Learn about the process and applications of using the split face option as a method to create patterns and apply materials on architectural structures, specifically on walls. This article explains the technique in detail, using an interior elevation to illustrate how the split face option allows for flexibility in pattern placement, material application, and adjustments in wall structure.
Key Insights
- The split face option allows for the creation of multiple portions of a wall to apply different materials, creating complex patterns or a band of varying materials.
- This method, although flexible, could be time-consuming for larger projects as it is applied wall by wall. It also presents the risk of losing the pattern when editing the wall or adjacent walls.
- Despite its drawbacks, the split face method offers advantages such as the ability to apply non-rectilinear patterns and the flexibility to make design adjustments with the edit profile option. However, it requires careful planning and finalizing of the layout before starting the split face and material application process.
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Now for method number three here, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take this wall that we were using before and just drag it off to the side. And it looks like I need to do a little cleanup here and get rid of the remainder of our other exercise. That's okay, I'll just drag this over again.
And what we're going to do is we're going to do most of this work in that interior elevation we created a while ago. If you didn't create that, go ahead and go to your view tab and create a elevation using the interior elevation option. Then we'll go to this view and we're going to use this portion of the wall to create that.
And the goal here is to create a similar pattern that we have before. And to do that, we're going to use the split face option. And so this is another one that works pretty well.
And it's a good method if you're controlling the whole model. So from our modify tab, you can see there's this button, it's called split face, I use the keyboard shortcut SF for that. And if you pick the wall, we have a few rules that we have to follow.
And so I can't draw a line like this, because see, we're outside of the boundary here. When I want to draw a portion of my wall, that's going to be tile. In this case, it'll be something kind of along these lines here.
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And I'll just go to the edge or roughly the edge of the wall, and then align it back here. And really, what we're doing is we're saying, okay, this is going to be a portion of the wall that's tile. And you can do the same thing where you just bring it all the way across like that.
And then when I finish, you can see it'll give me a line like that here on the wall. And if I were to go in, back into the plan view, and make adjustments, and this will give me some errors when I do this, but if I were to drag that over, it'll pop the wall over. And then back to our elevation here, you can see the line still applies.
When the wall adjusts left or right, it still maintains the split in the face. And this is important because what it what it'll allow me to do here is I can go in and I can actually use, again from that modify tool, I can use the paint option. And this allows me to paint a material.
And so if I pick this tile here, I could paint that material onto this wall. But then you got to ask yourself, well, what if I wanted to have this sort of band here? Well, it's kind of the same process. We go through, and we use split face.
And I could pick the portion that I want to split, which is going to be this one here. And then instead of drawing just one line, see, I can draw this one here. And then I can draw another one through here.
And that's going to give me one, two, three, and now four total portions of the wall that I can paint. If I go PT, which is the keyboard shortcut for paint, I can grab that other material, and I can apply it to the wall. And then you're done.
The downside to this method is this is wall by wall by wall, right? So I have to go in and I have to do this process every single time. The bonus is it's very simple. And so it's kind of like a hybrid between this method here, the first one we did, and the second one where we get the advantages of just using the one wall.
But we also have the flexibility of being able to place that material pretty much anywhere we want and which way that we want to place it. And I'm just going to put this wall back since I moved it there and it was bothering me that it was gone. But essentially, we have that ability to do that with those walls.
And the one downside is going to be in a couple of scenarios where it's just not going to work out as well as we'd hope it to. And just running into some join issues here. Sorry, just a second.
And when we look at this wall again, here, I'll just put that back, you can see it's the same, essentially the same method, right? But we end up, and this one joined together. So that's a downside that we just discovered on our own. But essentially, we can do the same stuff where we have our door that can be placed, our toilet that can be placed to the wall.
And there's no issues that we have to worry about. So it's the same door, same toilets, you know, everything else all just kind of works the way that we want it to. But the problems that we start running into is when we start adjusting things.
So like you saw here, when we brought these two walls together, it joined them, even though we would never want that to happen. And so like, let's say there was a perpendicular wall here that we wanted those two to be separated from, right? So this one's there, this one's there. Not sure why it's not joining the way I'd want it to.
But essentially, we could easily lose our pattern. When we are editing, like the wall or walls around it, you saw how it starts to bounce around and we could lose it, which is always something you discover at the worst possible time, like when you're printing a set to be submitted to a client or submitted to the city or something like that. So it's something that you want to keep in mind.
You can see even after we, we did that, I lost the paint that that occurred here. And it's one of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of this method. It does work out really well.
It's one of those things where you want to make sure you have everything done first, before you go in and start doing the split face and applying the tile. So meaning like, you're pretty good on the layout, things probably aren't going to change and then you can pop in. So part three here is now if we wanted to add the sweeps for the base, we got to use that same method we used in previous videos where we use that wall sweep tool to apply it to the base and the crown molding the way the way that we did before.
When we look at all three here, we essentially have the same result, you know, I didn't put the crown molding and stuff on here, but we do get the same result in all three. But it's just a matter of which one's going to work, work best for your scenario. I think in a larger project where you're using the same tile pattern, the same wall finish pattern over and over and over and over again, this is looking pretty good, because you can establish it in one place.
If for some reason it needs to change, like this material needs to become a different tile, or this one needs to become a different tile, it'll change everywhere. So, you know, if I go in in here and I decide to flip these things around where it's like, okay, well, I want this textile slate blue to be actually on this layer, rather, this layer. Notice I didn't hit escape, that would have been bad, I actually might this time.
But essentially, you know, if we wanted to switch these materials around, we could do that, you know, and that's going to take place in every instance where this wall is being applied. So it's like, if I wanted to make adjustments or merge these things, that's project wide. And I think that advantage with both of these methods is pretty huge.
Here, you know, you just have that flexibility of being able to place this pretty much anywhere you want. You also have the ability to, and I'm not saying this is something that people always do, but if you needed to have a non-rectilinear pattern, you know, you can edit the profile to move it away and, you know, and even have different shapes based on, you know, the demands of your design. You could do a tile or a pattern material applied to your wall in any shape you want, because we have that option to use edit profile.
And so what I'd like to do here, now that we've got kind of our three different methods that we've tested out here, is we'll go ahead and save as this file. And this is just a reference for you to use. And so it's just a file, you can call it like wall, we'll call it wall finish methods.
And you can just have it as a file that you can refer back to for when you're like, hey, I don't know how I want to do this. Maybe I could check out one of these three methods and see which one's going to work best for you. So I'll hit save, and then we're going to take a look at floor finishes in the next video.
