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What's the answer to the problem of wall finishes?


Christiaan

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Wall Styles are hugely inefficient at controlling wall finishes. Your number of Wall Styles soon proliferates out of control.

We need some other way of controlling finishes, whether it's changing colours/texture of brickwork, say, or changing from wet plaster to plasterboard on battens.

It's a complex problem. As soon as I start to formulate a actual suggestion in any detail I soon run into exceptions and problems.

What's the answer? And how do Revit and Archicad deal with the problem?

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It is a complex problem, especially for interior wall finishes. I typically use one long wall for the entire exterior length of the building, but inside the building there are usually 3 or 4 rooms created by interior walls T-ing into it. What do you do for that? You need to be able to have several different interior wall finishes the length of one wall. Or else use short segments of walls butted together at the "seams". Not a good solution. Extract planer objects for each interior room space/walls?

I haven't come up with a good solution yet.

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A thought: The finish items such as siding, wallboard, paint should not be wall components. They should be more like windows & doors, etc. They would be applied/bound to a wall, continuously or intermittently. The wall would now consist only of the framing, sheathing or other structural elements, insulation, utility runs (?), and other things that are constructed continuos with the wall but not related to individual spaces or exterior finishes.

More like the way structures are built. The bricks, wallboard and paint are not applied until all the walls are erected and joined. Current VWX walls create these things simultaneously with the wall, leaving designers to sort out how to put different finishes on several areas of the walls.

-B

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I typically use one long wall for the entire exterior length of the building, but inside the building there are usually 3 or 4 rooms created by interior walls T-ing into it.

It really gets out of control when you have different finishes on both sides of the wall (which we always do). If you have 4 internal finishes and 4 external finishes that can mean 16 wall styles just dealing with finishes, even if the build-up of your walls doesn't change. We typically have many more wall styles than that.

A thought: The finish items such as siding, wallboard, paint should not be wall components. They should be more like windows & doors, etc. They would be applied/bound to a wall, continuously or intermittently.

Agreed, it's hard to think of anything else that would work in all instances really.

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Why do you feel the need to think this out for NV Inc? What you want is simple...any wall bounding a space should have its finishes controlled in the space settings, same with floors and ceilings. How else would you schedule them?

If they can't come up with an elegant solution to this they don't deserve your subscription.

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And how do Revit and Archicad deal with the problem?

In Revit, you still can end up with varying wall styles to show different finishes within one project.

However, Revit's implementation of materials (Classes) makes it much easier to create and manage wall styles. These materials can be applied to either the inside or the outside of the wall. You can create stacked walls (combination of two existing, different walls into one wall style) as well as wall sweeps (think EAP within the wall style)

VW needs a similar approach to Revit's materials - whereby you can assign surface patterns, section hatches and 3D textures within the one material. This material can then be applied in any thickness to any slab, wall etc.

Edited by Kizza
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Why do you feel the need to think this out for NV Inc? What you want is simple...any wall bounding a space should have its finishes controlled in the space settings, same with floors and ceilings. How else would you schedule them?

If they can't come up with an elegant solution to this they don't deserve your subscription.

The reason is I'm not convinced NV even agree that there is a problem in need of a solution, let alone an elegant one. Add to this that wall components is the current inelegant solution and there's no reason to believe that an elegant fully thought out solution is forthcoming. I don't want a typical VW solution that works half the time and not the other either. Take for example the wall sculpting feature; it doesn't work at the corner of walls... and it's been like that since it was first added a few years ago. Inelegant and half-baked.

I don't think the problem is simple. Spaces should understand what finishes are in a space, agreed, but the Space tool doesn't seem like a natural way to control finishes. For a start it doesn't deal with external finishes.

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How about being able to have multiple finishes per wall.

For Wall Finishes - We would have to do this using extract surfaces, or define the wall components with height and top & bottom offsets.

Let's take this further.

Finihes definable by room. For any room. I listed just a few. It works for any defined (traced) area.

All definable regadless of wall type. No need to have multiple walls of same type for different finishes.

See jpeg image

Ex: Dining room - green upper walls, wainscoting below, with chair rail cap. Baseboard and crown moulding. Ceiling by texture & material. Flooring. Heck bulkeads (interior soffits).

Currently we have no options to predefine flooring, baseboard, crown, chair rail, ceilings that I am aware of.

Food for thought.

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I stand corrected.

Just tried creating an exterior wall with multiple textures on same plane.

Can't be done.

We can offset vetically the material, but can't stack.

At least from withing the wall menu.

Has anybody else tried this?

Edited by taoist
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I think composed walls could be an answer to this and other stuff.

Let me explain:

We have a wall which can have components, but what if we could have a wall that contains of walls/components in any arrangement we want? A wall should just be group of those and only those must be 'joined'. You could stack them, place them next to each other, .... . Only then we could make almost every wall we need to make.

But what with plug-ins, symbols etc... ? Well, we still need to be able to insert it into a wall, and the wall opening should just cut out all walls/components in that wall. But better would be that we don't need to insert such things in a wall, but just need to place them somewhere in the drawing, and then the object could react to the wall and cut out the things in all walls it needs to.

So to summarize: just let us use any 3D object as wall components and let VW do the rest like showing the section cut in plan view, section view, and let objects cut out their holes in it. This would solve so much problems we now have!

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I don't think the problem is simple. Spaces should understand what finishes are in a space, agreed, but the Space tool doesn't seem like a natural way to control finishes. For a start it doesn't deal with external finishes.

It's only unnatural because VW doesn't do it right at the moment. When you're specifying finishes, colours, fixtures, fittings etc in real life, you do it by space...therefore a BIM tool should do it by space.

The external finishes of walls are unrelated to internal finishes and should be controlled via an association with the wall, but again there is a more elegant solution. In your Wall Style definition you should be able to assign a fixed range of external materials for each style that can be applied by-instance in the design layer.

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Just bumping this one for NV attention.

I've just spent almost an entire day back and forth between plans, sections, wall styles, wall joins, slabs, slab-wall joins trying to produce tidy sections with finishes only showing where they should be.

Producing tidy 2D drawings from a model in VW is actually more time-consuming than standard 2D drawings, even when take into account that the model is already produced.

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Here's the problem visualised.

There are 7 wall styles required around this lift shaft, when, to my mind, there should only be 4. All the additional styles are required to ensure there are no internal wall linings shown to the inside of the lift shaft/service area. As you can see I've also had to split walls into sections (including the external wall) and join them end-on-end to make it work.

This creates a huge overhead and it's classic VW I'm afraid (i.e. VW is a collection of disparate tools that, as a whole, do not understand what a building is).

ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=8171&filename=finishes.png

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