Discover the process of adding a metal coping across the top of a wall in your project, using sweeps and reference planes to model the element accurately. Learn how to create a new family, draw reference planes, and add profiles for a realistic representation of the metal coping on your wall cap.
Key Insights
- The article shows how to add a metal coping to the top of a wall in a project, recommending the use of sweeps for walls that don't reach the top of the parapet. This is because a parapet cap would look odd on a wall that doesn't reach full height.
- The process involves creating a new family in the English Imperial template and using the Profile Hosted option, which provides helpers for better modeling. The intersection of two reference planes serves as the basis for the modeling, and all elements are modeled off this location.
- After creating the reference planes, the article provides a step-by-step guide on how to draw the metal coping using the line command. Following this, the metal coping profile is saved and loaded into the project, and added to the wall in the 3D view.
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The next sweep that we're going to create is for the metal coping that'll go across the top of our wall here. And now this is something that can definitely be added as part of a wall type or we can add it as a sweep to the project. My personal preference here is to add it as a sweep because we will have walls that are part of the same type that you can see here that don't go all the way up to the top of the parapet.
So it would be weird to have a parapet cap sitting on one of these walls that are not going full height. So the first thing we have to do, just like our last two assignments, is we need to go in and we need to create that profile. We're going to do the same thing we've done before.
We're going to go in and we're going to create a new family. We'll go to File, New, Family, and we're going to pick our template from English Imperial and we're looking for Profile. And this one doesn't have anything special going on here, but we do have a couple options that we can use that might be a better fit.
So I would prefer to use Profile Hosted. Profile would work as well, but it doesn't give us the helpers that we get from Profile Hosted. So I like to use this one.
I'm going to click Open and the reason I like it is because it tells me, it gives me a better idea of how to model the element. And so we're going to use this intersection of the two reference planes as the basis point for how it's going to look. And that means that everything's going to be modeled off of this location.
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So that means this is essentially our top of parapet line and this is the face of our wall. We want to keep that in mind as we create this. Now, these guys here that we're seeing, they're just helpers that are put into place.
If we need to, like in this case, we can move this to the outside so that doesn't get in the way of our modeling. Now to create this, the first thing I want to do is draw a reference plane vertically here. And I use keyboard shortcut R P to create that.
But I want to create a reference plane that gives me the full depth of our exterior wall. And that distance is one foot two. If I draw a dimension here, I can see that my arbitrary location was eight and three quarters.
So I'll just select my reference plane and then change that dimension value to one foot two. And so now I know exactly how wide this is going to be. The next thing I'll do is I'll draw a couple more reference planes.
So I want these two vertical ones to be one inch away from the two that are already there. So you can see I'm just kind of mocking them in and then placing it. And then I'll draw a couple of horizontals as well.
So I'm going to draw one horizontal across this way here, and it doesn't have to go the full length. So I'll actually stop it here. And I want that one to be one and a half.
So zero space 1.5 for one and a half inches. And then I'll draw this one at one inch off of the main horizontal there. The last reference plane that I'll draw is going to be on the bottom here, and that's going to be four and a half inches below that main center line.
If I were to draw a dimension here, I can set this one to be four and a half. And that would give me an overall dimension at the highest point of six inches. So the dimensions aren't going to be required because we're creating this kind of as a one-off piece.
But the reference planes give us a really good framework so that we can essentially just connect the dots at this point. The next thing I'll do is I'm going to go to create, line, and I'll start from say this point here. And all I have to do is go through and hit all of these intersections at this point.
And one thing that's going to be really important when you do this is when you're hitting create and then line, you want to make sure chain is checked here. Because if chain is not checked, it's just going to draw individual segments. And so I would skip every other one, and we don't want that.
So I'm going to go through, I'm going to hit the intersection here. And you can see I'm still active in the line command. So I'll hit this one.
And then I'm going to draw an angle, which will represent the slope of our parapet cap across here. And then I'll go straight across for a straight element. And then back down vertically over to this point, up vertically to this intersection.
And then we'll go across and then down to close it out. And at that point, you can see that we have this shape, which will just sit over the top of our wall. So it's not an exact profile shape, but it's a representation of the metal coping that would get installed on top of our wall cap.
Just like our previous profiles, our next step here is going to be to save as. So file, save as, family. And we're going to save this as metal coping.
Hit save. And then we can load it into our project. Our next step is going to be to add the profile.
So I'm going to go to our 3D view, because it's clearly going to be the easiest way to add this. And we'll go to wall, sweep. And this time, we just need to do the same thing we did before with the reveal, but we're going to be adding a sweep.
So I'll do edit type, duplicate. I'm going to call this one metal coping. And then I just need to set the profile to what we want it to be.
So it's going to be metal coping and hit OK. And then we can add this to our wall. And so as we go through and place it, you can see I get a little preview here.
And so there's the first one, and it's going to want to make a continuous chain all the way around. And so you can see here as I go to the next one, it will add it. And one thing that's important is if you look at the preview here, when I go from, say, this side, it's flipped and sloping outside of the building instead of the inside.
So I need to make sure I 3D orbit using shift and the mouse wheel to get it around. So you can see the difference is it miters the corners here. Whereas when I come in from this side, it's not going to miter the corners.
So I know that it's not going to be a continuous profile. And then I'll add it in. And then once I'm done, I can just hit escape to get out of that command.
And there we have it. Our metal coping has been added.
