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Interiorcad beginner questions


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@Stephan Moenninghoff thanks for all your help on this.  

 

I'm playing around with the Interiorcad demo version for 2021.  It's very impressive.  I'm hoping some Interiorcad gurus can help me out with a couple questions.

 

I love how easy it is to make cabinets that aren't possible with the standard cabinet tool.  Especially drawer configurations.  I have a couple questions about cabinets I often have to draw:

 

Looking at this photo how would you use Interiorcad to draw:

 

1.  the door on the side of the upper cabinet over the sink

2.  the corner legs on the cooktop cabinet

3.  the double pulls on the drawers

4.  the hood enclosure. Not even sure how to start that one :-).

5.  the glass doors with muntins.

6.  the arched toe on the sink cabinet.

 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hi Michael,

you are certainly diving in at the deep end. 🙂

 

 

1.  the door on the side of the upper cabinet over the sink

-> Draw a cabinet with that type of door and hide all the parts you don't need (that is everything except the door and face frame) . You can do that by switching those parts off inside the configuration dialog. Hide the side panel of the cabinet. Replace with the door.

2.  the corner legs on the cooktop cabinet

-> That's a modelling challenge rather than an interiorcad question. Easy boolean operation between two extrudes.

3.  the double pulls on the drawers

-> Ah, good point, we need to add the second handle back for drawers. You can either

  1. place one handle with an offset. This will import that handle into your document. Then, with the symbol insertion tool, add the second handle. It will even connect with the drawer front and add the drillings. 
  2. Or, create a double handle as a single symbol. 

4.  the hood enclosure. Not even sure how to start that one :-).

-> you could use single framed fronts (with hidden cabinet parts) as well or model from scratch. Obviously, those X-es need to be added in manually. You could also use a Marionette object and add that to the cabinet. (Yes, interiorcad supports adding Marionettes to all of its boxes!)

5.  the glass doors with muntins.

-> Sorry, no muntins yet but on the near-term radar. You can either add them via Marionette or model them otherwise.

6.  the arched toe on the sink cabinet.

-> You can either

  1. Delete the plinth, add an extra box and create a framed front, hide the stiles and bottom rail and set the top rail to 'arched'
  2. Use an interiorcad contour to create the routing in the plinth. That is much quicker but not as parametric. If you resize the cabinet, you need to adjust the routing.

Let us see what you created when you've finished!

 

HTH

Edited by Stephan Moenninghoff
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Thanks, @Stephan Moenninghoff I'm going to struggle through this.

 

I didn't realize that symbols could connect to cabinet objects.  Very cool.

 

I'm just getting started so some of your response is going right on over my head.  I'll have to dig in.  

There is a lot there.  

I like the way you have materials integrated into each part of the cabinet.

 

If you find yourself bored and want to make any quick videos answering any of these questions … 🤓  (or if there are other videos you can point me to) I know I would find that helpful.

 

 

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@michaelk I had to find a way around that limitation in the Demo to able to see if I could do a full project and if it was worth it......the answer for both is "definitely yes".  That being said, I guess you want to know how I did this with the demo 🙂 it's easy but slow, I have one file where I assemble the kitchen and another file where I create/edit the cabinets, this second file only have one cabinet so there's no issue, is just a little bit slow to make the copy/paste from one file to another.

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Habitat43 said:

If you put it in social media would be nice if you could tag me

Of course. Let me have your social media links please!

2 minutes ago, Habitat43 said:

Quick question, I'm doing the crown moulding using the extrude along path, do you think is an easier way to do it?

That is fine but maybe you are not using the EAP to its full potential in this case? You can convert the path to a NURBS before you start and then place a working plane at the end. You can actually click on the end point of a NURBS curve with the WP tool and the WP will be placed perpendicular to the path. Then, you draw your profile on the WP and when you perform the extrusion, you check "Fix Profile".  

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
56 minutes ago, Habitat43 said:

@Stephan Moenninghoff hello! Asking for a quick advice. What would it be the easiest and fastest way to change the texture of a cabinet? Thanks!!

Textures and materials are one entity in interiorcad. Each material has a texture and a thickness assigned to it as well as a 'material type' So, we discriminate between  melamin faced, solid wood, raw, etc.

In order to change a texture, you must define the texture for the material used for construction. This is necessary to ensure that cutting lists are always up-to-date and no material can be assigned that is either anonymous or has the wrong constructive thickness. Go to interiorcad -> Master Data -> Boards and define your materials there. Likewise for edge banding and coverings/veneers.

 

On a second note we do realise that we are thinking too much like a joiner/cabinet maker rather than a designer and we think a future version might support double-clicking a texture in the Resource Manager and just pouring that texture over the entire cabinet, even before a proper material gets assigned. This is very much an experimental idea tough and not guaranteed to be implemented.

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We have been using InteriorCAD for about a year now, and getting the hang of implementing board types. It's not always intuitive what the right type of board is, because the various types are very much focused on production (good for me!), but it's probably a bit cumbersome for designers. If you want a texture added to a material without fussing about coverings, finishes, or edge banding, I recommend going with a Standard Panel defined by whatever the core texture is. This will display your desired texture on edges and all faces with or without 3d details turned on - and that saves on RAM, too, since VW won't be rendering any extra geometry..

 

Veneered Panels:  If you want to be more realistic with the rendering, then you can use a veneered panel and choose the covering of any thickness on the front and back faces, as well as the texture of all the edging (this is useful for both veneered panels, as well as high-pressure laminate panels).

Melamine face panels: have different covering and substrate textures, but the covering thickness is effectively zero. This is a nice option for many applications, because VW doesn't easily allow one to select different textures for individual faces of generic solids. Note: using this a "melamine faced" board type does not mean that you are specifying melamine for your project! It only means that you are defining the board by the overall thickness of the panel, without adding any covering thickness. While you can change the finishing and edging on melamine-faced parts, you cannot change the covering without creating a new board. If you want to change the texture of an individual part or in a set, than you can do so by adding a "finishing," which can be any RW texture. (*this is also true for standard and veneered panels)

Solid Wood: Allows one texture to be displayed throughout, and also allows the thickness of individual parts to be more easily changed. Again, using this option doesn't mean that you are specifying solid wood. I use this material type for metal, as well, and I can send these parts out to my metal fabricator to be waterjet or laser cut.

Glass: same as above.

 

Once you have a board set up with your desired texture, you'll want to create a set with all of your boards and edges specified for every type of cabinet part. Then if you want to change from one texture to another, you can just change the construction set and everything in the cabinet will update. The more accurately you define the IC materials according to your real-world materials, the more accurate the model will be. Most shops will deal primarily with one type of material or another, and everyone is going to have their preferred workflow, so be sure to check with your fabricator if you plan on exporting parts to them!

 

In my experience, the more time that you spend setting up the libraries and saved sets, the more time you will save in the drafting process. The difficult part is understanding the nomenclature, but once you get past that, it's fairly intuitive.

 

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@mgebel thanks a lot for all the explanation, thanks you for taking your time. 
 

I needed to change textures really easy and fast to show to a client several options, but I wanted to stay in VW universe (I usually render in 3Dsmax with Vray), so what I ended doing was exporting the cabinets as fbx and importing them back into my VW file and then as magic I was able to change textiles lol..... I know.... I pay a high price bc I won’t be able to edit it but I don’t think I will need to. 
 

Something that I notice is that I can’t convert the cabinets into a generic solid. 

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Excellent summary of board types, @mgebel.

To add  to that:- there are seven board types with only three different patterns. 

  1. Solid type
    1. Solid Wood
    2. Glass
    3. Plywood
    4. Laminated Wood
  2. Composite type
    1. Melamin Faced
    2. Veneered
  3. Standard

1. The first group can not receive edge banding or any covering at all but has variable thickness. This means you can adjust the thickness of these materials in the OIP.

2. The second group receives edge banding but not coverings. You should not set the thickness of the coverings to 0 in the Master Data setup because it will not render well. Any thickness you assign to a covering will not be added on to the material (as @mgebel already pointed out) so, give it at least 0.1 of a mm.

3. Standard Materials like chipboard or mdf expect to be either edge-banded or coated or covered/veneered. All coverings will add their assigned thickness to the total thickness of the finished material. So, if you have an 18mm board and you add on 0.5mm on both sides, you end up with 19mm finished thickness.

 

@Habitat43 you do not need to go to such lenghts if you want to simply explode a cabinet object. Just ungroup the cabinet. The first ungroup will decompose the cabinet into custom parts. All custom parts are still intact and can be assigned a material, edge banding, fittings etc. They cannot be reshaped as a cabinet any more, that's all. This is a great way to overcome any limitations of the cabinet object without destroying cutting list or cnc information. If you want to go further, first make sue that "3D Details" is disabled for the cabinet in the OIP before you ungroup the top level cabinet (because that will get rid of all physical representations of coverings and edge bandings.). Then, ungroup and then, ungroup again. You end up with generic solids that can be easily textured (but have no meta-information any more)

 

A more recommended workflow is to use the Search and Replace command in the cabinet dialog which you can apply to just textures, ignoring the material data .The Search dialog will automatically list all materials and textures that are being used for the edited cabinet.There is also a standalone command unter the interiorcad menu to search and replace all cabinets in the document. That's even faster than decomposing  and manually assigning the textures.

 

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for interiorcad xs user, please explain how  to change the material and texture for a cabinet as one unit.

I can't follow Stephan's statement, it is not possible

 "Go to interiorcad -> Master Data -> Boards and define your materials there. Likewise for edge banding and coverings/veneers."

Please advice

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