Is there any way of creating a non-mitred wall join, like this?

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I'm always coming up against this issue, where a sloped gable wall meets a level eaves wall.

 

Vectorworks does its mitred join, which produces something that bears no resemblance to the reality to how a corner like this would be built. Sometimes it can be covered up with roof elements, and I can pretend it's not there but sometimes, in order to work out certain details it can't. And then I have to resort to building things out of dumb solids (or a bunch of parallel one-component walls).

 

This morning I thought I'd check that there's not some way of doing what I want, that I am missing.

 

To start with I tried just getting the end, gable wall right. I tried using the "wall end cap" tool and then the "create wall recess" command. But both of them mess up.

 

Even if I'd got either of those to work...I'm not sure that I could actually then properly join the other wall to the result.

 

So...is there some way of creating this junction that I don't know about?

 

I've attached the example file.

 

wallcorner.vwx

[Tom W.]

You can do it with a Wall Hole Cutter symbol , same idea as your Wall Recess attempt:

 

 

But not a very flexible solution + you don't get the correct representation in Top/Plan but luckily for you this probably isn't an issue!

 

See:

wallcorner-TW.vwx

[line-weight]

@Tom W. interesting - thanks.

 

I made a kind of mirrored version of your wall cutter symbol to cut a stepped end to the other wall, and then assembled them together.

 

 

In the 3d view above, VW knows not to draw a line between the two brick components where they meet each other - even though the walls aren't "joined".

 

However, as I feared, in a horizontal section viewport it does draw lines where I don't want them ... and doesn't give a thick line to the end "cap" of the brick component like it should:

 

 

 

 

 

This is how a conventional join looks in a horizontal section viewport:

 

 

 

And if I try and join these two walls (with the hole cuts applied), then the hole-cuts disappear.

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Am wondering, is there a clever way to persuade VW that the end of the wall is in fact one side reveal of an opening, and get it to "wall closure" wraps around that reveal?

 

I'm yet to start using wall closures properly so would have to learn up on them, but I expect this would end up being horribly complicated.

[Tom W.]

36 minutes ago, line-weight said:

This is how a conventional join looks in a horizontal section viewport:

 

 

 

And if I try and join these two walls (with the hole cuts applied), then the hole-cuts disappear.

 

How about having two conventionally L-joined walls for the main section with a third wall on top? Something like this:

 

wallcorner-TW-2.vwx

[line-weight]

Yes - good thinking - that could work in many cases. I do end up with stacked walls for this kind of thing quite often. Here, used in conjuction with the hole cut approach, it works well.

 

The problem with stacked walls comes when you want a door or window opening to span across both of them. In fact, on the other end of the bit of the building that I originally extracted these two wall elements from, to use for this thread, this is the case. There is a window in the opposite gable-end whose head is higher than the eaves of the long side wall.

 

This can be got around by having stacked walls just for the first bit of the gable wall, leading up from the corner, then transitioning to a single wall for the rest including the bit with the window in it.

 

That's fine in principle but then it becomes more laborious to edit various things, like the pitch of the roof and so on.

 

And I sometimes reach a point where I decide it's quicker just to make the whole thing from solids which I can shove around with the push-pull tool.

 

It's a shame that wall components can't have "start" and "end" offsets like can be done for the top and bottom of walls.

[Tom W.]

1 minute ago, line-weight said:

It's a shame that wall components can't have "start" and "end" offsets like can be done for the top and bottom of walls.

 

Also I really wish you could 'Add 3D Object to Wall' + 'Subtract 3D Object from Wall' the same way you can with Slabs. In a case like this you could very quickly + easily add some 3D geometry to your gable wall + get the corner looking the way you need it without having to jump through dozens of hoops + end up with something that's a nightmare to edit further down the line.

[zoomer]

I usually try to do this with endless playing with Wall Component Connection Tool.

 

I did not ever have a VW Roof so far but different Wall Height situations anyway.

And with endless I mean that I can play easily 2 hours on a single Wall Connection.

But it is interesting that in most cases you will get to your desired result at one point.

 

Which means that already the overall Wall Connection type is important if it will work

or fail. And you usually have to try all possible sequences and directions and all kind

of capped or uncapped options.

[line-weight]

2 minutes ago, zoomer said:

I usually try to do this with endless playing with Wall Component Connection Tool.

 

I don't think there's any way to do what I want with the component connection tool, because it will always join the components with the diagonal mitre.

 

(Unless I try using the capped T mode, which gets rid of the mitres but pulls one of the sections back from the corner)

[Tom W.]

7 minutes ago, zoomer said:

I usually try to do this with endless playing with Wall Component Connection Tool.

 

I did not ever have a VW Roof so far but different Wall Height situations anyway.

And with endless I mean that I can play easily 2 hours on a single Wall Connection.

But it is interesting that in most cases you will get to your desired result at one point.

 

Which means that already the overall Wall Connection type is important if it will work

or fail. And you usually have to try all possible sequences and directions and all kind

of capped or uncapped options.

 

Yes + with Wall End Caps as well you can normally achieve anything but I didn't realise this would happen:

 

I think when I have been using Wall End Caps to achieve complex connections I've been more concerned with what I see in Top/Plan + anything like above has been lost inside the roof + never seen so it hasn't been a problem...

[zoomer]

Ah, could be that capped T-Mode is sometime necessary to force a butted connection,

like in cases when Walls or their components do not use the same height levels ....

 

But AFAIR,

join same Materials, brought a desired non-capped Top Plan result anyway .... (?)

[line-weight]

13 minutes ago, zoomer said:

And with endless I mean that I can play easily 2 hours on a single Wall Connection.

 

This process looks something like this?

 

 

[line-weight]

Ok, here is the other very common problem scenario. Anywhere three or more walls meet at the same point. So it's neither an L join or a T join. And if they aren't all at the same height the "mitred join" issue is in play too.

 

I'm not allowed to use the wall cap tool on joined walls, and I'm not allowed to use the component join tool on unjoined walls.

 

In this particular case, this means the walls all have to be unjoined, because I don't think there's a way to cut back the various components without using the wall cap tool.

 

The 3d view shows the geometry as I want it:

 

 

And that's fine, but then the question is what's going to happen in floorplans, or elevations:

 

 

 

The best result for me here is the horizontal section with "same fill" merged. But that setting can cause things I don't want to happen, to happen, in other areas of the drawing (have to remind myself what they are exactly).

 

And the elevation seems to be successful... but I don't feel 100% confident that a line won't unpredictably appear at the junction between the "unjoined" walls. I think elevations in theory won't draw a line between coplanar wall object faces, is that right? But this can be temperamental.

 

 

Anyway for anyone who wants a challenge, is it possible to draw this junction so it will appear properly in either or both of the top/plan and the non-same-fill-merged HS viewports? I don't think it is.

 

(File attached)

 

 

 

wallcorner_v2.vwx

[E|FA]

6 hours ago, line-weight said:

Ok, here is the other very common problem scenario. Anywhere three or more walls meet at the same point. So it's neither an L join or a T join. And if they aren't all at the same height the "mitred join" issue is in play too.

 

I'm not allowed to use the wall cap tool on joined walls, and I'm not allowed to use the component join tool on unjoined walls.

 

In this particular case, this means the walls all have to be unjoined, because I don't think there's a way to cut back the various components without using the wall cap tool.

This is the most common issue that I have to deal with.  Thanks for the clear explanation.

[Tom W.]

This is my take using the Wall Join Tool only. Almost what you wanted but not quite:

 

 

To get a T join with three different Walls like this I often run one of the outer walls past the internal wall by 0.1mm to allow me to use a T join on them, then the second outer wall can be L joined to it. You'd have to zoom in really close to see the step.

 

wallcorner_v2_TW.vwx

 

[line-weight]

@Tom W. good work!

 

Doing the thing of extending one of the walls very slightly past the junction, it makes me uncomfortable because I worry it'll cause something bad to happen elsewhere/later.

 

But maybe I should get over that; obviously there are a lot of advantages if you can have the walls actually all joined.

 

I assume you then went on to do a bit of adjustment with the wall cap tool, and/or component join?

 

It gives a good result in top/plan, which is what you will be interested in, but does give me some mitres in horizontal section:

 

 

 

I might be able to get rid of at least some of those with a bit more tweaking though.

 

 

There are various things I can do to break it, but maybe these combinations of wall types wall would also be resolvable?

 

 

 

[Tom W.]

8 minutes ago, line-weight said:

 

I assume you then went on to do a bit of adjustment with the wall cap tool, and/or component join?

No I think I just used Wall Join Tool. Plus Edit Wall Tool to put a step in the top of the external Wall.

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1 minute ago, Tom W. said:

No I think I just used Wall Join Tool. Plus Edit Wall Tool to put a step in the top of the external Wall.

Had just realised, you couldn't have used wall cap tool because they are all joined.

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I wanted to do some more tests using the "wall hole cutter" symbol approach, to see if there are situations where this can give me what I want.

 

Seem to have fallen at the first hurdle in creating my own wall cutting symbol. Vectorworks won't let me insert it into a wall (the wall won't highlight in red when I move the symbol over it). The @Tom W. wallcutter, provided in an earlier file on this thread, works. But I can't work out what's different about mine.

 

The file below contains a wall object and two symbols. The TW wall cutter symbol works, the LW one doesn't. What am I doing wrong?

 

(I do have the "wall insertion mode" turned on, when I try with either).

 

 

wallcutter.vwx

[Tom W.]

16 minutes ago, line-weight said:

I wanted to do some more tests using the "wall hole cutter" symbol approach, to see if there are situations where this can give me what I want.

 

Seem to have fallen at the first hurdle in creating my own wall cutting symbol. Vectorworks won't let me insert it into a wall (the wall won't highlight in red when I move the symbol over it). The @Tom W. wallcutter, provided in an earlier file on this thread, works. But I can't work out what's different about mine.

 

The file below contains a wall object and two symbols. The TW wall cutter symbol works, the LW one doesn't. What am I doing wrong?

 

(I do have the "wall insertion mode" turned on, when I try with either).

 

 

wallcutter.vwx 314.82 kB · 1 download

 

You need to enable 'Insert in walls' for your symbol!

[line-weight]

Just now, Tom W. said:

 

You need to enable 'Insert in walls' for your symbol!

Right ... had thought that meant making sure the right "wall insertion mode" was on, but it's this box here under "Symbol Options"

 

 

Only just managed to find it now.

 

This is yet another instance of the "Symbol Options" or "Plug-in options" trap because these options aren't available by right-clicking on a symbol instance or from the symbol OIP. You have to go to the resource browser and find it there by right-clicking on the symbol definiton.

[Tom W.]

Yes this has been discussed as well. I think I did a Wishlist item about all of this.

 

Bizarrely, in the case of a flipped symbol instance only, if you double-click on it you get a 'Symbol Options' choice come up in the Edit Symbol dialog:

 

 

This doesn't happen with an unflipped symbol.

 

However it's even less useful than that because when you select it + open the 'Symbol Options' dialog the settings aren't right + changes don't affect the symbol the way they should. So just a weird bug. But shows the ability is almost there to have it as an option! (i.e. to access the symbol or PIO settings from the drawing space).

[line-weight]

Hm.

 

VW help is not very helpful on exactly what all of these insertion options mean, so am currently working it out by trial and error which is how I seem to end up having to do most things:

 

It's not even very helpful in explaining quickly and clearly how the symbol orientation is related to wall direction and so on ... something that a quite basic diagram could communicate very quickly. Like, X axis is parallel to wall direction and so on.

 

Unless I've missed something somewhere.

 

With the "wall cutter" symbol approach, I'm finding it quite hard to get them to appear where I want, because if they don't have any 3d geometry there's no visual clue as to where they are gong to end up, and whether they are going to be pointing the right direction. But maybe I'll get used to it once I figure it all out more.

[Tom W.]

It doesn't take long to figure out. Generally 'Wall left edge' or 'Wall right edge' is the best way to go. A couple of versions ago the only option was wall centre which was far less useful.

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Is there a way to reliably insert a symbol un-flipped in either axis? Just double-clicking on the desired spot doesn't produce consistent results. First click to choose location, then second to determine flip - but for that you need some visual cues as to what's happening.