Setting Exterior Materials for Walls and Panels: A Step-by-Step Guide

For this next lesson, we're going to go through and we are going to set all of our exterior materials. And so that is going to involve picking wall types for, say, this material here, this one and this one, and even this spandrel panel that we have here. And then any changes that we need to make to some of the glass or the concrete materials that have already been assigned.

That will be our focus for the next set of videos. And to start, we're going to go ahead and change some of the assignments to the wall types. I'm going to jump to our level two plan here, and I'm going to start by adjusting these walls and changing their types.

And so I'm going to select these, and this is what makes them pop out here. If I were to look over in the 3D view, you can see it's all of these walls here. And we're going to go ahead and change the type of these walls to be the exterior EIFS on metal stud.

And that's not the material we're going to use here. But we are going to use it as our baseline. So with that selected and applied there, what I'll do now is I'm going to go to Edit Type > Duplicate, and I'm going to change this; instead of EIFS, I'm going to call it metal panel.

Now, what we'll do is we're going to take a look at what makes up this wall. And then we'll go in and we'll actually make some adjustments to that.

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So it's not going to be the EIFS material, and we're not going to have all of these other layers on here. So I'm going to take out the thermal air layer here because we won't have that extra piece. And then we're going to adjust our finish layer to have a different dimension.

We'll make that two and a half inches. And then lastly, we'll adjust our material type here to be metal panel. Now we can go into our material browser and we can search to see if there's one that might work.

And when I do that, you can see it's just going to search for all the metal ones here. And if there isn't one that is going to work or serve our purposes, we can pick one that we can use as a baseline. So this aluminum one is a pretty good one, and we can take this, and I can right-click on it and say Duplicate, and then I can just call it aluminum panel.

The next thing I want to do here is I want to set a surface pattern on here, which will represent the joints that we're using for it. And so if I click here where it says None, I want to create a model pattern so that it has real-world scale, and then I can create a new one here. These are easy to create if they're rectangles or just vertical lines or just horizontal lines.

Because all we have to do is define it based on being parallel lines or cross-hatch. And so I'll define it based on the size. We're going to call it eight feet by four feet.

And so that's the size of the panel that we're going to create. Then we can change this from parallel lines to cross-hatch, and these are going to be at 45°. So I can set this to 0 or 90 for it to be vertical and horizontal.

Then I can set my line spacing. So my first one could be eight feet, and then my second one could be four feet. I may have this backwards here, so I'm going to go ahead and flip it and let's hit OK and hit OK again.

Once we get out of here, we'll have it set for the right metal panel. So I'll keep going a few times till we get out of the properties. And then once we're done, we'll be able to see that pattern on the exterior of our building here.

And so you can see how it all kind of pans out. The next thing we would do is we just adjust our joint layout here. And so since we have a 10-foot window and a four-foot panel module, we'll have to decide how we want that to work out.

What that means is we can actually determine how that pattern is going to sit on this elevation here. And so when I zoom in on it, you can see that this pattern has those dimensions that we were talking about. So these are the joints here.

That's going to be eight feet, and then this is going to be four feet. And so, because those are the real-world dimensions based on our pattern, we have the ability to go in and then adjust it as we see fit.

So I can take it and say align it here and align it here and have the joints work out that way, but then I end up with kind of a strange space in this location. So what I could do is I could take that joint just by hitting Tab a few times to get to it, and then I can move it around. If I wanted to equalize that a little bit—instead of having one foot on that side and nothing on the other—then I can move it around and now I can have a space like this, or I can move it the other way and I can have the space at the bottom, like you see here.

And I think this is what we'll go with, because it kind of turns the corner with it. And if we look at it in 3D again, you can see it'll meet this corner pretty nicely.

So these are two different walls. The surface pattern is going to be applied differently on both of them. So I'll go in and I can align it here, and then I have the choice to set this one vertically however I want it as well.

And so I can go in and I can say, OK, well, this is the joint that I'd like to have lined up and have that set. And then we're going to have the same material coming around the corner here. We want to make sure that those joints line up around the corner as well.

And now we have the material set for our metal panel. The next one is going to be for these panels here.