HVAC Ducting to Interior Model

[milezee]

I am wanting to add some HVAC ducting to the ceiling of my interior model, similar to the attached image. This is purely for aesthetics to show how the space will look and feel once all the furniture, floors etc have been fitted. Is there a way to do this in VW 2019 (Architect) ? tia 

[zoomer]

I am 100% with you. Duct for decoration purposes.

 

And I often have the opposite too.

Customers want to see real duct work and send data from engineers.

Mostly using exotic Apps and barely have real DWG export.

What you get is a bunch of Meshes or 3D Faces that make your file

unusable.

So some basic "fake" Duct tools, providing proper (Solids) geometry

from 3D line work would be very welcome.

 

VW Architecture has some basic MEP tools. But they only throw in

separate single components, which is much to tedious.

 

So for now I think the only and best option in VW is to "Extrude along Path" (?)

[milezee]

@zoomer I was hoping that I was missing something simple 😝, but I guess not. Yes extruding along a path is one way to do it, then how to make them look like ducts with the ribbing etc ? Is there a material/texture that will work ? ps, thanks for the input 👍

[zoomer]

So far I did a few extrudes along paths only (in C4D).

Pipes and square elements.

No fancy ribbing. Just a zinc texture.

Better than nothing.

 

Ribbing could be done in VW by custom geometry duplicated along paths (?)

But I think I would prefer to cut and bevel loop selections in Modo or C4D.

 

I played with MEP tools in Bricscad, which also have basic volumes only

but allow continuous drawing like with VW Structural Member Tools.

These allow also some manipulation and parametric editing.

I didn't really got the Tool Workflow so far though.

[Guest Wes Gardner]

Hi All,

 

I haven't looked at this third party app in a while...

 

http://www.vectormep.com/page/vectormep

 

Wes

[milezee]

@Wes Gardner Hi Wes, yes seen a couple of vids on You Tube for this plugin. Seems a bit much to be just wanting to do some ducting for visual purposes 

[BG]

VectorMEP looks amazing. Be great if that was included in VW.  Actually, there seems to be a lot of really useful tools being created by third party vendors that would be incredibly beneficial to have included as standard in VW.