Discover specific architectural techniques for dividing a curtain wall into six equal panels, and the subsequent steps to manually create the desired look. Learn how to select and place mullions correctly, trim down grids, and integrate a wall type into the curtain wall.
Key Insights
- The process of dividing a curtain wall into six equal panels involves primarily architectural curtain grid, ensuring the placement is in the middle of the curtain panel.
- Placing mullions correctly includes choosing the corner type first and then proceeding with the rest of the mullions. Part of achieving the desired look involves deleting some of the mullions.
- Integrating a wall type into the curtain wall involves removing certain grids and mullions, and then selecting the large panel to change it into the desired wall type.
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For our south wall, what we're going to do is we're going to divide this up equally like we did with the west one. But instead of four equal panels, we're going to go with six equal panels.
And since it's an even number, that actually makes it easy for us. We can do the same thing—go to Architecture, Curtain Grid—and we can put one right in the middle. Make sure when you look down on the bottom left, it says "Middle of Curtain Panel."
And instead of going in the middle again this time—because if we did that, we’d end up with too many panels—we're going to look for where it says one-third or two-thirds of the panel so that I can divide each one of these up into three parts. And what’s cool is—well, it’ll go to the midpoint now—but what’s cool is that it just does the math for me.
There’s no guesswork. So you can see, it says "Two-Thirds of the Curtain Panel." If I went to this side, it says "One-Third." It doesn't matter which one you start with, but you can see I was easily able to divide this up manually to get the look I’m going for.
And so what I want to do is I want to make sure I’ve got all the panels in the right location and everything looks pretty good here. And so I'm at a point now where I could start adding some of the mullions in. And so what I'll do—and I typically do this on all curtain walls—is I’ll add the corner mullion first.
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So I'll go to Architecture, Mullion, and I'll pick the corner type I want to use, which is typically the 5" X 5" Quad Corner. I’ll place that one in, and then I'll go ahead and do the same thing, but this time I’m going to use the 2.5" X 5" and I'll set it to All Grid Lines and do the same thing on this side—All Grid Lines. This gives me the basic framework of how it looks.
And so I just go back in—not delete the panel itself, but delete the mullions that are on here. And when you do this, you have to delete both of them at the same time, because this door can’t have a regular rectangular shape. For this section right here, I’m actually going to place a new wall type within that area, and that’s going to make a couple of changes to my wall location.
We’ll be able to handle that pretty easily though. So to do that, the first thing I want to do is go ahead and delete all of these mullions here, because I just want the ones that are around the border and the ones on the bottom as well, since it’s going to be a wall that’s part of our curtain wall.
Then I can remove any of the grids that are within this location as well. If I use the Add/Remove tool after selecting the grid, I can remove this grid as well as this one, and do the same thing for the vertical—Add/Remove—and then remove those ones. Then I’ve got this one piece right here that needs to be trimmed down as well.
And you’ll notice, even though we had already removed that one portion, it still made me do it in a couple of different segments. Now that we have it set up with just one large panel, I can select the panel. And what’s cool is I can change this into any wall type.
We can use the same wall type we used for the existing building just to kind of tie the two together. So this EIFS on metal stud, and that gives me this type of look here. This will work out well, because we’re going to have the stair kind of going up through here, and it gives us our large, narrow lobby with the curtain wall and everything set up. So there are a few things we can do here.
Next is going to be our roof canopy, and then we’ll start working on embellishing this a little bit more.
