Learn how to effectively set up and draw curtain walls within a 3D model, specifically focusing on aligning reference points, setting dimensions and controlling wall height. Explore how to navigate potential challenges such as unpredictable wall movements and ensure an aesthetically pleasing and accurate build.
Key Insights
- The process begins with setting up reference planes, adjusting them to the appropriate dimensions and allowing them to frame the future curtain wall.
- Guidelines include ensuring the wall is drawn on the correct side and taking care to control the height to meet specific requirements.
- Lastly, attention should be given to aligning wall faces, confirming that walls are not moving unintentionally, and making necessary adjustments such as using the 'Trim, Extend to Corner' tool for a clean finish.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
We’re now at a point where a lot of the hard work that we’ve already done is going to start paying off. So setting up that curtain wall so that it works in our favor here is one of those things. And so what I’m going to do is I want to draw in the wall that’s going to go in this location here and here.
And to do that, I first want to set up where it’s going to start and stop. And so it’s going to start from this point here, work to the corner and then go to the corner and up. And so what I’ll do is draw a couple of reference planes.
So the first one I’m going to draw in is going to be from this point here, just drawing a vertical reference plane. And then I’m going to go ahead and set it so that it’s two feet away from the grid line like this here. And the next thing will be to set the end point up here, but you can see we don’t have a grid line at this point.
And so what I’ll do is since we’re using the inside face of these walls as our datum, I’ll go ahead and take that dimension from the inside face of the wall to this reference plane. I can see that it’s five feet four. And if I want this dimension here to be the same, what I could do is I could take the same dimension, the five feet four, and I could set this reference plane to be five feet four.
And we got pretty close there with just guessing. We can set that. Now I’ll have this same dimension on both of these sides for what’s going to frame our curtain wall here.
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With the extent set up here, I can go in now and I can draw the wall using our curtain wall storefront type. And I can just start from my center line here. And what’s important is as we draw it, we want to make sure that we have the wall on the right side.
So exterior is to the bottom of the screen. So I want to make sure the glass is to the bottom of the screen. And then I’ll just draw it out to the corner here.
And you can see it’ll hit that end point. And then I can start and draw it out to the corner, or from the corner rather, to that reference plane that we created. And in the previous lesson, I was talking about how by having that set up to cut into the view there, and I’ll show you that setting here, or embed rather, but you can see it says automatically embed.
So by having that set as automatically embed, it’s cutting itself into this wall. And so when we look at it in 3D, you can see here that the curtain wall is cutting in at that point. And so if I were to select these and change the settings here, so it’s from zero to roof, but if I leave both base and top constraints set to level two, what I can do is I can control the height of the wall with my top offset.
So I want to make sure these are both set to level two, and then I can set my top offset here to 10 feet, because that’s how tall I want the wall to be. And then it’ll drop it in there at 10 feet. And then I get the look I’m going for all the way around here.
Another thing we can do when we look at it is we can actually control where this wall sits within this one here. And so when we move it around, what you’ll notice is if I just move it from here over, it’ll pop it out of the wall and unjoin, but it’s still going to leave the cut. We have the ability to move this around to wherever we want.
If I wanted to align these faces here, I could do that. And when you do it, one of the things that you really want to make sure is not happening is that this wall is not moving with it, because that will happen sometimes. And if I knew why, I’d write a book and make a million bucks.
So it’s kind of a weird thing where it just doesn’t, it’s not always predictable. So you just want to always double-check that. The next thing you’ll want to do is, because the corner was created, what it’ll do a lot of times is it’ll cut on one corner, but not the other.
And so what I do is I’ll go back in and I’ll use my Trim, Extend to Corner to clean up the corner piece here. And then I’ll check which wall is not cutting at the corner. And you can see it’s this one here.
Because when I click on this one here, it’s being cut by the wall at the corner. And then unfortunately we do have to go in and use our Edit Profile option to clean that up. And this is really simple.
We’ve done this many times in multiple classes, but we’re using the Edit Profile option and then picking the extents of the curtain wall we just created. And then I’ll use the Split tool to split this portion and then Trim, Extend to Corner to create the pocket for the curtain wall, like you see here. Then I’ll finish the sketch.
And now we have a glazed corner here that we can adjust and put the right mullion in. And that’s going to be our next step is to go through and clean up our curtain wall condition because you can see here we’ve got two end mullions instead of corner mullions at all of our curtain wall locations. And then we’ll move on to creating the punched openings for the second floor on this side of the building here.
