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Roof Tool, Door Tool and working with finished plywood paneling


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Hey all. Since i'm stuck at home, like a lot of you, I've decided to remodel my living room.

This is a test/experiment job. I'm working a hybrid design/build/DIY model. There may be some "why would you ever do that?" questions. Just work with me. It's just me working on my own house, and refining my VW skills and my design eye.

Vectorworks 2020, current SP. Running Mojave on a 2019 MacBook Pro, 32 gig of ram. Software seems to work just fine 'performance wise' for all these tasks below.

 

Three things that have come up, and I'm looking for help/advice:

 

1. The Roof Tool. I'm having a tough time deciding if this is a tool that is useful for complex designs.

The existing roof is a super simple hip roof. Building is square, so no ridge. Just 4 hips, coming together at a point. In the living room, we're putting in an acoustic ceiling (recording studio style with 2x6 joists and rockwool, not a typical office drop ceiling) below the existing roof. Having a hard time integrating my roof 'parts' with the roof tool created parts. Couple questions for the group:

*If you draw custom rafters, blocking or joists, do you use extrudes, solids, Polys, lines/groups or some other item as your main go-to? this is basic US Pine/fir/hemlock 2x6 and 2x4 framing material we're using. Nothing special.

*Is there a preferred way to create custom rafters/blocks/joists that better works with the Vectorworks Roof Tool?

 

2. Solid paneling on stud walls as a final surface feature. We're using pre-finished Birch panels as finished wall.

*I'm using .5" thick 'walls' as the panels. This method seems 'heavy' and a little bit clunky. How do others typically do this? There are a number of cutouts, subtractions and flush fit things in the panels, so it's not just a plain slab of ply oriented on the wall. The grain direction in rendering also seems to have a mind of it's own. I can sometimes get the grain to orient properly, but sometimes it wont. (select OIP, Render tab, rotation) Panels that were walls and are now 'solid subtractions' are rotating properly. Some others are not. 

 

3. The door tool.

*It seems totally useful. And at the same time, well, fairly complicated to do simple things. Like paint one side of a door pine, the other grey. seems like I'm missing the boat on this one. What 'best practices' are people using for custom door skins/colors?

 

TIA. I appreciate it all. any comments are more than appreciated.

Kelly

 

 

Edited by tekbench
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1 - you may have to use two roofs? 
2 - it might be easier to 2d model the birch panels and extrude rather than use walls , use internal elevation tool for reference

3 - in the classes of the door object you can set different internal & external textures 


 

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3 hours ago, tekbench said:

 

1. The Roof Tool. I'm having a tough time deciding if this is a tool that is useful for complex designs.

The existing roof is a super simple hip roof. Building is square, so no ridge. Just 4 hips, coming together at a point. In the living room, we're putting in an acoustic ceiling (recording studio style with 2x6 joists and rockwool, not a typical office drop ceiling) below the existing roof. Having a hard time integrating my roof 'parts' with the roof tool created parts. Couple questions for the group:

*If you draw custom rafters, blocking or joists, do you use extrudes, solids, Polys, lines/groups or some other item as your main go-to? this is basic US Pine/fir/hemlock 2x6 and 2x4 framing material we're using. Nothing special.

*Is there a preferred way to create custom rafters/blocks/joists that better works with the Vectorworks Roof Tool?

 

The roof tool is more of a helper than a tool.  I usually use it for hipped roofs at the beginning and then explode it into roof faces for more detailed work.  For a pyramidal roof, you could use it this way or model each roof face and then duplicate at 90° to complete the 4 sides of the roof.  I prefer to work with roof "faces" rather than the roof tool.  I typically model a 1" thick roof face which is equivalent to 5/8" ply + 3/8" roofing.  I can then texture the top with the roofing texture and the bottom with a plywood texture.

 

Once you have a roof face, go to the menu: AEC>Framing>Roof Framer.

That will create rafters, purlins, etc using the framing "helper."  It's not a smart command, in that there's no telling where it will start the layout from, but it will match rafters to the right pitch etc.  My advice is to use it to create your basic framing components and then manually adjust the layout, overhang lengths, etc.  Once you have one face done correctly, you can group and copy the members to the other 3 sides of the roof.  If you need to create custom framing members. The "Framing Member" tool is versatile and allows for easy adjustment on the fly.  If you want more control, you can go with an extrude, but they are harder to manipulate later.

 

I have my framing members set to classes for texture mapping.  For wood members, I use textures with a fine enough grain where it doesn't really matter which way the texture is oriented (it's a crapshoot).  For locations where grain direction IS really important, I make two different textures (one rotated 90° from the other) and apply them to the respective surfaces where they look right.

 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, tekbench said:

2. Solid paneling on stud walls as a final surface feature. We're using pre-finished Birch panels as finished wall.

*I'm using .5" thick 'walls' as the panels. This method seems 'heavy' and a little bit clunky. How do others typically do this? There are a number of cutouts, subtractions and flush fit things in the panels, so it's not just a plain slab of ply oriented on the wall. The grain direction in rendering also seems to have a mind of it's own. I can sometimes get the grain to orient properly, but sometimes it wont. (select OIP, Render tab, rotation) Panels that were walls and are now 'solid subtractions' are rotating properly. Some others are not. 

 

Why not use a multi-component wall with a stud cavity and a 1/2" thick paneling component?  Or, are you modeling each stud?

 

 

 

3 hours ago, tekbench said:

3. The door tool.

*It seems totally useful. And at the same time, well, fairly complicated to do simple things. Like paint one side of a door pine, the other grey. seems like I'm missing the boat on this one. What 'best practices' are people using for custom door skins/colors?

 

@fabrica explained this one.  In the Door Settings > Classes you can control the appearance of panels, rails/styles, etc. separately.

 

3 hours ago, tekbench said:

TIA. I appreciate it all. any comments are more than appreciated.

Kelly

 

 

 

VW can do anything you want as long as you're willing to fiddle with it long enough. 

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Thank you both. This all makes good sense. I'll fool around in the door tool, but those settings im looking for are (I believe in my case) being over-ridden by some class settings that I'm not seeing very clearly. As long as I know you can paint both sides different colors, I'll hack on it and figure it out.

'Roof Face' and 'framing member' sounds like the conclusion I am slowly coming to as well. Using extrudes is what i've done, and like you say, it gets more complicated later down the road.

The Roof tool is great for my main gig (AV design) and lets me model a big house really quickly. And using 2 roofs is pretty much what I would need to do in my case here now that I really look at it. 

Sure, nothing is on layout, but at the end of the day we're just trying to locate attic access and areas for the installers and hang some speakers and cameras in the eves. So even though it's not the smartest tool, I will give the Roof Tool some credit for that. Import a PDF, trace some lines, build a roof and it looks like you spent a thousand hours building a model. VW gets very high marks for this type of thing in my book.

Multi-component wall you say.... I might give that a test drive.

2D model and extrude is how I used to do something like a custom panel. But I think putting some time into building a multi component wall might end up saving a bunch of time down the road. The only thing that jams this up is the panels are often set at an angle off the wall and used as reflectors. Wall stays plumb, panels get a 10 degree tilt off the wall. Probably be good to use both methods. 

Thanks again. It's always nice to get some outside opinions. to keep pushing in the right direction.

Cheers!

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