Improve your 3D modeling skills by learning how to modify the outer boundaries of a wall in a 3D view using the edit profile tool. This article guides you through the process of using the tool to change the wall's shape, create openings, adjust geometry and avoid common errors.
Key Insights
- The edit profile tool allows for changes to the shape of a wall in a 3D model, including creating openings, adjusting the geometry, and adding curvature. However, these changes only affect the two-dimensional plane of the wall.
- The pick lines function can be used in conjunction with the edit profile tool to draw boundary lines in the model. However, caution should be taken not to overuse pick lines, as overlapping lines may cause errors.
- There are three critical rules to follow when sketching with these tools: maintain a continuous boundary, avoid intersecting or overlapping lines, and ensure all changes remain within the continuous boundary. Violating these rules can lead to issues in the model.
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For this next step, we're actually going to make these changes in the 3D view. Now that we have a few lessons under our belt, I think we're ready to start modeling in 3D. Let's jump to our default 3D view here.
And we're going to make a profile change, meaning we're going to change the outer boundaries of this wall by using the Edit Profile tool. And this is a tool that allows us to change the shape of this wall, maybe create openings in the wall, or even adjust the overall geometry of it by making it round or give it some curvature. And this is only going to happen in this plane here.
So it's not something that allows me to kind of freeform model it, but it does give me options in this two-dimensional plane. To do that, we're going to use these reference points that we've created with the two interior walls. So that lobby curtain wall that we've been talking about, that's going to be our top point here that's going to kind of create this top section.
And this interior wall that's along the grid line is going to create the vertical leg here. When we do edit profile, first we want to select the wall and then click on edit profile. And you can see it just gives us the outer boundary of that.
And the easiest way to do this and the most efficient method is going to be to use pick lines. And what pick lines will do is it'll pick a point that's existing in the model, and it'll draw a boundary line for me. When I use pick lines, I want to make sure that I'm using it pretty carefully because it's easy to overdo it.
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If I accidentally pick one or two lines twice, then it'll give me a warning saying that I have lines overlapping. So see how that's popping up as I accidentally double click on that. Not what we want.
We want to make sure as we're using pick lines that we're very carefully picking these points. So you can see I'm sitting on top of that wall there and it's drawing the line within the plane of our sketch. I'll do the same thing over here.
It's going to draw the line within the plane. And then now I'm just going to use a tool that we're very familiar with, which is our Trim Extend to Corner tool. And I can use that to create my new corners as I'm going around and creating the new shape.
And so that's the shape that we're trying to create there. And after we've created the shape, we can go ahead and we can hit the green check mark, which is how we finish our edit mode. And if you've done it all correctly, this is what it should look like.
Now, this is not obviously a perfect world. So, let's say we left intersecting lines.
Then I'm going to get a warning that says Lines cannot intersect each other. The highlighted lines currently intersect. So it's showing me that these two lines intersect.
So I'll hit continue and resolve that error. The beautiful thing about these sketches is that there's only three rules that we have to maintain. We need to have our continuous boundary, which we have here.
We don't want to have any intersecting lines or any overlapping lines. And so we can do pretty much anything within that, even something like putting a big circle within the middle of it. And if I were to finish the sketch, that's going to work.
And I can put as many of these circles as I want, even though it's totally not practical. But I can still do that as long as it stays within that continuous boundary. The moment I go here, it's not going to work.
So just as an example, I'll show you how that will look. And you can see we can create crazy circles to create the Swiss cheese facade look we wanted. I'm going to go ahead and take those out because our building is going to be a little more conservative than that.
And I'll finish the sketch. And we're going to go ahead and do the exact same thing on the south side. So I'll edit the profile.
I'll use the pick lines tool to pick my reference points here. And then just using Trim Extend to Corner, picking the sides I want to keep here as we go through to create the new profile. And there we have it.
This is the general shape of our building. There's only one more thing that we have to address. And some of you may have already picked up on it.
It's these walls here. They're both now interior and exterior walls. If we go to level one, we can see it a little bit more clearly.
You can see this is our exterior wall type and our interior wall type. We'll need to address that and make sure that we have the proper wall types in the proper locations.
