Learn how to adjust the spacing of grid lines, dimensions, and constraints while setting up window placements in a building project. This article ensures you'll gain a deeper understanding of how wall dimensions can be manipulated to achieve a desired layout without racking up errors.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed guide on how to adjust grid lines and wall dimensions to achieve the right window spacing, reducing the working dimension from 13-foot-4 to 13 feet.
- The tutorial also emphasizes the importance of using temporary or permanent dimensions to avoid errors while adjusting equal constraints for a curtain wall.
- The author offers a step-by-step process on setting up walls and windows in specific locations, modifying corners, and reflecting similar conditions across different points in the building project.
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Now because the Grid Lines on the side of our building here, the A, B, C, and D, are 30-foot spaced, we have to look at our window spacing a little bit differently. And so mine are pretty close to the building, so I'm going to move that 3D Extent out a little further so I have some room to work here. But essentially we're losing 8 inches across, and so the 13-foot-4 that we're working with here is going to have to reduce down, and so we're going to make it 13 feet.
So I'll take this guy here, and if I copy this 13 feet, and then this one's going to be 2 feet, 2 feet, and then do it again, and we're going to have 13. If we did our math right, then we should have 2 feet at this point here. Now I just need to go in and adjust these walls.
So I want this Grid Location to stay the same, and I definitely want this one to be in the middle of both of those. If I take the extents of this wall and adjust it to that point, and then adjust this one down as well, that gives me the 2 feet, and then I just need to make sure that this is in the middle. And so instead of 6-foot-2 and 6-foot-4, this value needs to be 6-foot-6, and that gives me the wall dimension I'm looking for.
And so we'll just make these adjustments to those dimensions, and then we should be good to go. Another way, if you're not a big fan of doing math, which I don't blame you for that at all, is you can go in and you can actually adjust the Equal Constraints. And now when you do Equal Constraints for a Curtain Wall, I highly recommend using your temporary dimension, and if you can, making it a permanent dimension.
And this one's not giving me that option, so what I need to do is when I draw the dimension, I want to make sure that my left and right extents are of the Curtain Wall. And this, I've found, is the best way to ensure you're not going to get many errors. And so I'm just using that tab option here until I get, see how it's the little dashed lines? And that allows me to then adjust the Equal Constraints so that they're the same.
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And so I'm going to delete this dimension because I don't need it on this plan, and then I will unconstrain it just so it doesn't become an issue in the future. Now I can take this one, just this one here, and I can mirror it over Grid Line C. And because I know I want two feet here, what I'll do is I'll just copy these two Reference Planes from the edge of my Curtain Wall here to this one there. And that'll give me the framework for my next copy, which is copying this one up and over.
And then now I have this same condition that exists at this point here. So this corner is the same at this location here. And so what I could do is I could go through and I can actually mirror this to hit that point.
And so you may notice that the Grid Line offset to this wall is not the same here. And so we have to just be careful and mindful of that, but we can get the same wall within that same location. And it's important to note that these walls are their own individual elements.
And so I could literally, I could literally just copy this, this Corner Piece, and I can set it off into nowhere, essentially. And I can work from it at this point. So this is my corner.
And if I wanted to take these two walls and say, rotate them so that I had the outside corner here and then move them into place. If I was trying to use this as my guideline here, I could draw in a Reference Plane and set it two feet back. And then I can move my wall into that location and that'll give me my first spot.
So I know that it's going to be this Grid Line here that is going to set this location. And then I can move the wall down from the face of the Mullion to the face of the wall. And that starts to put us exactly where we want it to be.
And so if I were to check some dimensions here, and again, that's going to be different because of this relationship here. But if I were to mirror this guy, I should start to see some of the same dimensions. So two feet, 13 feet, and this one looks a little shorter.
And again, that's because we lost some dimension here, but that's easy to pick up. And so this is one foot five, and that's two foot three. If I were to take my wall here, and I can actually start moving these things around.
So I need to pick up seven inches to get that two feet there. So I'll type in zero space seven, and it'll move the wall. And then I can start adjusting my Grids around.
And so I want this one to be, I still want to have that two foot dimension. So I'll change that to two feet. And then we need to make sure that this is still going to have the 13 foot and then the six foot six, because that's half a 13 on these dimensions here.
And that gives me the same type of relationship all the way down this wall. Now we have that same corner condition that we need to address. And so if I go to my 3D View, we can address that corner the exact same way that we have for all of our other walls here.
And that's the other one. So it's this corner here that we need to modify. So I'll go ahead and Edit Profile and using the same, same exact options, right? Picking those lines and then splitting and using that Trim/Extend the corner to create that clean corner condition.
Now, when we go in here, we want to make sure that we take out that Corner Mullion on that top portion, because we did add that after the fact. And the same thing on this side here, I can see it kind of sticking out there. And we do have some issues with our Wall Joins in here, but we'll address that later.
Now we have a window that needs to go here, and then two that need to go in this location. And so what I'll do is I'll jump back into my Level Two plan. And what I could do is I can grab the windows from this side, and I can just copy them into the other wall.
And we might have to adjust them a little bit after the fact, but that's not a big deal because we can easily move them around. What I want to do here is I want to go ahead and flip them so that they're facing out. And then I'll select them again and move them to the desired location.
We could have been a little more careful with the move operation, the first one, and put them exactly where we wanted them, but really isn't that big of a deal to go in and just make that move. And so now if I were to check out my 3D View, you can see we've got most of the windows in our project on both the First Floor and the Second Floor. And we're ready to start doing a little bit of refinement and maybe even some interior modeling as we move forward.
