wall styles: what would you do?

[domer1322]

I've always been unsure of the best way to solve this problem. I often model, in 3D, existing buildings, and make a rendering. Often the walls might be painted CMU on the interior, and brick veneer exterior. The problem is, each room might have a different color paint on the CMU. What is the best method to set up the walls so that each wall, although the same in structure, can easily have a different color in a rendering ? The problems that seem unsolvable to me include:

1) many different wall styles for the same type of wall (diff color)

2) the same exterior wall has one color in one room but another color in the next room over. Does that require multiple walls along the same length, even though it is the same structural wall ?

3) no easy way to change the paint color in one room, without affecting the colors of many other rooms that have the same wall style or class or components

I'm hoping that I've missed an easy solution and that someone can educate me. Thanks in advance for any response. What do you do ?

[AlanW]

A simple thing you can do is extract the face of the wall and extrude it by 1mm and then you can colour all the wall whatever you want and have 1 wall style.

You could even cut the extracted surface in 2, high and low and paint top a colour and the bottom wood paneling.

Edited August 23, 2015 by Alan Woodwell

[Amelia S]

Domer, I struggle with the same issue. Alan's suggestion is good, but I dislike such manual methods because a) it clutters the drawing and b) it needs to be moved or reshaped separately from the wall it is representing.

Maybe someone else will pop in with an easy answer I'm unaware of, but if not, do you think there's room for the space tool to have a role in interior finishes? I never use the space tool, so probably I'm way off and there are a million reasons this wouldn't work. But it might allow us to keep wall types to a minimum and assign interior finishes by room. Wish list?

[billtheia]

If your renderings are of individual rooms you could override the interior wall finish class in the sheet layer viewport.

If your renderings need to show more than one room at a time then you might be best off simply manually setting the colors for each room. With the issue of exterior walls running past multiple interior rooms, I'd probably slice the exterior wall at the centerline of the interior wall. Not elegant, I know but I don't know of a better way to do it. If your building isn't too big, manually setting the wall colors isn't as bad as it sounds.

Good luck.

[VincentCuclair]

Unfortunately I would still go with a Wall Type for each variation of the wall, however to make this process a little faster make sure the Wall Components that have different colors are Classed. Then I would create a class for each color or material you are going to need ie. CMU-paint-grey light, CMU-paint-grey dark etc. Then when you need to have a new wall type just duplicate it and assign the correct class to the correct Wall component. ( I agree there will be a lot of wall types but I think once it is set up you'll get quick at it and the advantage is you can quickly tweek a wall or material and the changes show throughout the file. An added advantage is you can override certain materials in VPs for presentation purposes because they are classed.)

Presumably you'll create a library of wall types in time that you can use without needing to create them each time.

Good luck!

Edited August 26, 2015 by Vincent C

[domer1322]

Thank you all for the replies. Although the problem still exists, it is comforting to know that the problem is not simply due to my ignorance. I'm a part-time maker of 3D renders, and I often feel like there are so many more things I could know about manipulating this software. They keep adding more things before I've figured out how to use the old stuff.

Amelia: I agree ...... Hoping that someday I'll see software that actually meets the promise of 3D CAD. That is ... integrate the spaces with the finish schedule. When you change the spreadsheet from green walls to blue, and the 3D render automatically changes to blue walls ....