Explore the method of drawing ribbon windows in using curtain wall wall type, which starts with establishing the extents of the windows. Understand the use of reference planes as a tool for drafting line or a working line as they don't print and will stay intact and prominently show up on elevation views and views in levels above and below the current working plan.
Key Insights
- The first step in drawing ribbon windows is establishing the extents of these windows by using reference planes, a tool that provides drafting lines or working lines that are visible on elevation views and levels both above and below the current working plan.
- While creating the curtain wall, it is essential to check the 'automatically embed' option, which enables the curtain wall to cut out the host wall and embed itself into it, preventing a situation where one wall is drawn over another.
- It is possible to establish parameters for the curtain wall itself to avoid adjusting them later, such as the vertical and horizontal mullions, and the layout of the vertical and horizontal grid, which can be set to a fixed distance or maximum spacing.
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To draw ribbon windows in, we're actually going to use the curtain wall type. And the first thing that we want to do here is we want to establish the extents of these windows. We're going to start in this one first.
And what I want to do is I'm going to add a couple of reference planes. And reference planes are a great tool for using as kind of like a drafting line or a working line that we can use because they don't print and they will stay intact. And what's great is they actually will show up on elevation views and views, say, in the levels above and below the current working plan.
If I were to go to the architecture tab and then find reference plane, this is a good keyboard shortcut to know as well. This one's RP. I can add a reference plane, say, here.
And these are just lines that I'm drawing. So I'm just clicking, clicking again. And what I want to do is I want to establish a dimension of three feet from the grid line to that reference plane.
So I'll just draw in those dimensions and then I'll adjust the location of the reference plane by selecting the reference plane and changing the dimension value to three feet. And now I've got the location where I want the window here. And I'm going to do the same thing going down to the other side.
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So I'll just use the mirror pick axis. So I know that's three feet. And then I can simply copy this last reference plane down the distance we're looking for.
And for this project, I want to copy it down 35 feet. And that's going to be the length of the entire window. And so what I've done here is I've given myself two bays, say, here and here, where we're going to have a window that runs all the way across.
We'll start with this first one here. And this is not going to be under the window command. This is going to be under the wall tool.
And so if I go to wall, I'm going to pick one of our curtain wall types. So you can see here, these are the curtain wall types. I'm going to go with exterior glazing.
Before we create this, I'm going to go to edit type. And we want to make sure that a couple of things are happening for us here. First off, this automatically embed is pretty important.
And I'll show you why here in a second. If I don't have that set, then when I draw my curtain wall, it's actually going to just draw a wall on top of another wall. See how it didn't do anything for me there? If I do it again, but this time I have automatically embed checked, it'll cut out the host wall, which is our brick on metal stud.
And it automatically embeds the curtain wall into it. When we go back into that wall command with exterior glazing, we want to make sure we go to edit type. And we set that automatically.
The next thing we can do is we can actually establish a lot of the parameters for the curtain wall itself so that we don't have to do it later. The parameters that we're going to change here are the vertical and horizontal mullions. And so I'll go in and I'm just going to set all of these to the rectangular two and a half by five.
If you remember from the little exercise I did before, the mullions didn't show up. It was just a pane of glass that showed up. So none of the framing elements of the window were part of the model.
And so now that we have these set, then we can go ahead and draw the rest of it. When we look at our layout here, the vertical and horizontal grid, we're going to stick with fixed distance for both of these. Essentially, what that means is that every six feet, it's going to try and drop a mullion.
And then every 12 feet, it's going to drop one vertically on there. And in some projects, this may not be the option to go with. And I think most cases, you're not going to want it to just go every six feet and put a mullion.
You're probably going to want it to be spaced a little bit more equally. So what I like to do is I'll change this layout from fixed distance to maximum spacing. So it's essentially saying it's going to divide the wall up in a way that won't give me a width on the vertical grids or the pane of glass of greater than six feet.
And same thing with the horizontal grids. If I set that anything over 12 feet is probably going to divide it into two equal spaces or two mullions, because that way I won't go over 12 feet of a vertical height. Our wall is not going to be that tall, so it's not going to matter so much.
But max spacing or even establishing the number are the way to go here. So I'll hit OK. And I'm going to go ahead and add that in.
And this wall is going to be created within the stud here. So you can see as I go through, it'll actually find that point. And what's great is it'll actually find the intersection between our reference plane and the center line of the wall.
So I'll go ahead and click to place it. And right now, you can see it's facing outside is to the right. If I hit spacebar, it'll flip it until I get to that next intersection.
And that's how we create our curtain wall. Before we move on, though, we want to make sure that we have the size correctly.
