Learn the steps to design walls using an exterior brick on metal stud wall type with a full height finish face exterior in a building model. This guide provides in-depth insight on manipulating wall settings, drawing and adjusting wall dimensions, and correcting orientation issues with detailed examples.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on creating and adjusting wall dimensions in a building model using an exterior brick on metal stud wall type. The base offset is set to three feet and the top constraint is set to top of parapet with zero top offset for full height.
- When walls overlap or when a wall does not extend entirely through a location, the modeler can split the wall at different locations, delete a section of it and butt the new wall up against the existing portions.
- Walls can be flipped for correct orientation without changing the dimensions by selecting the full chain of walls and changing the location line to wall center line. This technique is also used to adjust walls that extend beyond the parapet and to create openings in the wall for building entrances.
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Let's start by drawing these walls here. And we didn't define the back extent and that's okay. Cause we're going to play with that a little bit.
As we do the design here, we're going to use the wall type exterior brick on metal stud, and I'm going to set that to finish face exterior, and we want this wall to be full height. We're going to look at these settings right now. You can see a base offset set to three feet.
That's because the last thing we created was our existing curtain walls. And that's what the base offset was. And then the top constraint, we're going to do top of parapet, but we don't want a top offset.
We're going to set that to zero. So these are full height walls. We got that finished face exterior goings, and this is the clear dimension we want.
So I'll kind of start here. This is the wrong direction that it's facing. So I'm gonna hit space bar and then I'll just work my way through.
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Now you may have noticed that I did get an error here and it's telling me that I overlapped those walls. And that's because this wall is not actually going to go all the way through there. So what I'll do is I'll split it at two locations here, and then I could split it, say here, and what that'll do is it'll give me the opportunity to delete a section of it, and then I could take my new wall and butt it up against the existing portions here and here.
And so now you can see we've got our new walls drawn in. And if we go to 3D view, we can readjust our phase settings to be previous plus new instead of previous plus demo. And I can see the wall that I've just now created.
And so what I'll do is I'll do the same thing on the other side, going back to that new level one plan, I'll go ahead and draw the same wall. And what I like to do is just use create similar because I don't want to have to redo any of those settings. And I'm even going to take it another step further and use the rectangle tool to draw this, this wall in, and I'll just kind of pick a point here, something like that, and that allows me to just get the wall in to the points where we need it.
And you can see here when we look at it, you're noticing that this is gray on the outside, whereas this is kind of a red color. And that's because we set this to finish face exterior. And when I drew it, I essentially drew it inside out.
And that's not a big deal because we can go in and we can actually flip these around. And what I do is instead of just going through and flipping them like that, and then having to readjust everything, what I'll do is I'll select all those walls using that tab key to select the full chain. And then I can change the orientation of the location line from finish face exterior to wall center line.
And it's important that you use wall center line because it'll put it right in the middle. And then I can go through and I can just flip these all four of them and notice it doesn't change any of the dimensions. And that's because I picked the wall center line as the location line.
When you flip a wall and have say finish face exterior as a location line, it'll use that as the point to flip it about. But if you have it at wall center line, it won't change any of the dimensions. And so now you can see when I go back to the 3D view, we have it set up pretty clearly.
Now, when you look at it in 3D, you can see that it's really not working out that well, cause we're going to have this big opening here. And so what I want to do is I'm going to take this wall, which is essentially the inside portion here. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to trim it to corner with this piece.
And that's going to give me my building envelope at the location where I need it. And when you look around, you can kind of see that there's some adjustments that we can make, like maybe this wall, this wall, and this wall don't need to go full height. And so I could adjust them.
Those three right there, instead of top of parapet, I can have them go up to level roof and then I'll sit down below the roof. Now this one is a little bit more unique because it actually takes the job of two pieces here. So do you see how it's going up and over the parapet and then across and through, and it doesn't necessarily have to do that.
And so if you wanted to have this wall drop down below the parapet at that location, then what you could do is you can actually edit the profile of it so that the wall does not poke up at this point. And if you remember from some of our BIM 101 lessons, we did this to create the notched entry. And so if I were to say, edit profile here, I could simply use the elements that are already in the model, like this existing wall as my vertical face.
And then I can use the bottom of my, my floor or my roof here as the other portion. And this one's a little trickier to get to because we don't have a great way to get to it. Um, but you can see how we can use that to help us create the opening.
And so I'll just trim it at this point here, and then I'm going to move this one down another foot. So it says one foot, two and a half. So I'll just change that to two and then we can adjust it later as we see fit.
And so that notch will give me the exposed wall at the height I want here, but it drops it down below the roof line at that location. So I'll do a finish. And now this is the look that we're going for.
And we've got the main walls drawn in. Clearly this isn't exactly what we want because we will have to edit this profile to create the opening, but we are certainly one step closer.
