inches. Let's do that together.
It might be easier to see. I'll go offset. This distance will be 11 feet.
Remember to use your tick mark. Enter. I'll grab the outside wall and bring it in and click.
And again, I'll go outside and bring it in and click. Enter to say that I am done. Enter to go back in.
Now I need to use my 3.5 inch distance. Enter. And again, I'll bring both of these to the inside.
This line to the inside and click. This line to the inside and click. Enter to say that I am done.
Now we know there is a horizontal wall segment that connects these two walls, and we can see on the handout that that is four feet six inches from the interior face. So I can go offset. Four feet six.
Enter. I'll choose that interior face of the wall and come down and click. Enter to say that I am done.
And enter to go back in for my 3.5 inch distance. And again, that's going to go down, so I'll choose my line and go down and click. Enter.
Now we want to trim these lines up so that we can end up with the right geometry. Now this is tricky because we're going to introduce cutting edges. Cutting edges are an old school way of using trim where it allows you to select a certain number of lines that are only going to cut your geometry.
They can also be cut themselves, but all other geometry will be ignored and crossed over when we do our trims. Our cut in geometry is going to include this line and this line and all of the geometry in the middle. You'll notice how I did that.
I picked at the top, I picked at the bottom, and then I did a crossing window from left click to right click. Let's do this trim together. Trim.
Notice that I need to establish my cutting edges, and we can see that it is the hotkey T on the keyboard. T, enter. Now it's going to ask select objects, which is to select our cutting edges.
So like we showed before, I'm choosing this line, this line, and then a crossing window here to here. Enter. Now if I pan down, we can see that these lines cross over, multiple lines, this one and this one.
But as I pick them, one, two, three, four, they ignore those two lines and are only cut by our selected line. I can do the same at the top. One, two, three, four.
Now we need to create that kind of S shape. So starting at the left side, I can trim out here and here. I'll go up to the top and get these two on the right, here and here.
And then these two, here and here. Not these lines, but over on the left, here and here. Now at this point, you could hit ENTER to say you're done with your trim and then enter to go back in.
Trim is a tricky tool in that if you undo, it will undo all of your trims at once. So sometimes it's best to take trim in multiple steps. Now this is simple cleanup.
I can go into the top and pick one at a time and clean out all of these little extra lines. Enter, zoom extends and control S to save. Now let's take a look at that bathroom wall in the bottom left and the kitchen wall, which we can see is actually five and a half inches.
Let's start with that kitchen wall. I'll zoom in. We can see that from the exterior face of the wall to the right side of kitchen wall is five feet, nine inches.
So I'll go offset, five feet, nine, enter from this face in, enter to say I'm done, enter to go back in. And that distance is 5.5, which is different from all of the other walls in our project. This is because it has plumbing in it.
That goes to the left and click enter to say I'm done. Now from the outside bottom edge of the wall to the bottom edge of our bathroom wall is five feet, nine and a half inches. Let's go back to offset, five feet, 9.5, enter, and that's from the outside edge, up and click, enter to say I'm done, enter to go back in.
The width of the wall is 3.5, so I'll type 3.5, enter. I'll click here and go up, enter to say I'm done. And one more line we need is the top of this wall.
We can see that on the handout that it is actually to this corner up one feet, four inches. So that's this line up one feet, four inches. So I'll go offset, one feet, four inches, enter, picking this bottom line and going up, click, enter to say that I am done.
Now the same rule applies when we do this trim. Our cutting edges are going to be everything that's here and our two interior faces. Let's do that trim together.
Trim, let's activate our cutting edges by going T, enter, and now I'll select all of these lines, picking this interior face as well and this interior face as well. Enter to say that I'm done selecting my cutting edges. Now this one is pretty simple.
Let's start with what we know. Let's clean up what's inside the walls first. One, two, three, one, two, three, and this one as well.
Now moving around from this side in that direction, I can click one, one, two, one, two, three. All that's left is the inside of my wall and that's three as well. One, two, three, hit ENTER to say that you're done.
Zoom extents and control s to save. I'll see you in the next video.
