Discover how to add and adjust curtain grids manually for architectural designs. Learn techniques for setting the door placement, creating openings, and refining your design to achieve your desired look.
Key Insights
- The curtain grid in architectural design can be adjusted manually, allowing for specific dimensions and placements. This includes setting the head height of the grid and adding additional layers above it.
- Proper door placement within the grid is crucial. Techniques include dividing the space into equal sections and creating an opening for the door. The dimensions can then be adjusted to fit the specific size requirements.
- Refinements to the design can be made after the basic structure is created. This includes aligning and centering elements like doors, maintaining equal panels, and swapping panels for door types to finalize the design.
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Now we can go ahead and add our curtain grids. And because we use the curtain wall one, we have to do this all manually, which isn't that big of a deal, but it is a little bit more work than what we did on these previous ones. So let's go to the architecture tab, curtain grid, and I'm gonna start with my horizontals.
And so we want the head height to be the same. If I drop this one in, I can set it at eight foot one and a quarter, and you can use decimals like I did here, or you can do eight space one space one over four. That's all gonna give you the same thing.
And then we'll put one more above that, and we're gonna go nine feet above this one. And you can see I had no idea what that dimension was gonna be, but it doesn't matter because we can just go in and change that to nine feet. Now to keep it going around the corner, we just go ahead and you can almost feel it lock in when you drop it into place there.
The next thing we'll do is we wanna set the door so that it's in the middle of this piece here. And what I'll do is I'll essentially just divide this up into four, and then we'll create an opening that's gonna be six foot two and a half to make a six foot door in there. And whatever these panels end up being on the outside is what they'll do.
So what I'll do here is I'll just go in, and if you move your mouse around, you can kind of see that it'll lock in at the halfway point. And so I'm set at the halfway point. And if you look down on the corner here, it'll go away every time I move my mouse.
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But if you watch down here, it'll tell you what it's saying. So it's gonna say midpoint of curtain wall or curtain panel here, and then I can place it. And then I can do it again, and it'll actually find the midpoint again and the midpoint again.
And I can't really read those dimensions because of the pattern on the brick. So it's hard for me to tell if they are actually equal, but I do have that helper on the bottom left of my screen. And now that gives me the walls that I need or the grids that I need to create this side of the curtain wall.
We'll do the same thing, but I wanna have just one segment on this bottom side here. And I don't know exactly where those need to be, but what I do know is that I want a door that's gonna be that six foot two dimension. And that's this space right in here.
So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna edit this out. And if you remember, we do that with the add remove segments option, and I can add that and select it. And one of the things that I get a lot with questions with students is how do I get to that? And you have to keep in mind that right now that option is not available because I don't have a curtain grid selected.
When I select a curtain grid, I then get the add remove segments option. So you have to have a curtain grid selected before you do that. So before we move on to the south wall, we've got some refinement we need to do here.
So you can see it's pretty well blocked out, but it's not quite right yet. So let's go to level one. And what's cool about this is it's actually easier to see what we wanna do here.
If I go in and I draw a dimension, say from here to here, here and there, I know that I want, and I'll just draw some reference planes so that I know not to mess with it. I want this one and I want this one to remain the same. And I'm gonna have a door that's right in the center of that.
So I can draw a reference plane again, and then I can equal that dimension. And if I had the grid, I could just put it in there, but I removed that already, so it's gone. But this gives us the same result.
And I know I want my door to be centered here. And so if I were to look at what this dimension is, looks like I got pretty close. But when you look at my overall dimension, it's five foot nine instead of wanting it to be the six foot two and a half.
And so what I could do is I could do a little math and that's gonna be three foot one and a quarter. If I take this guy and I copy it up, three foot one and a quarter, so three space 1.25, so three foot one and a quarter, then it'll put it in the location I want and I can easily go in and align it. And then I can take this guy here using that mirror tool that we have grown to love and using align again, and I can lay it out and you can see how quickly that was.
And now we've got the door centered. We've maintained our four equal panels across the top. We've got our double door with the side lights and everything seems to work out pretty well.
So what I do is now that I know I want this to be a door, there's no reason to procrastinate. I go ahead and I change that out right away to the right door type and then it's ready to go. And the reason I changed out the panels before I put in the mullions is because it's just one less thing that's in the way.
If I do it right off the bat, I don't have to tab through mullions and grids to get to the panels. I can just go straight to the panel essentially. So that's gonna be our West wall.
In the next video, we're gonna take a look at our South wall.
