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Custom Doors and Frames


JonnyP

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It depends largely on what you define as accurate enough for fabrication.

 

You can use Marionette, Vectorscript, Pythonscript, or the SDK to create 2D or 3D objects. You can make these objects as accurate and complex as you want.

 

The issue is that the more accurate you need them to be and the more variations you need/want, the more time it will take to create the scripts/networks to generate the desired outcome.

 

If you are a door manufacturer and want to be able to generate drawings of 1000 doors a year to fabricate from then this probably makes sense. If you have 10 different styles of door. If you have 900 different styles of door, it will probably not make sense to try and put that many different options into a script.

 

If you an an architect trying to get around having to detail 20 doors a year you will probably never get the time back.

 

Tell us more about what you are really trying to do and we can offer better advice.

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Thank you for your responses.

 

My background is in architecture, I am a big Vectorwoks fan, but I spend some time working for a door manufacturer.

 

Regarding the standard door hardware feature, while this feature is excellent I doubt if it will give me enough control of, for example hinge positions. (and maybe even 3d geometry).

 

Complexity could be relatively simple, for example a lockcase in 3d could be quite complex, but all that is important to me is the external shape, the cut-out in the door and that it get's picked up on a schedule. I think it could be a symbol that adopts a standard position in the door.

I will do up a typical example, I see you're on LinkedIn. I'm not real into forums.

 

By accurate enough for fabrication I mean something I can convert to a .dwg and send to a CNC router. This might sound complicated but it's not. As I say it doesn't need to be super complex, but the beauty of parametric objects is speed of variation. You mention different door styles I don't mind producing a script for each format i.e. single leaf, leaf and a half, etc. but to be able within those parameters to alter sizes would be big.

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I would rather keep this discussion here unless there is proprietary information that can't be shared publicly. I do this to try and share information and help the overall community. If we have to take the discussion private it is of far less interest to me.

 

Does the router need 3D information or simple 2D polygon outlines? That will make a big difference in the complexity of the objects.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Jonny, thanks for your further clarification. I might mention also interiorCAD which has a bunch of CNC functionality out-of-the-box. Not cheap, but if it does what you need then it can save a lot of expensive time.

 

It is more cabinet-oriented though, and so the Marionette approach might be the best. It's not a big deal to pass a list of objects (e.g. doors) to a Mario script and have it "draw stuff". And our DWG export is pretty clean. 

 

My advice on designing the script is pretty much classic: start from the endpoint. Think about what the ideal output looks like, and work backwards to get that. For instance, here are some generic questions to answer:

  • What do the door shop-drawings (intended) look like?
  • Does your workflow require that there be a separate file for each door, or would 1 door per design layer be sufficient?
  • What do you want to keep as  a legal record of the project?
  • How would you prefer to do quality review of the output (and what implications does this have on data structure)?
  • What parts of the workflow  might be best kept manual or semi-manual, and what has to be automated?

...etc.

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2 hours ago, Pat Stanford said:

I would rather keep this discussion here unless there is proprietary information that can't be shared publicly. I do this to try and share information and help the overall community. If we have to take the discussion private it is of far less interest to me.

 

Does the router need 3D information or simple 2D polygon outlines? That will make a big difference in the complexity of the objects.

Thanks for that Pat.

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