Explore various approaches to applying materials to walls in digital design, with a focus on understanding how different methods suit different applications. Delve into the intricacies of creating and modifying wall structures and materials, with step-by-step demonstrations to guide you through the process.
Key Insights
- The article presents a diverse array of ways to apply materials to digital walls, highlighting that the effectiveness of each approach can vary depending on the nature of the project.
- Through detailed instructions, the article demonstrates how to create a new wall structure, apply a material to one side of the wall, and modify the vertical structure of the wall to adjust the placement of the material.
- The article also discusses potential challenges associated with this method, notably that changes to the top constraint of the wall require corresponding adjustments to the top extension distance to maintain the correct placement of the material.
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For the start of this lesson, what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and create a new file because we're going to do a few tests. And I just want to go through a few options of how we can apply materials to walls. And it's a little intricate, and I think it'd be kind of clunky in the project.
So I'd like for us to go to file, and then new project. And we can use this template, it's fine, because we're going to create everything we're going to use in here anyway, and hit OK. And from here, we're going to take a look at a handful of methods of how we can apply different materials to walls.
And so there's a ton of different ways to do this. Some work better in some applications, and some work better in others. And some have just some pretty fatal flaws that may not work for your application.
And so I wanted to just take us out of the project, and take a look at these, and just do a few videos where we talk about the different methods. So the first one we're going to look at is if we build a wall, and we add a material to that wall, we can use that as a way of describing it within our project. And this works out really well, because we have the thickness of the material.
Let's say it's like a tile, or like a siding material that we're adding to it. That means it's going to be accounted for in the overall thickness of the wall, and so we'll have an accurate depiction of the material within the project. And so we'll take a look at that, and there's a handful of options that go along with this as well.
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So I'm just going to draw a basic wall here, and I'm going to change the wall type to our interior four and seven-eighths partition, which is a really typical partition size, because this is a three and five-eighths inch stud with five-eighths drywall on each side. So I'll pick this one, and I'm just going to draw a length of wall here. I'm not too worried about the height or where it sits or anything like that, but I just drew a section arbitrarily here.
And now I'm going to go to edit type, and I'm going to say duplicate. And I'm going to take everything off the end here, and what I'll do is I'll just say tile one side, just to describe that we're putting a material on one side of this wall, and hit okay. And now I'm going to go in and edit the structure.
So I'll click edit here, and from within this dialog, I'm going to go ahead and add on the interior side, and it really doesn't matter which one. But in this case, we'll use the interior side, and it added this number five here. We'll go ahead and move it down, and so I'll have this be finish two as well.
And then the priority, which means the two numbers that relate to each other are going to try to join when there's join conditions, and so I'm going to change this to a five so that it matches all the exterior layers. And then I can give it a thickness. If I say half inch for that thickness, then now I've got a layer on the outside of the wall.
And if I wanted to take a look at it, I can click preview, and you can see here I've got the gypsum wall board, which is represented by layer one here. Then I've got the stud here, the structure, finish two, which is the gypsum wall board on that side, and then this one here in row six is the one we just created. And so from here, we can assign a material to it.
So I'll click on that browse button to open up the material library, and then I can just pick any material that I want in here. I'll just type in tile just to filter it down like we've done previously, and then I'll pick the slate blue, or let's see which one has a pattern. Neither one of them do, so it doesn't really matter which one we pick here, but I do want to add a pattern to it so that we can see it better.
So I'll click on the pattern, go to model patterns, and then let's go ahead and pick the eight inch tile option here. Actually, let's go ahead and pick the block 8 × 16. We'll use that one.
We'll pick that one, we'll hit okay, and then now you can see it gave it a cut pattern because that material has that particular cut pattern, so we can kind of see which one of these layers is showing up the way that they are. And so what I'm going to do in this case, because we've already gone through a few steps, is I'm going to hit okay to kind of lock that in, and I'll hit okay again, and then if we go to our default 3D view, which is the house at the top there, I can now see my pattern has been applied to the wall on this side, but when we look at the other side, there's nothing there because that material doesn't have a surface pattern. So I'm going to go ahead and select the wall now and hit edit type so I can get back into that structure setting and hit edit again here, but this time I'm going to go in and I'm going to change this from floor plan to section view, and you can see it'll switch it to a section view, and I wish it did this in the floor plan view, but when I click on the actual layers in section view, it highlights them, and so maybe next version we'll get that and rev it, but don't hold your breath on that one.
And so from here, by going into section view, we actually get these options to modify the vertical structure, and so the first thing I want to show you here is if I go all the way to the top, you can see this is kind of where it's all lined up, but if I click this modify button, and I can go in and I can actually select the end points of each of these individual layers, whether it's vertical or horizontal, but in this case what I wanted to show you is if I pick this guy right here, it gives me a lock, and I can go ahead and I can unlock that, and so what it's doing is it's unlocking this layer from the rest of the wall assembly. Now I can hit okay, and one thing that's very, very important when you're working in this dialogue is you never want to hit escape. If you hit escape, it'll cancel out like that, and you will lose everything that you've done, and so I'm going to go back in, and I'll repeat those steps.
I'm going to click edit. I'm already in the section mode, so it's no big deal, but if I go to modify, I can click on this plane right there. You see that top end point, and then unlock it.
From here, I'll hit okay until I get out of that dialogue, and now when you look at the top of the wall, you can see we've got two arrows that we can use to move up or down, and so these two have been removed from each other. So right now, this wall is a base constraint of level one and a top constraint of level two, and what's cool now is I've got a top extension distance, which is what represents this piece right here, so if I move it down, it's telling me that it has a negative three foot six, and so this wall itself has a 12 foot height, and so if I wanted a band of tile at six feet, I can set this to negative six, and now it'll put the tile at six feet across the top, and so that's flexible throughout. You can always grab that.
Honestly, what I like to do is I'll have an elevation, so I'll just create an interior elevation here real quick. I'll have an elevation of the wall, and knowing where I want my tile, I'll draw a reference plane, which is from the architecture tab, and then we've got reference plane here, or keyboard shortcut rp, and then I'll set that at the height where I want my tile, and so right now that's at an arbitrary point, so that's where I drew it, but let's say I wanted seven feet, so if I put that at seven feet, then I can go through and I can use my align tool to set that, and this will bother me that it's not on module, so I'm going to change it to seven foot four, but if we set it at like seven four like that, you can see we're on module, and now I've got this reference plane that I can even name it. I can say like top of tile, or if it needs to be more specific, it could be like this room top of tile kind of thing, and now you've got that throughout your whole project, and so this method has a lot of benefits, but it does have a few downsides, and so I'll take a look at a couple of those with you here.
One of them is if for some reason I need to change the height, this dimension of negative four foot eight is relative to this height here, so if I were to drop the offset and say like negative two here, the whole thing drops down, and so now that negative four foot eight is going from 10 feet instead of 12 feet, and so when we look at our interior elevation again, you can see this is my tile line, but now I have to go in and make sure I make that edit, and sometimes people aren't super good about doing that, so it's one thing you want to keep in mind. If the top constraint changes, that top offset extension or that top extension distance needs to change to match it as well, and so that could definitely be a downside to this method, and so this is just kind of the basics of how you can use this, the modifying of the wall structure to adjust your tile. In the next video, we're going to take a look at a few of the more custom items that get into this.
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