Discover the step-by-step process of adding a door to a curtain wall in a building design, including changing out panels and selecting the correct system panel type. Learn about the precision needed in selecting the right curtain panel and the process of adding mullions for a complete and custom curtain wall.
Key Insights
- The first step in adding a door to a curtain wall is to establish all the different curtain wall panels. Once the panel for the door is selected, the width and height of the door are set.
- Selecting the curtain panel for the door requires precision, using the tab command to highlight and select the correct panel. The panel is then set to a system panel type that represents a door. The door types available for selection are dependent on the system library used.
- Once the door is added, mullions are added to complete the curtain wall. Mullions are placed on all gridlines that do not currently have a mullion, creating a visually gratifying finished curtain wall.
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Before we add any mullions, I like to make sure I have all of the different curtain wall panels established first. And doing that means we need to select this panel and replace it with a door. And it may seem obvious that if you want to add a door, you would just use the door type.
But you can see I'm in the door command in the floor plan, and nothing's happening here. In curtain walls, you don't add physical doors to them. We just change this panel.
So by putting this panel in here, we've established the width and the height of the door. And now we need to select it. And this is where Tab really becomes your best friend.
Because you have to go through and hit TAB here on the edge until you've highlighted the panel and select it that way. Of course, there's always our other option, which is to use the crossing plus filter, and then pick just the curtain panel. But you need to be very surgical with your crossing so you don't pick any of the other curtain panels.
The next thing we want to do is we want to set it to a system panel type that's actually a door. And you can see we only have glazed and solid here.
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So what we'll do is we'll click Edit Type. And then there's this option to load in a system panel that's a door type. If I click Load and go back into my Imperial library, you can see that we have some door types that we can pick from.
We've got door, double storefront, or double wall glass, which is kind of the full-height one; we're going with the storefront. We'll select Open and hit OK a couple of times. And there's our door.
And everyone asks me all the time, where's the hardware? Well, this family in particular has different visibility parameters based on the detail level. If I set the detail level to Fine, then we'll start to see the door hardware on there. Our next step is to add the mullions.
And this is pretty easy, and it's very visually gratifying, because at this point, the curtain wall will be finished. If I go to Architecture > Mullion, what I like to do is I like to add the corner one first.
So I'll go in and I'll add the corner, which is going to be this five-by-five quad corner. And it's just simply picking what grid you want it to be on. You can see it adds it there.
And if I change the type, I can go back to that two-and-a-half-by-five rectangular. And then we can add those in. And it may seem like there's got to be a better way.
And that's because there is. We can, instead of using the single gridline placement, actually use this option for all gridlines, which allows me to place this mullion type on all the gridlines that don't currently have a mullion placed on them now. So you can see that when I do that, it fills in the whole thing.
Same with this side; it fills in the whole thing. All I have to do now is go in and pick this one mullion that it added in and hit Delete. And now I've created my custom curtain wall.
