Learn the step-by-step process of creating punched window openings in a building plan using reference planes. This comprehensive guide also covers the creation of curtain walls and the integration of curtain grids into your 3D design.
Key Insights
- The article guides on creating punched window openings on a building plan utilizing reference planes. This involves initial creation of one window opening and copying it to all other desired locations.
- The tutorial further explains the process of creating a curtain wall in the design. This part of the process requires careful settings adjustment to avoid errors such as drawing two walls in the same space.
- Finally, the author covers the integration of curtain grids into the 3D design, ensuring precise dimension and alignment with existing elements, such as headers, in the design.
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I'm going to go ahead and jump over to my level two plan now, and what I want to do is I'm going to create my punched opening type that we're going to use for the windows on this side of the building, and what we'll do is we'll set up some reference planes so that we can draw these pretty simply, and then we'll go ahead and we can copy them into their location. We're essentially going to draw one exactly the way we want it, and then we'll copy it to all the other locations. Since we have a grid spacing here of 32 foot 8, what we can do is we can break that down into a couple different sections, and so what I'll do is I'll draw a reference plane just starting here, and I'll draw another one on the other side.
And so I'm going to set those to be two feet from the grid line, and even though this one says clearly two feet, I'm still going to go in, pick the reference plane, and change this value to make sure that it is exactly two feet, because it will set those at fractional values if you're not careful. Now that we have these dimensions set here, what I can do is I can establish my window opening size, and I can copy this one over, and it's going to be 13 foot 4 for this one, and I can copy it over back the other way. And what I'm trying to do is have two feet in between here, and so if I did my math correctly, that should be two feet.
And then if I were to go through, I'm just going to make one dimension string to make it easier here, and I'll add to it using this edit witness lines tool that we've used multiple times here. And then I can go ahead, and now I've got the bay that I want to use, and that keeps me set up. Now I can use this module here at each one of these bays, and then we'll have a unique condition at the corners, but these are all going to work the same way, essentially.
And so what we can do is we can create our curtain wall here, and because this one's going to be a little bit more unique, I'm not going to use the storefront type, because we are going to change a lot of things on here. And so what I'll do is I will set this one to go from level one to roof, and so I'm just going to start my wall tool. I'm going to change it to curtain wall one, and make sure it's set from level two to roof here, and draw it across, and again making sure that it's facing out.
So you'll notice that I'm getting an error, and it's essentially telling me, hey you're drawing two walls in the same space, and that's because this wall is literally just drawn right on top of it, whereas when we drew these ones, by having it automatically embed, it took care of that for us. And so we can do a couple of things here. If we don't want to have that automatically embed set up, we need to go to our modify, and we need to use this cut tool.
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And so if I were to cut geometry from my exterior wall to my curtain wall, it'll do the same automatic embed option. And so when I look at it in here, you can see this is the opening that I have now, whereas before I did the cut, that's what it looked like. And that was just me undoing and redoing again, just to show you the example.
Now what we need to do is we need to add our curtain grids. And so I know my first one going from my architecture tab to curtain grid is going to be a vertical, and I want it right down the middle. I'm going to jump over to my 3D view now, and I know the next one that I want is going to be in line with this header here, which is going to be four feet from the top.
So I can just draw it in anywhere like this, and then I can change this value to four feet. And that gives me the framework for the window that we're going to have in these locations here.
