Creating a building contour with our numerical polygonal tools

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Inserting a contour with our numerical polygonal input tools (from Version 10) is one of the fastest ways to accurately capture the building outline, an alternative to inserting the outline using 2D guidelines.

The following video is split into four major parts.

Numerical polygonal input

As a first step we positioned a 2D view and a 3D view next to each other. This gives us a good overview while inserting our elements. The grid and the display of the line widths have been switched off in order to always snap exactly at the point we really need. We also added a horizontal and a vertical guide line for a better orientation. The intersection of these two lines should be the reference points for our floor plan.

Now we can start designing our building outline. If you hold the CTRL key pressed while inserting walls, you can activate an internal angle grid (e.g. 0 °, 15 °, 30 °, 45 °, 60 °, 75 °, 90 °, …) . That means that the walls are inserted only with the mentioned angles and it cannot happen that they are accidentally moved out of direction, neither horizontally nor vertically. The reference point of a wall can be changed with the key combination CTRL + W (axis, outside, inside). In the dialog for inserting walls, wall length and angle for the current wall are to be defined. The angle always shows the value between your current and the previous wall.

Bezug des Winkels bei der numerisch polygonalen Eingabe

At the end of the first step we will show how-to edit the floor area and room labeling.

Inserting multi-layer walls and editing the length of existing walls

As a second step we will first show how-to insert multilayer walls. We want to create walls that are made up of an insulation layer and a concrete layer.
The individual wall layers are shown with different filling styles.

Tip: The definition of walls with individual wall layers serves a purely graphical purpose and is not evaluated further. It therefore makes sense that when defining the layer structure you only include layers that are also clearly recognizable in a scale of 1:50. Layers of a few cm thickness (e.g. 1 cm plaster layer) are only drawn as a bold black line (or several black lines lying one above the other) when printing a 2D top view on a scale of 1:50 and only disturb the clarity.

However, to get the actual wall thickness, simply add the thin layers internally to existing wall layers. That doesn’t matter, because it is only a pure graphical representation anyway.
Example: the specified wall thickness is 38cm and consists of 1cm plaster layer inside, 24cm brick, 12cm insulation material and 1cm plaster layer outside – define the purely graphic layer structure of 25cm brick and 13cm insulation material. The inner and outer plaster layer are added to the thickness of the insulation and bricks.

For a detailed representation of the layer structure with ALL layers, we recommend a detailed drawing (e.g. with a scale of 1:20), which is also positioned on the plan (see our video on the wall connection detail).

Changing the length of an existing wall

While inserting the floor plan, we will show you 2 ways how-to change existing wall lengths.

  • Changing the existing wall length numerically
  • Changing the wall length with your mouse using guideline and the shortcut key V to lengthen / shorten walls.

Coloring and texturing a wall

In the third step, we will show you various options for changing the color and pattern of existing walls.

  • Coloring an existing wall (e.g. changing a white plaster texture to a reddish plaster texture)
  • Changing an existing texture (e.g. changing a plaster texture to a texture with clinker)
  • Texturing a single wall while keeping the CTRL key pressed.

This post is also available in: German