Chimney

[Bruce Kieffer]

I'm drawing my house in 3D. What are some techniques for drawing chimneys? In the basement layer, I have the foundation drawn around the outer base of the chimney, and the interior walls are drawn straight across the opening. To draw the exterior portion of the chimney (the brick), is that typically done with a basic extrusion, or with the wall tool, or some other way?

[michael john williams]

We normally draw the chimmney as a piece of wall.

[bclydeb]

We generally use extrudes to form masonry chimneys. Since we render them using brick textures using the RenderWorks this works well. Fancier chimneys - e.g. "Queen Anne", spiraling and twisted chimneys such as abound in the Eastern US and the British Isles we also incorporate various solids modeling techniques and apply a texture. Our chimneys are abutted to a standard wall and use the fireplace plug in at the wall. To get the firebox to show correctly in elevations, renderings and sections we do a solids subtraction in the shape of our firebox.

If we are using a manufactured fireplace in wood framing we model the surrounding walls using the wall tool. We use masonry veneer type walls and render them with a texture if we are simulating a masonry fireplace.