Learn modifications to spandrel panels and vision glass in a structure's design using the match type command. This article discusses methods to adjust the foreground pattern and ensure material designations reflect the building's intended state.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed guide on modifying the patterning of spandrel panels and vision glass in a structural design. It explains how to use the 'edit type' feature to select and modify a panel to a spandrel one and adjust the pattern accordingly.
- The author further emphasizes the importance of maintaining accurate material designations in the design such as glass, plaster, or concrete. These designations are useful not only for material takeoffs to identify the amount of each material, but also for exporting into a rendering software.
- The article also discusses the creation of enlarged elevations for better annotation. The tutorial shows how to select a region for a call out, add an enlarged elevation view, rename it for better identification, and place it in the appropriate location within the project.
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As you can see here, I've hopped over to sheet A401, and the reason I did that is because we're going to go in and we're going to make some modifications to the patterning that we have on this glass here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and pick one of these panels that I want to have be a spandrel panel, which would be this one here, and I'm going to say Edit Type, and I'm going to change that to be a spandrel panel. And you'll notice that it makes the revision in the pattern for me.
When you look at the vision glass, we have not made the modification to that glazing to have the pattern that we had talked about. So I'm going to go ahead and say Edit Type on this one, take a look at the glass material properties, and then we can go in here and we can make those adjustments. So you can see we have glass, and then we're going to adjust the foreground pattern to have that same diagonal up that we were talking about before.
And hit OK. And this, you know, sometimes this gets a little too dark, but we'll take a look at it and see how things start to look. And if we need to make the adjustment, we can go ahead and do that.
So you can see that's a lot of pattern on the drawing. And so, again, like I was mentioning, it might be something that we want to crank down a little bit. But for now, this is going to work because our objective is to make sure all the spandrel panels on this window wall are reflecting the correct material.
And the best way that I know to do that is by using the Match Type command, which is keyboard shortcut M-A. Or from the Modify tab, you can go to this guy right here for Match Type. And once I select a spandrel panel, I'm able to just now pop in.
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And what's cool about it is it's only going to find glass panels, which is nice. And so what I'll do is I can go in and I can now Match Type to the panels that I know that I want to have be spandrel. And so the pattern is—it's kind of the ones on the top, and then skip one as we go through.
And then once you've kind of got a few of them, which this is just one of the iterations here, it just repeats itself as we go through. So whichever method that you think is fastest obviously is the one that you're going to want to do, but it's really just a repetitive process of going in and making sure that you select the right ones. And if you accidentally pick one that you didn't want to be spandrel, no big deal, because you can always just Match Type it back or Change Type, whichever method you want to use, to the panel that it was intended to be.
And so what happened here is I clicked into white space, and you can see my paintbrush is no longer loaded with a type because it's white now instead of black, whereas I redo it and now I'm back in business. So that may happen to you, but fear not because you can just hop back in and keep the process rolling. And it's important to use material designations the way that you intend for the building to be for a few reasons.
Number one, you can use this for material takeoffs to identify how much spandrel versus clear glazing you have, and also see exactly how much plaster versus concrete versus all these other materials. And then if you were to export this into a rendering software, you could easily apply those materials for any rendering that you might be doing. So that's another one of the benefits for sure to being able to do that.
So it didn't take me long to realize that this is just going to be too busy, and the thing is it's always going to print darker in plan than on paper or in PDF than what we're seeing here, especially when you have repetitive lines like that. So I'm going to go ahead and adjust my glass material to have the same pattern, but I want the color to be this 192 because I do want it to show up, but I want it to be like a light gray so it's not so bold on the plan. And you can see that makes a really big difference.
It still shows the pattern, we can tell that it's glass, everything's looking good. And then the same thing here, I'll go ahead and adjust the spandrel pattern. And this one doesn't need to be as light, so I'm just going to change the RGB to 100 across the board here.
And that just kind of mutes it just a little bit. If you were to go too low, clearly it would just mesh into that gray—kind of like the black-on-black thing that I was talking about earlier. So that looks pretty good.
And so the next thing we'll set up here is we just want to make sure we have a good view for being able to annotate this. And so I think the sample that we have between grids three and four here is a good one to have for like an enlarged elevation. So I'm going to go to my View tab, Callout, and then you can see here that your view is still set to Building Elevation.
But what it'll allow me to do is pick a region like I'm doing here, that can be for a Callout. And then now I've got an enlarged elevation view that was added. And so this view is now a Building Elevation that was added.
And you can see here it's saying parent view is North Elevation. The view is now Elevation Callout 1. And so we can make a few changes here.
I'm going to go ahead and scroll up in my Project Browser to find my Elevations. And you can see it here as North Elevation Callout 1. And what I want to do is I want to change that.
Instead of North Elevation Callout 1, what I'm going to do is I'm going to call it Enlarged Curtain Wall Elevation. So I'm just going to give it a rename here and create that enlarged view. And then we'll have another one that we want to do, which is going to be for, you know, like our typical window wall here.
And so I'll go ahead and we'll place that one on A402, because that's kind of our front elevation of the building where that's being used a lot. And so we can pick one of these here. So maybe next to grid line six—that looks like a pretty good spot.
And I'll do the same thing. So I'll go activate the view, double-clicking on it, go to Callout. And then I'll draw my Callout boundary here.
And of course, we're going to move the tag around. That should go without saying. And this view, we're going to call Enlarged Window Elevation.
And so instead of moving around in the Project Browser here, I can actually just click on this guy, look at the properties, and see how it says South Elevation Callout 1. I could wipe that out. And then I can call it Enlarged Window Elevation.
So modifications to the same stuff, just from different areas. And so I'll go ahead and save again. And we'll pick up where we left off in the next video.
