BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 17 – Complex Modeling PART 5 A- Curtain Walls Basic

Welcome everyone to the AC Best Practices course training lesson. This lesson will focus on curtain walls. In order to give it some context, I will draw a box of walls here as usual. I will remove the front wall. Then I will go to 3D and say, “What if we wanted to have a curtain wall in the front of this?” Curtain wall is a systems tool within AC. It was introduced in AC 12 and later refined in AC 13. I don’t know whether it’s changed much since 13. So the things that I am going to be teaching you probably apply from 13 on. In 12, most of this applies, but they did improve it a bit. [0:00:49]

So the basic idea of a curtain wall is it is something of a system that can have a basic geometry and then a grid that would create dividers and panels within that shape. In the simple case, we would activate the curtain wall tool and use the default settings, in terms of the geometry, to create a straight segment or a single segment. We can also do a chained segment, which would be like a polygon or a poly line here. So we will just do a simple one. We can also do cylindrical ones and create a boundary shape. [0:01:33]

We will see lots of different ways we can do this. Now in the basic settings of the curtain wall, there are a lot of controls for the way all of the elements are handled, including the basic scheme which would be the repetitions of a grid. Curtain walls can be used for rather tall buildings with huge expanses of glass, and can also be used for little bits of storefront. They can even be inserted or placed in what would otherwise be a normal building to give a little more control over any custom glazing that you might have. [0:02:12]

The tool actually can be adapted for use for other things. I have seen people use it for suspended ceilings. If you think about a suspended ceiling, it’s often a grid that has a certain type of panel such as standard acoustical tile or something similar. And then some of the panels may be replaced with lights or vents in them. So if you think about that, it’s actually a grid system. It can be varied; it doesn’t have to be all rectangular. It can have parts that are different, but it does have a systematic approach. [0:02:58]

So as part of the curtain wall, we have options for the shapes of boundary elements in different orientations, mullions and transoms, vertical and horizontal ones. We have the idea of panels that would be potentially two different main types of panels, and then custom ones. And we have the idea of possible junctions. So these would be elements that would hold the glass in place. This is optional, but some types of complex curtain wall systems will use elements like this. Then we can have accessories, such as a sun shade; things that would be attached to the system. [0:03:41]

Let me just start with the basics of creating a simple curtain wall in front of this building by having this straight line segment here. I can go click on two points. You will see this cursor that is intended to represent the sun, and it’s saying, “What side is the outside?” So there is always a reference line side, the outside of the building, and then the other side, the inside. I clicked to indicate that. Once I do that, it asks me when placing a curtain wall, “What is the position?” We can specify the height based on the top and bottom height, or we can specify it by the height of it by its top height and the height of the base. [0:04:27]

You can talk about where it starts or finishes, along with its own height; or you can say start and stop, bottom and top. So we will do a 10′ piece and say 90˚. You can tilt these curtain walls and do a variety of placement options. You can even rotate them in 3D space after you have placed them. I will do the most basic thing, which is a vertical wall just 10′ high. You can see on the plan that it’s created a series of segments with dividers or frames. And when I go to 3D, it’s created a basic structure very quickly. [0:05:08]

If I use the arrow tool and select this, you will see it selects the whole thing. So it is a unit, but each piece can be edited. So what do I mean by editing individual pieces? If I click on the Edit button, which in 3D it will just say “Edit”, if you select it on the floor plan it will say “Edit in 3D”. Then when I do that, you will see a new palette come up and a new section of the toolbox become available. So this palette allows me to make changes and confirm them with OK or cancel them if I realize I don’t want to move forward with that. [0:05:51]

Now when I hover over with the mouse, you can see that it is now pre-selecting a panel. If I go to this edge here, you see it would select the frame. So let me select a panel here, and when I select it, you will see up on the top that it refers to this and says it is a generic panel. So what does that mean? It’s just a piece of a simple element. In this case, it’s based on the definition of the main panel. So the main panel is the glazing, and when I click on this one, you will see it is the distinct panel. So the settings, if I have nothing selected, I can go in here for the scheme. [0:06:37]

When I double click on this tool here, you can see “system scheme”. So if we turn on scheme and select that, and go into the system scheme – okay, I am missing something here that I wanted to show you. Let me cancel out of this. When I have this selected as a whole and I go into the curtain wall, there is the idea of the panels having main options and distinct. So what is the difference here? You can see that the main panels were told to be generic panels with a certain material; in this case, a glazed or tinted glass. The distinct panels are alternating panels and are set up to use a particular type of panel. [0:07:46]

And you can see that there are some variations here. We wouldn’t want to put doors in every panel, but we could pick individual ones and put doors in, open up windows, things like that. This is the way that the panel would be set up, and there are all sorts of controls. We will look at a few of them. So in the original scheme, it’s saying that the main panels are going to be just glass, and the distinct ones are going to be a piece of something that has a certain look. In this case, “Stainless Reflective” is the surface appearance of it. If you were in AC 16 or earlier, this would say “Materials” rather than “Surfaces”. [0:08:32]

So that is the basic thing about the scheme. If we look at the scheme here, you can see that it’s showing A, B, C, D. And you can have as many different divisions as you want. So I could say that I want the A one to be 6′ long. You will see that it extends a little further. And I will make B 2′. So now I can say it’s 6′ and 2′, and then 4′ and 4′.  If I wanted to, I could make as many of these as I want. I can add another one here. I will put that as 4′, and this is 1′. So I am going to now do 6′, 2′, 4′, 4′, 1′. This allows me to control that. [0:09:16]

And you will notice that each one of these, I can click on it. When I do, it will highlight it in a color or take the color away if I keep clicking it. So I might just make these alternate panels by clicking on them to make them gray. Now I have just changed the overall settings of the grid. When I say OK, you can see what it has done.  So what I’m doing is very visual, you start out with a 6′, then I have a 2′, then two 4′ panels, and then the 1′.  So the scheme as a whole can be edited when we select the entire thing. [0:10:01]

If I click on the Edit button here, now I can actually go into editing individual pieces.  So let’s take a look at one of the most basic things that we can do in terms of manipulation.  We can combine the pieces together when we want to put in a door.  So if we want to put in a door over here, we may want to get rid of this frame by selecting it and then simply hitting the Delete key.  When I hit the Delete key, you’ll notice that the frame disappeared and the two panels now are combined.  There’s a little bit of a handle here or a hot spot there, so it still remembers that, but it does treat this as a single unit. [0:10:45]

This is a generic panel, and it was set being a main panel of the scheme, so it has that glazing.  But I’m going to switch it to be a door.  So when I say door, it changes it to be a door and you can see how it instantly changes.  When I deselect it you can see a little better that it’s a door with a doorknob.  Now of course, like all doors in the library, it does have some flexibility.  You can make it opaque or have subdivisions. There are different choices for it.  But the first and main choice is, is it a regular panel or is it a door?  And we could also make it a revolving door. [0:11:26]

This might be a little tight here. Maybe we will want to undo that.  Let’s perhaps put in a revolving door for both of them.  So what I would do is select the frame and delete it.  And because these were combined, they both ended up as doors.  Let me let me see if I can delete the frame in between them by selecting this frame and this lower one and delete them.  Now you can see that it’s a single piece and this is actually set up as a door.  That would be a huge door, so I may want to change it to a sliding door or perhaps that revolving door might fit very nicely in here. [0:12:22]

So the basic idea is that I can select and delete individual separators or frames, and then I can select individual pieces and make them different if I want.  Now if I’m happy with what I’ve done I can say OK.  If I don’t want to I can click cancel.  So if I say OK, and we’ll see that now we’re back to where we selected the whole thing.  The edit button is available, and if I were to rotate you would see this in the context of the building. [0:12:57]

So what happens if we were to take this and we made it taller?  I can go here, and just like the wall tool, I can ask for it to tilt or get taller.  We can see these options here.  So I can literally grab this up and take it to 12′, and we’ll see what has happened.  So this lower panel gets repeated and then when it runs out or hits the next one, it starts the next thing here.  So if I were to take this up here and say make it 20′, we are going to see multiple repetitions. I will just zoom out. So it does have this whole concept of a repeating scheme, both horizontally and vertically. [0:13:49]

Now this scheme can be adjusted in a variety of ways.  In addition to selecting and replacing individual panels, I can adjust the spacing of the grid or the placement of grid items.  So let’s say edit.  When I click on edit it has now highlighted this and actually I can no longer select other elements. I’m actually editing the curtain wall.  So it’s a little bit odd.  They do make the other elements sort of fade a tiny bit to the background, but it can be a little frustrating because you may want to be editing the building as well.  You have to focus on the curtain wall and then potentially say OK, and go back to editing the rest of the context of the building. [0:14:43]

You’ll notice that in this OK and cancel area, there’s also some eyeball icons next to certain things.  So if I turn off the environment, you can see that’s the rest of the building.  I’ll turn it back on.  If I turn on the scheme, you can see that there is this little extension of a plane.  So it’s intended to be translucent you can see that it’s not a real thing, it’s a virtual surface. You can hide or show it if you wish.  Now if I turn off the frame, you can see now we are seeing just the panels.  If I turn off the panels, and of course now there is nothing to be seen, because we don’t have any junctions, those are the things that hold the panels in place.  We don’t have any accessories, because we haven’t done that.  Now if I turn on the scheme, we’ll see here is the virtual placement of these grid lines. [0:15:39]

Obviously, we talked about the horizontal placement of these. And we also have a sequence for vertical; a lower height and a middle height that was set in the original scheme.  I go to the system settings, this is our horizontal arrangement and these are the primary grid lines.  This is the vertical arrangement two and seven.  I wanted to have another one here, let me just cancel this and go back into the system settings. I will click on this and say I want to add a point, and it will go below that or extend to the next one.  And let’s say I wanted to have it at 4′ here and another one here at 6′ or something like that. [0:16:41]

You can see the total height of the scheme.  Perhaps I just click on these to indicate that these are all going to be that color, and then click here.  So I just click on these to change their color.  So I have now defined a different arrangement for the second floor.  Maybe we have more of a mechanical space that we want to hide between the lower floor and the upper floor; a dropped ceiling and mechanical stuff.  So we can obviously change that.  I say OK, and you can see now this has updated. [0:17:15]

Do you see this heavy line here?  That is the current height of this element.  Remember, I just changed the height up to 20′.  Well now that has stopped in the middle of a panel.  If I say show me the frames, we’ll see how the frame follows that boundary.  If I say show me the panel, we’ll see this is what we’ve ended up with.  And if you look carefully, you’ll see that there still is the blue line. I am going to hide the panel and the frame, and you can see that blue line still remains.  If we turn off the scheme, the blue line goes away.  Whenever you have a scheme you have that blue line, although it may be hidden by seeing the panels.  [0:18:24]

So obviously, we turn on and off these categories of elements to be able to control different things.  So for example, this boundary here is straight, but we could curve it.  So if I press down on the edge here, we have the standard polygon editing tools.  So for example, I can take this and curve it.  Now you can see that it has extended the theoretical panels up here, although it has only taken this boundary up as high as I made it go. When I turn on the frame, you can see how it is approximating that curve with a series of straight segments.  [0:18:05]

So it will not actually curve the segments, but it will follow each one of these points that will be on the theoretical curve of the boundary.  If I turn on the panel, you can see how it approximates that as well.  If I turn off the scheme, as soon as I deselect it, you can see that we are adjusting the shape of the curtain wall there.  I see a question from Tom Downer saying, “Are the panel dims center to center or just the panel?”  So I’m not exactly sure how to answer that, but I will point out that if I select a panel there are some options for all sorts of controls here, including the dimensions of things and how it’s drawn.  In this particular case we’ve got a particular panel. [0:20:20]

For some reason it’s calling a custom panel, perhaps because I clicked on some things here.  The settings of this curtain wall panel are one type of an option here.  If I go to the panel box, you’ll see this will draw a box out, or we can put in a window, and we have various controls for opening and closing.  So there is a thickness here that is the actual thickness of that panel, and in this case it looks like this is centered around whatever the frame center is.  So that would be center to center reference.  There are other things that perhaps you are referring to.  We go to the system settings, which have to do with how the frame boundary is set, you can see various dimensions that you can control.  There are the various types of frames that would have some other options. If we go to this frame here, there are going to be some controls for their placement. [0:21:38]

I might be able to answer a more specific question, because I’m not really familiar with the ins and outs of curtain walls in the real world.  In other words, I’m not a builder and don’t understand that.  I’m not going to pull up instantly the best example of that, but if you give me a specific thing that you want to control, then I will be happy to deal with that.  So I apologize for deferring that question.  You definitely have controls over where everything is placed; you can get very precise. [0:22:22]

If we turn off the frames and panels here and turn on scheme, you can see that I can actually select a grid line here or a grid line along here.  So you can see we can select individual ones.  If I wanted to, I could adjust the placement of these.  So maybe if I don’t want any divisions up here. I can go and press down on and say I want to move this one grid line by itself or I can move the whole system.  I can move this one grid line I can move it up beyond it.  So now I have customized the placement of it, and when I say show me the panels and frames here, you can see now we don’t have that division.  So even though there is a system in place, I can move things.  [0:23:21]

If I turn off frames and panels and select this, it selects the entire grid line and I can move this around and perhaps make it a different pattern.  So we have that flexibility to rework things as needed to fit the context.  In addition, in terms of starting it, right now it is starting at this end here.  And this end has a thin piece.  So let’s say we didn’t want this divider here.  So if I go and select this one here, if I hit the Delete key I can’t actually delete this line.  I can move it, but I can’t remove the dividers.  So I can go to one of these.  And you’ll notice when I select this, there’s a popup that comes nearby.  This allows me to select all of the ones horizontally or parallel to it, and this one allows me to select all the ones in a row. [0:24:31]

When you do that, you can actually change their settings by making them thicker or changing the material, things like that. You can also say in this case I just want to delete them.  And that now has combined these, even though there is a grid line, I’ve just quickly deleted those elements.  What if I wanted all of these to be a different color? I can select this panel and use the option to select all of the ones parallel to them.  You can see they are all selected. I can go into the settings and maybe make the panel surfaces a different color.  So I’ll make them a yellow color here and say OK.  Now you can see I’m able to very quickly adjust all of the ones that are similar.  [0:25:25]

There are a lot of controls for individual panels, whole systems, individual frames or a whole row of frames if you want.  Ken Brooks says, “Dimension center to center of the frame elements.”  I believe that would be generally the case there.  Now let’s look at some controls that we have for placing this into the context of a building.  I just sketched something with a few walls, but let’s say we had a building where we wanted to fit the curtain wall into part of it.  So I’ll go back to the floor plan here, and we’ll do another box of walls here. Then I’ll go up to the second floor and show the first floor as a trace reference. I will do another set of walls here and get rid of the upper piece. [0:26:35]

Go down to the first floor, and will actually just open up this wall.  I’ll go and split it here and split this here and get rid of the middle piece.  So now if I go to 3D we’ll see that I have a space and it could be nice for having a curtain wall that would fit this. This is based on an example they have in the manual and it’s a very simple one.  Nothing too fancy.  But certainly, if you did want to fit this into any part of a wall, it’s important to be able to place this easily into position.  So when we are going into the curtain wall tool, you can actually place it in 3D.  We can create new ones in 3D or in a section or an elevation. [0:27:36]

I’m going to go to the floor plan and I will create a section just for the purposes of placing a curtain wall.  So I will go to the section tool and create a section just across the face here.  So this section defines a line in space obviously. And when I open it up, we’ll see the shape that we’ve got.  Now because I’ve put it at the back end of that building there, I’m not seeing the actual wall.  Let me just drag this down to here and then open it up. And you can see the shape.  It’s interesting that it’s not showing the wall here.  So I’m not quite sure. We’ll just go here and move this into the center. Let me take this out to the boundary here and we’ll open that up. [0:28:59]

So now we can see the shape of the building as we cut through that front wall.  So when we go to the curtain wall tool, one of the things that we can do is actually draw this as a new element right here in section.  And when we do that, while we can use the same option for drawing a single line or a chain of walls – I haven’t demonstrated that yet – in the section we want to do is actually draw the boundary right away.  So you saw how I curved the boundary in the earlier example. We can do any type of polygon shape that we want for the boundary. In this case I’ll say I want to do draw the boundary, and I will click on this series of points. [0:29:46]

So I’m literally just tracing this area. It can be edited afterward, but I’m setting the initial shape of it.  You’ll notice when I got back to the first point, it changed the cursor to the sun.  If I click the sun inside the area, then it’s going to put the reference of the curtain wall facing back towards me. If I click outside, it will take it in the way the section is looking which would be towards the back of the building.  So I’d like to take it out towards me, so I’m going to click in the middle. And you can see how it has created this curtain wall system directly in the section view.  The actual curtain wall system in the scheme was the default; I didn’t pay attention to it. So that is why we have this very regular grid here.  [0:30:42]

And we’re not seeing the contrast in colors, because right now we’re just looking at the section in simple line work, how sections and elevations for construction documents are often done with just line work.  If we go to 3D we are going to see the contrasting colors. If we wanted to adjust this, I could potentially take these grid points and move them.  So let’s just go and select this curtain wall here and edit it. And when I say edit it, now I have the option to work on this.  You’ll notice how everything else becomes a little bit gray. So I can go here and say show the scheme and hide frame and panels. And now I can go and move and select this line and snap it to here. Perhaps take this one and snap it in line with that. [0:31:39]

So I’ve now got a nice even thing there.  So obviously in general, to keep regularity, you would want to have the openings match the original grid. But if you for some reason wanted to subtly adjust it you could do that.  And I might take this one and move it up here. So I can use this as a free form sketching tool to make the shape that I want.  If I go back to the frame and panel, you can see that at least starts to fit in with this. Now these lines will not show, this is part of the scheme. If I turn off the scheme you can see it’s just a basic wall.  So if you did want to put in some type of a storefront into what would otherwise be a normal wall, you can create an opening either by stopping and starting the wall or by creating an empty opening. And then you can just draw your curtain wall in it.  [0:32:40]

We can do it literally on the floor plan, just sitting in the empty opening, or we can look in a section or an elevation.  Now if I rotate this around, we’ll see that the outside frame is sticking into this wall. You can see what’s going on here. I am a little unclear in terms of the visual representation here. It’s probably because I’m editing mode. When I say OK, there we go. So now we are seeing how this is done here.  [0:33:25]

Let me see if there are any questions. John Gilchrist writes, “I am trying to follow along, and I don’t see scheme displayed.” Tom B. asks, “Can you stagger or stilt a curtain wall form?” I’m not sure what you mean by stagger or stilt.  Maybe you can explain that a little bit more. In terms of having these divisions, let’s take a look at how we can actually put in some more custom glazing rather than just using those points.  In terms of trying to follow along and get the scheme, basically if I select this curtain wall here in 3D, there’s the edit button. And when I go to the edit button, then you can see that there are these little controls here.  When I’m not in this, if I click OK or cancel, then we don’t see that whole editing thing. [0:34:32]

And by the way, if I am on the floor plan and I select that curtain wall here, then you see there is a button that says “Edit in 3D”. It will just jump to the 3D window with this now setup for editing.  We don’t see handles saying that it’s selected, but it is slightly more colorful than the background which is sort of grayed out. And it’s the only thing that we can edit. If I click on any other elements, it won’t allow me to edit it. So this is where we have the scheme and you can turn the scheme on or off using this button.  Let’s say that we wanted to – we mentioned step. So suppose we wanted to have a bit more creative arrangement here. [0:35:20]

I can go and turn on the scheme. I am trying to remember – if I go to the frame I know I can snap two points. I am going to do one thing. I know that is not what you want, but just to show you that I’m snapping to these points, and it now has created a frame here. And I can actually snap to these points. So I can do some creative drawing on here.  Let me just undo back those couple of steps. And each one of them is a distinct panel that I can control.  I can make a mosaic pattern.  If I go along here, I can draw this straight across. You can see here is a snap point.  Is that horizontal? Yes, it actually was horizontal because I’m snapping to the center. And here you can see the black pencil. If I go somewhere along here, and let’s see if there’s a perpendicular snap. [0:36:28]

Yes, there is a perpendicular snap. This is along the plane. I am not seeing the snap. If I use the Shift key it allowed me to snap it. So the Shift key clearly made that horizontal. So holding down the Shift key will lock it horizontally. And if I wanted it to be a specific height, you can see that I’m at a certain location. If I type in “Z”, you can see “Z” is a certain height. It just happens to be whatever it is in space.  If I wanted to be 2 feet higher I can add two and a + you can see how it repositions cursor into a new location.  That was – it did the mathematics.  When you hit a coordinate, it brings up the tracker, and when you hit some numbers it will allow you to either put in a final value or by hitting the plus or the minus, it will allow you to move it up or down or greater or lower value of that coordinate. [0:37:37]

Then hitting the Enter key will be will give me that value. And if I hit the Shift key here this locks me. So I’m getting a horizontal thing. This is going to be exactly 2 feet from center to center here. So let’s say that I wanted to go across and press the Shift key to lock it. And maybe I want to take this piece out.  So now I have something. This bottom one was not set precisely, but this one is 2 feet above that.  So if I wanted to perhaps remove this piece and remove that piece, I can select them and perhaps select this. And maybe instead of making it a different type of panel like a door or whatever, I can change it to the distinct panel which would put it into the category that I have.  [0:38:27]

So that shows you the flexibility that we have. We can create dividers anywhere we want, and then we can modify these panels to be either other types of elements or possibly change their color. We were changing the color here. We were changing their dedication from the main type to the distinct type; however those are set up in your scheme.  Dave Norman writes, “I’ve assume 2″ wide framing needs to be adjusted by 1″ at the wall so that the frames are not buried into the wall.” Good point. There are some options here. I will say OK, and we’ll to the floor plan and go up to the second floor so we can see the curtain wall. [0:39:17]

And I select this curtain wall and you can see how the end of the curtain wall was set here, but the frame is visible sticking into the wall.  So if we didn’t want that, if we wanted it to stop dead there, we can go into the settings for the curtain wall. The boundary frame here right now is set to generic. So generic will just have a certain thickness and a certain width, 2″ horizontally in this case. It will have a certain depth, 6″ here. And then there’s a certain depth for where the panel is in terms of how deep the panel is set in. But there are some options as well for switching it from generic. Where are the controls for inside or outside? I know that there are options there. I haven’t looked at this for a while. If I choose this as frame, and cut outline – those are more detailed things. Cutting planes – okay, that’s not where it’s at. Let me just go back in and go into the scheme. [0:40:49]

Here you can see this says, “Start with a segment”. This is the option for where I started in terms of this. But there is an option – where is it? We can set it to be inside – so that this line here becomes the inside of that. You can change individual frames, but I’m looking at the whole system of this here. And I’m not seeing what I was looking for here.  But there are some different variations and invisible. This is an interesting one. If I say OK, you can see it has disappeared.  Let’s take a look at what that does in 3D. You can see that the glass is sort of stopping dead. So of course this is one possibility here is that we actually have the frame made manually with other pieces of things, rather than defined in the element. [0:42:32]

You can see that that the boundary here now allows some space for it. Let me undo that change here and go back to 3D. You can see now that boundary is there. I am trying to remember where this is set at. 6″, that’s the depth of this whole thing. If I go to scheme and start with frame not panel, if we select this and go to the scheme, and say start from center, align to center, end with segment.  So you can actually align the whole thing centered in your wall. You can also say the endpoint of what you set is going to be the segment. Or whatever point you clicked on becomes the center.  And here is custom origin which allows you to place the origin where you want. Then actually we can move the origin around for this, but that’s not what we are controlling here. [0:43:46]

So here’s where it is. It’s not under schemes; it’s under curtain wall systems. And we can control place boundary frames. Okay, so I apologize, it’s under the entire system rather than the frames. And instead of placing them at the center boundary, I am going to say that I want the boundary frames to be inside that. So you can see this slightly heavier line, it’s going to put the frames inside that. Say OK, and now we are getting that clean result. So there are a whole lot of controls here for the system as a whole as well as for individual pieces.  [0:44:39]

We’ve been going 45 minutes, so I want to do a few more minutes here and then collect some questions and things that I will do in a second lesson on curtain walls.  One thing that I know we can look at is on the floor plan, you can see that we’re on the second floor, and we’re seeing the first floor as a trace.  Let me turn off the virtual trace, so that we are not seeing that. Remember on this side, I didn’t even have any walls up on the second floor. If I go down to the first floor we are seeing the door symbol. Now the curtain wall as a whole is set to show in a certain way on the floor plan. So on all relevant stories it was showing. This basically extended up into the second floor so it was showing there. We could restrict it, if we didn’t want to show any other stories. [0:45:50]

We can also choose the floor plan display. And this says “symbolic with overhead”. We can also just say “symbolic” or “projected”. So what does projected do? You can see now it’s actually showing the fact that there is some information for that. If I go to the projected with overhead, we see some additional information in terms of the top of that. If we go to the symbolic here or symbolic with overhead, in this case there’s no part of the curtain wall that sticks up further. And we can do the projection within the floor plan range or show the entire element. So if it goes up above the story, we can show the entire element if we want, things like that.  [0:46:46]

I know what I was going to show you. We haven’t done corners. So let’s do something simple. I’m going to say I want to create a chain of curtain walls.  So I’ll just do this in empty space so we can see it by itself. I’ll just draw a corner, and then I’m going to switch. And this little pet palette you can drag around and switch your mode of creating. So if I wanted to create a three point curve like this, I can create a curved segment of this curtain wall, and then just drag across it. I want to get this line so then I can take this over to here. So I have defined a free-form curve, but I said I want to take it straight to here. And then I can switch it back to a straight segment.  [0:47:43]

When I’m done, I’m going to click on this last point again. And it will then say “Which is the outside?” So I’ll say this is the outside here. And he gives me the option. Right now, because we’ve got a chained one with multiple pieces, it only allows me to do it at 90°.  When I was doing a simple segment, I could have tilted it.  And we’ll be looking at how you can tilt things and place them. So I will say “Place”, and you can see how it very quickly has created a complex system.  Each part of the system has its own scheme. In other words, perhaps I want to make this front part have a different setting than the rest.  So I will take this piece and say “Edit it”. Now I’m actually editing – if I go to the scheme here and turn off these panels, I can select this segment.  [0:48:46]

Notice how this segment here is separate from this one.  So if I wanted to go to the scheme for this, I could go into the system settings for this scheme. Let’s say that I wanted to make this finer. So let’s say “2”, like that, and that’s going to make these thinner. And actually that affected the whole thing. Let me cancel that I will discard the changes. Let me go here and edit.  I think what I need to do is go in and select this here and go into the settings for this scheme.  So I was going to system settings. I want to go into just the scheme that is selected. And we’ll make this here. And what that did is it changed this one. [0:49:41]

Let me go back and say that in the scheme settings perhaps I want it to be all glazing like that, and say OK. And now if I turn back on the panels you can see what that has done. Or maybe I just want it to be all purely vertical, so I can go in again and just take these and go into to the scheme and say that vertically, we’ll just get rid of this, and I’ll take this one up to be 20′. So it will just be as high as it needs to go. Maybe 20 is too extreme, so let’s say 12′ or something like that. So I will say OK, and now you can see how the scheme goes up to 12′ but the boundary is this. If I say OK, we’re going to see what that has done. When we have a chain here, we can modify the scheme for each piece separately. [0:50:47]

We do have overall control if we wanted to change all of them to have a different colored glass or some other settings there.  If we look at the corner here and say Edit This, you can see that this is a single piece, it’s a single frame. It’s not like there are two. So it is smart enough there. I can’t actually delete it. I could go in and delete this and it would combine these. I can’t delete this, but I can change this from a mullion frame to make it invisible.  And you can see how it was removed.  Now it left a gap there because of the size. If I put it back to generic and make that size – I’m not quite sure that we can make it zero. We can play around with some of these dimensions and then make it invisible. [0:52:05]

I know there’s a way that you can do it, you can do a butt glaze. I’m not quite getting this working here but let me show you something else here. So here we have a case where this piece – if we were going to get rid of that – we would want this to come down. And obviously it’s stopping at the midpoint.  If I highlight this you’ll see that there is a priority level. So all of these elements have priorities for intersection or connection. And when I make it bigger, you see now is sticks up more here? If I make it lower it will change its relationship. And I think maybe what I need to do is make these two higher. So I just made them higher, so now they are connected in the corner here.  [0:53:02]

And this is facing the corner, it’s a custom frame and I think it can probably be adjusted in terms of shape.  There was actually a boundary frame. Let me undo that. If we go into corner frame here, there we go. You’ll notice what that did. It actually put it in so that it fits that corner in a different way. So there are different options to change the shape of that.  I’m not quite sure what exactly to adjust to get this butt glazing to work, but that’s certainly something that you can adjust. But I wanted to show you another example where we need to adjust the priorities, because I want these to pass through each other. [0:53:53]

So if I take this one and reduce its priority here, there we go. I just reduced it down to the minimum and now it stops dead underneath here. In the same way, when we have a door, I’ve also seen that in the same way for when you have doors, and you want to have the frames on the side of the doors. So let me go and put in a door. I will take this piece out take this and make it a door here. And now if I take this piece, I don’t think I can delete it, but I can make this invisible. So I can’t delete this bottom frame, but I can make it invisible. And then you can see we have two problems. The door is raised up a little bit, and also these two frames are not meeting properly. [0:54:57]

So what I can do is make this frame a higher priority here. I guess that’s not going to work. I can make this one a higher priority. No. If I take this one down and this one up, okay – I’m not quite sure here. Maybe I have to take this one down. I know that if I take this one up – now that extended down. So I’ve basically made this one stronger so they could pass through. It wasn’t being stopped by the invisible one here.  So we’re at 2:00 mark. As you can tell, there’s a ton of stuff in curtain walls. We haven’t started to look at how you can do tilted ones or vaulted ones and other intersections like curtain walls meeting up with walls.  So we’ll deal with some of those next time.  [0:56:13]

Let’s see if we have some questions. Louis B. writes, “Wall finish at the end of the second story [inaudible] storefront”. Also he says, “So happy you are doing this topic and had the same issue with the door to floor alignment.” So I will look at that and have an answer for the next time. Dave N. says, “If you show the second floor plan, will the door be shown as a projection or not shown? Can the floor plan display be adjusted?” So let’s take a look at the second floor. So we now on the first floor. If I go to the second floor you can see that this is not showing. So let’s show as trace reference again. And let me draw basic walls here. [0:57:08]

Now if I turn off the trace reference, we are not seeing the lower information.  When we go down to the first floor, we are seeing that.  The floor plan display can always be adjusted. Individual elements here. So there’s an option for how this is going to be seen. And show the projection to floor plan range. Let’s do the entire element here. And now if we go up to the second floor, it’s still not showing that. I think because the settings for our current view – if we go to the second floor plan – are set for the floor plan cut plane to show only on the current story. We could go down one story below here, and now we’re seeing some stuff down there.  [0:58:14]

We’re still not seeing the door there.  Let’s go back in here and see if you did want to do that, show down to one story below here. And cut plane height here. Then we put in a negative distance and see if that does anything. No. If we go here, this is actually set to be symbolic, that’s the issue. If we made it projected, then we would see at least where that door opening is.  In other words, now it’s projecting down there. If I go down to the lower story, you can see how it is showing.  So I’m not quite sure what you’re wanting to see there Dave, but certainly there are options you can do in either the overall floor plan cut plane settings or in the curtain wall settings that would affect that.  [0:59:20]

So let me see, “Projected works,” Dave writes. Okay, that will solve that particular question. I think we’ve been going an hour, and I do need to do a little more research for the next one so that I’m able to show you some of the things that would be good. I look forward to getting your comments and follow-up questions. This has been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 0:59:49]

Best Practices Course – Week 17 Part 5 B– © copyright 2014 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 17 – Complex Modeling PART 5 B- Curtain Walls Advanced

Welcome everyone to the ArchiCAD Best Practices training on curtain walls.  We’ll be going into some more advanced topics than we did the first time, and I’ll be fixing some of the problems that I was not able to resolve in the first lesson.  Let’s take a look in 3D at this particular model that I started to work on, and fix two problems.  One is the butt glazing here.  I had said, “What if we wanted to have these pieces of glass meet without a frame?”  I did some changes here.  I selected this frame and I made it invisible, but it still didn’t meet up.  [0:00:44]

So it’s a very simple solution. I’m going to select a curtain wall system and say edit and then go and select that frame.  So this frame, which could be set to be generic of some size and thickness like this so it would show up, it turns out that what I need to do is make the width zero and “D” is the distance that the panels – in this case glass – are from the boundary.  So if I change it to zero here, then you’ll see these pieces of glass meet up.  If we wanted to get this framing here done differently, I can go and say take this frame and possibly delete it, or I can make it invisible. [0:01:39]

Now you can see what that did here, it made this join.  And perhaps I might take that same frame and make it have a zero gap there.  So that makes these pieces join.  I’m not quite sure about the actual join; there may be some little piece we need to put in there.  There is the option of something that would be a corner frame here. And that could be set to have a lower priority so it would fit underneath here.  So it could now go in here.  I could make it have the same material or surface appearance of these.  Now this one is setup in terms of the appearance, it’s set for nickel satin. And if I select this one, perhaps I need to override this here. [0:02:28]

That’s interesting, that saying building material. Let’s go into the settings of it, and set it to 3D representation. The material, curtain wall, cutting plane…so there are various things for a corner you can actually have different angles. If I say use frame building material, surface, what is the building material? The frame building material surface. That’s interesting. So that is actually setup in the curtain wall system.  So if I say OK, that’s crazy. Let’s go in and say that the frame for the entire boundary – I have nickel satin here. Always making problems for myself here.  [0:03:30]

I am still puzzled why this particular piece does not allow us when I do this to change this to the nickel satin. That is interesting.  The corner frame, if I open up the settings, its surface – okay here’s the setting. The surface there’s was set for iron. I wanted it set to nickel satin. That will do it.  So sometimes you have to dig a little bit more, perhaps you can widen this up so you can read what’s going on in there. Say OK, and now that’s going to match.  So that gives us the controls that we need there.  The other thing I had not done in the previous lesson was set this door frame at the bottom.  [0:04:21]

So you can see right now it is standing up above the frame.  If you had a threshold, perhaps that would be alright. But if we didn’t want it to be down at the same level as the frame, how would we achieve that?  It turns out there is a post on ArchiCAD talk that I had researched a while back. I will put a link to this underneath this video. If we go in here, it talks about the same issue of the gap. And it gives some solutions. So I actually tested this out to make sure that it worked, and then an e-mail tech support question that came in last year from Luis Barrios, remember I summarized it, which is nice because I wrote out some answers to some questions here in reference to that particular topic and had a quick summary. [0:05:25]

I’m going to be putting this underneath the page, because this is something that you might forget. And this is a very quick thing. So here are the steps I’m going to go through. And I will refer to it as I do it.  So the first thing is I’m going to confirm the changes that I had done in the corner. Then select this curtain wall and before I click on edit, I’m going to go to the main settings for the curtain wall and go to the boundary.  So I have selected the curtain wall as a whole, and I’m going to the curtain wall system main settings and say that I would like to place the boundary frames inside the boundary. [0:06:08]

So the line that is the theoretical boundary of the curtain wall itself is an abstract polygon, and I’m placing the frames within it.  Since the frames will come up within it, the door can then go down to that boundary. The door cannot go beyond the boundary.  When the frames are centered on the boundary, they go beyond, and if they are outside of course they also stick out.  So I will change it to inside the boundary, and they still move up. We still have some issues with cleaning up, so I’m going to go and edit this.  [0:06:37]

What we need to do is make sure that the verticals here, and I will select both of these, are set at a higher priority.  I can force them to the highest priority here.  That fixed this side, but this side I had done some extra things. I made this one the same high priority. Let me take this one down, and you can see that this bottom frame now gives way. So this comes straight down and the other one stops dead, rather than a mitered corner. So this is probably more the way it would be constructed.  So now I have fixed that issue. If I go underneath the door you can see there’s this line that refers to the frame. That frame right now is set to be invisible.  [0:07:17]

If I say make it generic, you can see how it starts to do some funny things here.  In the normal case, we would have some thickness like 2 inches here. And you can see how it’s continuing the frame across there.  But if I select this frame and make the A zero and also the D, which is the distance from the boundary line that the door would stay at, I also make that zero, then the door actually comes down neatly to the bottom.  So I can leave it as generic, I don’t have to make it invisible. It can work either way, because now the door is told to go zero distance from the boundary polygon line. It makes the boundary frame have zero thickness and zero depth.  [0:08:12]

So now we have that all cleaned up.  So remember you can select multiple elements here and change their priorities.  There are some defaults, in terms of the main boundary frame, the vertical ones and horizontal ones, these are defaults.  But you can change any individual pieces to get the results that you prefer.  So now we have a clean result there. I will say OK, and we can move on with some other questions here.  [0:08:41]

Now when I select the curtain wall as a whole, in order to edit the components, I can click on the edit button. But if I want to stretch this, for example, I can go to the end of the blue line.  So it’s a little hard to see, but there’s a blue line across here. That is the reference line.  And right now, the curtain wall is said to be inside the boundary and the offset to the reference surface is a certain distance here.  I guess it’s all touching that distance.  So there are all sorts of controls here for how the mullions are set, the defaults for their size or transoms. If we go to the boundary settings here there are distances and sizes for all of these elements.  [0:09:39]

And there are a number of different choices for the framing types. We’ll be looking at them in a different context later on, where we might change the framing type. We’ve already looked at how corner frames can be used selectively for certain things.  Now that gives me some options here, but if I just wanted to stretch this, I can grab this end point and use the pet palette and stretch it. And if I use the Shift key or follow a guideline, I can stretch it along the same dimension.  So curtain walls, when they were first introduced in ArchiCAD 12 could not do that. So if you happen to still be in ArchiCAD 12, you would have to actually adjust the boundary of the curtain wall.  [0:10:26]

Now we looked at the boundary changes that we could do in the last lesson.  I’ll just point out that if we want to make the taller, it’s the same thing. I go to the top here and use the standard options for walls to say I’d like to extend it. Whoops, I didn’t want to make it short like that, I just wanted to rotate it around to get a better angle. And I can go in and use the stretching option and take it up to some height. So we can do it that way. We can also change the height here. In ArchiCAD 12, we couldn’t stretch it. We could change it numerically here, and we could change the boundary. I will just demonstrate again how you change the boundary, because sometimes you do need to do that, even in ArchiCAD 13 through 17. [0:11:20]

So if I click on edit and I then say let me look at the scheme, you can see the scheme here is the theoretical extent. And if I turn off the frames, you’ll see just the panels. Turn off the panels, and now I’m seeing the scheme here with the boundary. The boundary is the blue line. So in ArchiCAD 12 you would have to do some editing of the boundary. For example, stretch this boundary longer or shorter.  In ArchiCAD 13 or later, you can just stretch the baseline. In any of these versions you can go and reposition this point and perhaps take it up higher.  You could snap it to some other element that you want to have the same height, and you’ll notice now it has this slanted piece. [0:12:12]

If I turn back on the frames, we are going to see that it has extended the transoms and mullions up to meet that new boundary.  If we want to curve this, we actually can go in and curve this after the fact. this is a boundary line here, and I can use the pet palette to edit it and make it curved.  Now what it actually is doing is making a series of straight segments that follow that curve.  So occasionally what you may need to do is put in some more grid lines to get a smoother curvature. So let me demonstrate that. If I take this curve sharper, you can see how this is segmented, which is fine. But sometimes you may want to have some more fine tuning in there.  [0:13:10]

If I added a grid line how would I do that?  I press down on this grid line and say I want to move it. So you can use the pet palette to actually move this. No, I am trying to remember how we do this. Let me confirm this and show you where I have used this successfully I’m going to rotate around and let’s start editing this one. And you can see that the segmentation here, we are seeing straight segments. So let me go ahead and edit this.  We’re in the editing mode here, let me turn on the scheme and maybe keep the frames here. Now with this scheme selected, I know that I can go and select this, and I can move this position. [0:14:22]

So if I move this position along in space, this is the separator, you’ll see how it will readjust this frame here. Let me undo that and see if I can move this and copy it. So if I select this and move it and hold down and release the Option key, no, it’s not giving me a copy. If I right click on this: Move, Drag a Copy, that allows me to select. If I select this and right click, when I right click, it’s getting the whole thing. So I’m trying to remember where it was that we could create additional segments. I know that we can draw – let’s turn off the frame here.  I know that we can activate the scheme and draw. Here we are selecting this. I just added another segment in there. [0:15:26]

So you can see as I click I’m adding more segments. And now let me go back to show the frame.  You can see there are more segments.  So this is what I remembered is if we turn off the frame we can add potentially more segments to get this straighter. Now we’re starting to see a more closer approximation of a curve here.  We can select this frame, and then there’s the pet palette. If I select this and say I want to select all of the ones here, I can delete them. This allows me to have it follow that segment closer instead of being a straight line across. It’s going to approximate that curve better.  [0:16:30]

So I haven’t worked with this thoroughly, but you can see how much more of a curve appears than over on this side where it’s straight.  So that may be something you want to do is create some extra grid lines and then delete the frame in order to get this appearing more smoothly curved.  Ultimately, what it is going to do is create straight segments along this whole area.  Now if you did want to do a vaulted roof – I’m going to say OK here.  Let’s say I wanted to do a vault on top of a building.  So I’m going to take the south elevation here.  So we have this building shape here. [0:17:15]

I’m going to go to the curtain wall tool.  Now, we’ve been creating the curtain wall from this option here, which is where you draw a single line or a chain of lines, a poly line, and then ArchiCAD will extrude the curtain wall and run it upward or away from that line on the plan.  We also have the option to do various curved things here. And in fact on the plan, you can use the option to create a vault.  But another interesting option is to just use this poly line one here in the elevation or section.  So by clicking now, I get the standard pet palette here, and I can draw a series of segments.  In this case, I just want to do a three-point placement.  I will draw this across here, and then the fourth point as you probably know, is how far it’s going to extend. And I will just leave it at this point.  [0:18:25]

Now it’s waiting to see if I’m going to do another segment, because I could go straight across.  Now think about this, this is going to go over the building.  So I’m looking in the elevation and drawing the shape that I want, and I’m defining what would be what we been seeing on the floor plan but on an elevation.  It’s going to go away from us to create a vaulted roof.  If I don’t want another segment, I can just click your one more time here to finish it.  You’ll notice the sun icon is potentially waiting to see if I click inside or outside.  And I believe if I click inside the frame, it will be put inside. If I click outside, it will go outside of that curve. So let me try this one.  [0:19:05]

It says how deep do you want to make it? In other words, how far back?  I can always stretch it later, but let me make it 30 feet deep here and say OK.  And you can see how it has created something. I’m not quite sure what it is. Let’s take a look in 3D you can see how it has created this vaulted element.  Now the vaulted element was drawn where?  It was drawn on the plan in line with this elevation, because remember, I was in the elevation view.  And we’re not seeing it here on the first floor. If I go up to the second floor, we will see the beginnings of it, because it’s up high. So it actually would be on the roof story or the third floor story.  So if I wanted to place this directly on the building, I could do that by creating a section.  [0:19:56]

In fact, we do have this section right here.  So let me just undo creating that piece, go back to the floor plan, and we will take this section here and open it up.  Now we have a similar thing.  I will just do a quick sketch here, make sure that I’ve got the three point one, click the fourth time to say this is the end of it, click a fifth time to say I’m not going to do another segment, and then click inside to say I’d like to draw it here inside.  So now, if we look in 3D, we are going to see something that at least is a beginning of the whole process.  If I select this, I can say in terms of the scheme that it’s only going to have one thing. So let’s say that I’d take this out and make this 4 feet or something like that. [0:20:56]

We’ll make these 6×4 panels, make it a little bit taller. And I can determine what these are. Are they opaque or transparent? So let’s say that these are all the transparent ones.  I will say OK, and you can see how it has created a simple vault. This vault or element does have a depth of 30 feet. If I change it to 20, it pulls it back here. So I could actually measure it and take it as far as it needs to be. If I select and edit it in 3D and say I want to see the scheme, and then turn off the panels here, you can see how I actually have control of this boundary. And I can go and say that I want to move this boundary in and snap it to that building.  [0:21:57]

And when I show the frame and the panels, we’ll see what’s going on with that.  So it has now created a vaulted shape pretty easily.  If I wanted to make this – say OK here and confirm it. And if I select this one I can go and edit it and say that I would like to show the scheme and hide the frames and panels. And then I will take this and select the boundary here and then go and curve that.  I will snap it up into position.  When I show the frames and panels, we’re going to see the results.  Say OK.  So we’re now getting something that is starting to look like an integrated system. Obviously, we would want to adjust it. [0:22:56]

Let’s see if I can get these things to adjust to each other. I will say select this and edit it and hide the frames and panels just to get the scheme, and take this grid line and move this grid line into position.  Now I’m not sure whether we can snap it directly.  It doesn’t look like there’s a snap point here.  So let me go and do it by eye. We can certainly get it to be pretty close. let’s see if we can get this moving.  That’s interesting; it’s not letting me adjust this grid line here.  So we might have to actually do some calculations.  So for example, if I go back and say OK and select this and go to the scheme, instead of being 4 feet, let’s say that it starts from 6 feet and then 3 feet. I’m going to see what happens with that.  [0:24:05]

You can see how it started to adjust these.  I imagine that we can control this to snap it, but if you can’t do it precisely that way then you can type in different distances and make sure that these coordinate.  So it might be more tedious, but you can definitely make them coordinate in the design.  So those are some quick demonstrations and some options that you may want to consider.  Another thing that is really quite special about the curtain wall is that we can tilt it even after we’ve drawn it.  So let me just draw a simple curtain wall here.  [0:24:46]

I will draw this on the floor plan.  I have this piece of curtain wall, and I can press down on the corner and this option allows me to stretch the height.  We were already doing that.  But this option here is rotate.  And when I rotate, we can actually flip this around. So I can rotate this in 3D space.  So I’ll take the compass perpendicular and then tilt it.  So in ArchiCAD 15 or 16, the compass was introduced for visual feedback, but the basic idea has actually been around since the curtain wall first was created. That is that you can create something if you want, standing up from the floor plan, and then tilt it into position.  [0:25:50]

So sometimes it may be easier to draw – let me just go back to our ground floor here – to draw a shape, perhaps complex shape like this and control it, and then flip it up. So imagine creating that vault as a series of segments on the floor plan and then flipping it up to be horizontal.  So we can manipulate it that way.  An interesting application of the curtain wall is to use it as a suspended ceiling.  So we’ll look at that.  I see there are some questions that have been typed in.  I will get back to address those questions.  So feel free to type those in.  I just want to keep going with some things that I think we’ll want to make sure we cover.  [0:26:43]

So I am going to draw something off to the side. I don’t want to complicate things with curtain walls meeting curtain walls and things like that. I just want a simple situation to work on.  So I’m going to draw a box of walls.  We’ll flip this around like that, and maybe do a ceiling within this space.  We could have more complex geometry, but let’s start with that.  So how would we do that?  I’m talking about using a curtain wall in a totally different way, not for glazing, but for creating a different type of system.  In this case a system of panels that would be acoustical tile or suspended ceiling elements.  [0:27:43]

Then the dividers, instead of being structural frames like we would have for glazing, would be like a t-bar shape.  So let’s see how we might do that.  When I’m drawing this, we had been creating the curtain wall on the floor plan using this option, which is either straight or a series of segments.  There is the option of the boundary.  Remember in the elevation one, if I go back to 3D, in this one here, we actually in an elevation view drew the boundary and it created a curtain wall filling that boundary.  Now we’re going to do the same thing on the floor plan. I will draw the boundary of this. And in this case, I will draw the inside shape.  [0:28:31]

It now says which way do you want this to go?  I don’t do this often enough to remember, but I believe if you click inside the boundary, then the elements in the frame will come up towards you and if you click outside it will go away from you.  This is in relationship to whatever was your reference plane.  So I will just take this up going towards me.  Now we have a shape here. And let’s take a look in 3D.  I’m going to do a little marquee to see what we’ve got here.  So what you can see is it created a curtain wall down at the floor level.  So the basic setting of the curtain wall was at a certain level.  And if I take this up to 10 feet, ceiling level, now it’s up there. [0:29:26]

If we look at the scheme, instead of it being something with alternating panels, let’s make it one and let’s say that it’s going to be 2×4. And let’s just remove these.  So it’s basically going to be a 2×4 in one direction or another. I say OK and let’s look here.  Now you can see that it’s now starting to look a little bit more like a suspended ceiling in that it’s just a simple grid with all of the same types of panels.  Now if we go into that setting for the boundary, the mullion, and the transom, we have some options for the sizes.  Mullions I believe are the vertical elements, if you were doing a normal curtain wall going up and down. And transoms would be horizontal.  [0:30:23]

In this case we might just create something very simple.  And you can see it says generic, butt glaze, corner frame, modular. Let’s look at some of these options here.  If I select frame or modular frame, you can see that there are some options that are obviously very appropriate for certain types of curtain walls.  Let’s try generic here. So generic just has some dimensions there.  We can also load other curtain wall frames.  So this allows me to open a frame file and it says it’s looking for file with that particular type.  This allows me to load something that’s already been created. Let’s see if we can create a shape that is a t-bar shape here. [0:31:14]

I haven’t done this, but I’m always willing to try something out and within a couple minutes we should have something that is usable, if I’m right.  Let’s take a look it that.  So I’m going to go back to the floor plan here and go to the Design menu, Complex Profiles, Profile Manager. If we go to profile manager, when we create a custom profile, it can be used for walls, beams, or columns.  But that’s not where we’re going to create this profile.  Instead, let me use a little slab, and I’m going to do something out of a simple component. So instead of a composite, it will be simple. [0:32:09]

Let me make this out of some stainless steel or something like that.  I will do a rectangular shape and then notch it, so let me go in here. I’m not exactly sure how big this should be, but it certainly will be pretty small. So I’m going to make it let’s say 3 inches across by 1 inch high, and maybe a little wider than it needs to be. Let’s just do it so we can actually see it better I will then use the subtraction, and I’m going to create this general shape, subtract here. I might want to fine tune this a little bit and make sure that these are exactly in line and perhaps make this a little thinner.  [0:33:11]

I can make this element very precisely drafted.  But for my purposes, let’s see if this actually would work.  If I were to look at this element in isolation, you can see it’s a little piece and it’s fairly tall. So let me just see if I were to make this 6 inches, a little shorter. So minus 6 inches here. I’ve made it a little piece of it. And let me go back to the floor plan having done that, and we’ll go to the File menu, Libraries and Objects, Save Selection As, and we can save it as a curtain wall frame.  So let’s see if this actually works.  [0:34:04]

So when you have one or more things selected, you can save it as an object that you could put in with the object tool. Or you can save something that you’ve drawn as a door or window. If it’s 2D information you can save it as a drawing title.  Then there are these various options that would be components of larger systems, like a handle or a leaf for a door, things like that.  In earlier versions of ArchiCAD, this may look a little different. You might just be saying save an object and then it would say what type of object to you want it to be.  In recent versions it asks you very specifically right at the beginning which you want it to be. [0:34:42]

So it may look a little different, depending upon your version, but in general you should be able to make it something different than an object. In this case, a curtain wall frame.  So I will just call this “t-bar frame” here. And it will be available in the setting dialog boxes of relevant objects which recognize it. So the curtain wall tool should be able to recognize this the next time I go in.  Now let’s see if this works. I’m going to go in here and select that curtain wall is up on the second floor. Why are we not seeing it up there?  Let me just make sure that layers would be there. We are seeing the other curtain walls. Let’s just go to 3D and see what we’ve got.  [0:35:45]

We’ll see why this curtain wall isn’t showing on the floor plan.  So it’s showing on all relevant stories here. We can stay ‘home story only’ if we want. We can say ‘symbolic, symbolic with overhead’. That’s fine. Symbolic to floor plan range, say ‘entire element’, that’s part of it. And also we can go and right click anywhere in the element and say ‘Relink home story’ and say we want it to be on the first floor. If I go back to the first floor here now we’re seeing it.  One of those changes that I did made it fix the issue. So let’s go here and edit in 3D. Let me go to system settings and here’s the mullion.  We’re not seeing that t-bar frame here. Load other curtain wall frames, go to library, OK so we’re not seeing that.  [0:37:05]

We saved that, so let me see what is going on here.  I know you should be able to do this. So what we’ll do is go in and change the size of this to something that would work. So the horizontal one, two inches, we’ll take this down to zero and the height will take this up to ½ inch, something like that. The overall height here, half inch, and it will have a certain thickness. So I’m not sure what exactly we’re going to get. So this is now saying mullions. Let’s see, when I do that, this is what it comes out like. So you can see that these pieces, which are the ones that I adjusted, are starting to look thinner. We also want the panels to be much thinner, because they’re not structural. So I’ll just do one more quick change here. [0:38:27]

We’ll make the panels to be zero here, and these panels – go to general settings, panel. Let’s see what we get if we reduce these down here to quarter inch thickness. Let’s make this a quarter inch.  Let me see what happens if I do that.  So now these panels are much thinner, they are more like acoustic tiles.  And I would just need to make the mullion one half and zero, so that is similar to what I had here.  So now we should see something more similar. What happened to the panels, the scheme? So now we have these all in here and it looks like somehow I got messed up with the dividers on one side. So let’s just give it one last try and I’ll say I’ve gotten it as close as I can get it for today.  [0:40:13]

So we’re doing frames here, transoms. This got to be somehow off. Do one, okay. There we go. So now if the material of these panels – so the scheme, this white cells refer to the main class, so we go to the main panels and we are going to say that the materials are not going to be glass, they are going to be something like a plaster. So where would that be?  Stucco, plaster, where is plaster? Ceiling tile, this is actually a texture that would have some line work in it, we don’t really want that. Let’s just do a stucco white, so it’ll have a white textured material.  [0:41:23]

So now obviously it still needs a little refinement, but the basic idea is there.  And you can then select individual panels, say edit it, and we can select this one and make this some other type of panel. We wouldn’t be able to directly put lights into the curtain wall unless we created a special panel type. So to create a custom panel type for a curtain wall I think should be a little easier.  There are no built in ones for this purpose, to create fluorescent light or other things.  So here’s one option you could do. If you want to put in a light or a vent, you could take this panel and go in here and just delete the thing.  That puts a gap in.  [0:42:35]

Then you could put in an object – if we save the changes. I’m not quite sure which one I did it in, but let’s go to the object tool, or maybe this would be under objects, lamps.  So these are skylights, that’s not what we want.  I’ll go to the More tool and the Lamp tool and take a fluorescent light here. And I think that’s probably what we want. I’ll take this four by two.  We don’t really want this to be suspended; we want it to be a ceiling light here.  I’m going to round it off rather than account for the t bar.  I’ll just do a four by two here.  And we have various styles that we can do, so I’ll do this one, like that.  I’ll put this in, show the layer, let’s go to 3D.  You can see that I could snap this element into position.  So it looks like I have it in the right vicinity.  So if I select this, drag it into position, and go to 3D and change the height of the base height of it up to 10 feet to make it a little bit closer.  So it’s quick and dirty, but definitely you can get this to fit in.  Probably put it above the supporting things rather than below.  [0:44:27]

So let me see what questions there are.  I have some remaining things about scheduling curtain wall doors and panels that I wanted to make sure we looked at. Dave N. asks, “Curtain wall as a t-bar ceiling?”  Okay, we’ve been looking at that.  So Dave, let me know if this is enough to go on. Luis B., hey Luis. I showed an email that I sent to you earlier, I’m not sure if you were on the call at that time. “Is there a way to center the grid within the perimeter or boundary?” Yes, I will show you that. “Panel revision into a light or vent would be good.” I think I’ve just done that.  Now we could create a custom panel that would actually look like a light or a vent. Right now, I was just deleting it and replacing it.  So I will see if I can get a custom panel to convert something into that.  [0:45:25]

Let’s look at centering the grid.  There’s a question from Roderick from earlier, “Eric, I’ve been working on a curtain wall in a project where I have a situation with a floor to roof curtain wall and a double height room. The problem is when I edit the boundary polygon in 3D I have problems identifying the underside of the roof plane so it can snap to the underside.” I might need to look at that question in a coaching call, because without seeing the example I wouldn’t know what you are having a problem with snapping to.  So sometimes when you have problems snapping to certain things, you may need to put in a temporary element for being able to snap. So essentially use a construction line but there might be a physical element that you drop into the model, and then you can snap to that and take that element out, it helps you to get it into position. [0:46:25]

So let’s look at centering the grid within the perimeter boundary, and let’s look at creating perhaps a custom panel that would turn into a light or vent there.  In terms of centering this, if I go back to the floor plan and select this, you’ll see that in the scheme settings, there’s an option for whether it starts at one end or it’s centered in the middle of the reference line segment, or it starts – what does this say.  This is one: position the origin at the middle of the reference line segment or position in the middle of the grid pattern.  So it depends on whether you want the line at the center or the grid pattern. Let’s make the line at the center here and start that.  So now this line is the center.  [0:47:22]

So if I were to stretch this and edit in 3D – this is a little odd. I can’t edit the boundary here.  You’ll notice I don’t have the pet palette to edit the boundary, but I can edit this in 3D.  For example, show the scheme, select the boundary, and let’s just say if I select that scheme now I can edit the shape.  So I’m going to take this in to show what would happen.  It will move the boundary here and when I say OK, and we go back to the floor plan, let’s see. If we select this and go out and start from center, it was originally there starting from the center, but it’s clearly not starting from the center here. so that’s not the case.  I know that we can move the points around, but that’s interesting. [0:48:33]

When I undo this back to where we were, because I hadn’t modified the boundary it was centering this. So if you were to do it on the floor plan, let’s select this one and we say that we want it to start in the center here.  If I were to stretch this, can we? Because it’s been tilted we can only stretch it by moving the boundary.  If I put in a standard curtain wall, a simple one going vertically, you can see that if I select this and I make this start with the center, this will center that.  And I believe if I stretch this, we have to go to the end of the reference line.  I stretched it, but it’s not centering there.  Let’s say ‘start with segment’ and then go back to ‘start from center’. [0:49:52]

So this shows that the controls for starting from center work when you first create it, but not after you’ve stretched it in any way.  But here is something that you can do that can be very useful to know about.  Let me set this up so that it’s more obvious here.  Let me take the marquee tool, we’ll stretch this whole building in a little bit. You can see how stretch the walls a bit, but it didn’t change the curtain wall.  So let me get the curtain wall set in there and get is centered.  I’ll show you how you can adjust the entire grid system as a whole; I think that is an important thing to realize.  [0:50:51]

So I will go to 3D and select this and say I want to edit it in 3D.  So now I can turn on the scheme and select this.  I can select the boundary here, and we should be able to see the environment.  Why are we not seeing the environment?  Let me cancel this.  Let me try editing again, and now we are seeing it. I turn on the scheme.  That’s interesting, we lose the references.  That’s unfortunate. I can grab this and move it, but we’re not seeing that wall when we first work on it.  When I select this, at least I can snap this to the inside corner.  So now this will stop here, we’ll make the frame, and we want to reposition this so that it centered, but how do we do that? [0:51:57]

If I select this line and a press down to say I want to move it, there’s an option of moving one line or the entire system.  So now, this is moving the entire system, that’s what I wanted.  So the visual feedback was a little misleading so was a bit confusing.  I basically select this line and say I want to move the entire system or just a single line. This was moving, this was rotating, and this one was rotating the entire system.  So if I say move the entire system over, I can reposition this to get it centered.  So if we had an element that we were snapping it to, I believe we could snap it to that get it centered there. [0:53:01]

Now that being said, some other fancy things that you can do are say you want to rotate the entire system. You can see this is now a skewed grid. So whether it’s for traditional curtain wall or maybe a ceiling, there are times you want to rotate this around 90° or some odd angle. And there’s also the option of saying that we want to rotate the entire thing. This is a skewed grid, and you’ll notice how it remained parallel on one side but only these lines moved. But I can also take it so that I’m moving the entire thing, and now the entire grid is rotating around.  So whether you want to rotate in 90° or some odd angle, whether you want to get only the ones in one direction rotated, leaving the other ones where they are or moving the entire orthogonal grid system around, those are some of the options that you can do with this.  So basically you need to have the scheme showing, because if you don’t have it showing you can’t do that. And in the scheme you can move the individual grid lines or the entire system or rotate the entire system or just one set of those. [0:54:22]

Let me just cancel this and discard the changes here. So Dave Norman asked, “Can the grid or scheme be adjusted in 2D so the t-bar starts at a wall or corner?” Unfortunately, in the curtain wall tool, the control of individual components such as individual frames, panels or the scheme can only be done in 3D.  I believe you can do it in a section or elevation as well, so we were looking at say a south elevation here and we can select this. It says ‘Edit in 3D’.  So this is a rather limiting requirement and that is that when I’m working with this, it is only allowing me to work on it in 3D. So I can’t actually move those grid elements around on the plan or in an elevation or section.  [0:55:30]

I have found that frustrating. In this case, I was getting it in only that element, maybe it’s because this marquee tool was active.  If I get rid of the marquee tool and say ‘show all in 3D’, then perhaps when I’m editing this, if I wanted to snap it to something I can snap it. you can see there are still snap points.  So ultimately what I’ve found is the workaround for some of these limitations is to put in some placeholder elements like a column or beam or something else that you want to snap to, to be able to line something up that otherwise might be harder to do in the 3D view.  So that’s a limitation that I found.  [0:56:25]

Let’s see, I have thanks from Luis and David, and I know Roderick I tried to answer there.  So there are two things that I haven’t covered here. One is creating a custom panel for a curtain wall door or for any purpose and the other is doing a schedule of doors and things in curtain walls.  So let’s see if I can create a custom panel.  I didn’t succeed with this t-bar in terms of it showing up. I’m not sure what I did wrong there. I’ll have to research and maybe post a short supplemental video or comments on the page.  So one of the ways that you can create a panel for any type of door is to draw with the slab tool and create it starting at zero and going up to 2 inches, just a nominal thickness.  [0:57:41]

And I’ll just draw this 3×7, just a simple shape.  And I’m going to create a cutout in it, so a rather odd-shaped cutout.  So imagine this is some elaborate glazing pattern, perhaps filled in with stained glass or something creative. How would we turn this into a panel? Let’s fill it with something that, instead of being like that, we’ll just fill it with something that is glass in here.  Select that and make this 1/2 inch thick. That’s the top and bottom, so let’s make it 1¼ and ¾ there.  So now if I look at this in 3D, we can see that I’ve got a panel, and the glazing for that is separate.  So how would I turn that into a curtain wall panel?  [0:58:55]

I select this, go to the File menu, Libraries and Objects, Save Selection As, and say I want to save it as a curtain wall panel.  Let’s see if this works.  So we’ll just leave it as ‘curtain wall panel 1’, move it to the embedded library and say save. It will be available for the dialog box as a relevant object which recognizes it.  So how would we do this?  If I were to go into any curtain wall – let’s go to 3D and say show all in 3D. Let’s just say that I wanted to put that door in here. I’m going to go in, select this curtain wall, say I want to edit it. Go and select the frame and delete it, so now this is a single panel here. Take it and change it from generic to a door, and that allows me to put in a door.  [0:59:56]

Then what we want to do is go in and once we’ve chosen it as a door we want to choose the curtain wall door settings to set for the door leaf. The door leaf right now is this one, and here are the controls where we can say we want to use a custom panel.  We also have other ones with grids, and there are different options that you can do.  But let’s look at the custom panel and choose a custom panel name and door leaf settings.  This is where I would expect that this would show up.  I don’t know what’s going on with this.  I’m striking out here, because this is what I recall is that you need to say it’s a door, use a standard door type here, and then you choose the custom panel. [1:00:51]

I have saved that as a custom panel.  So something has gone awry there because I’m not able to get that in there.  So I will have to double check and see why in both cases this didn’t work.  Am I doing something wrong or is there perhaps something not working in ArchiCAD at the moment that should be.  So that’s basically what we should be able to do but I wasn’t able to do it. With that being said, we have a door here.  How would I schedule it? So if I go to the door schedule you going to see that there are no doors in this project. Why?  Because I haven’t put any doors in walls. If I pop in a couple of normal doors and go back to that door schedule, we will see those two doors now up here.  [1:01:43]

Now how would I get the schedule for curtain wall doors?  The answer is that we need to go to the scheme settings and look at the schemes here. Perhaps we can choose a different one or set up a different one.  The criteria for a schedule determines what elements are being listed. In this case it’s going to show elements that are doors.  Now you might think that the curtain wall doors would be considered doors, but there are actually some options here for curtain walls that are more specific.  So what I’m going to do is create a new one, and we’ll call it ‘curtain wall door schedule’. The element type is not going to be wall, the element type is a curtain wall, and then we’re going to add this element type.  [1:02:57]

Let’s go to ‘More’ here. Where is that element type? Curtain Wall Panel. So here is the panel. Let me remove this one and let’s say that in the main one, we are going to go to ‘More’, and it’s going to be a panel.  So we’re going to list the curtain wall panels. So first of all if I choose that and say OK, right now we haven’t chosen to show anything so we need to list them or also show certain fields. We haven’t chosen the fields.  So curtain wall panels, we can set the height and width here.  Let’s say OK what do we have here?  Now we have a whole bunch of descriptions of curtain wall panels.  And I can make this a little wider here if we want.  [1:04:04]

Now this is for all curtain wall panels and it can, now that I have the panel here, I can add a criteria and say ‘panel function’ or ‘panel type’.  I think it’s panel type, which is curtain wall doors.  So it’s a little bit confusing, but you can choose to make a schedule, picking out what you want. Now if I did this, you can see there are only two doors that I popped into the curtain wall at this point.  And we just have some basic information, but we could add some more in the scheme settings, some additional fields. And I am certain that we could choose how this is going to be shown in terms of feet and inches here.  [1:04:54]

We could potentially do the 3D front view here, and this would make this a picture here.  Let’s change our record by columns, so now then we can go and say that view should have more space.  So now we can get the two different style doors that I had put in there. So I’m not an expert on this area, but I know you can get some reasonable schedules for curtain walls.  You will not be able to combine door schedules from curtain walls with regular door schedules in the same list.  You can put them on the same sheet, you can put them next to each other or possibly try to make them look like they were in the same one, but they will be different lists because of the way ArchiCAD works with them.  [1:05:55]

The only rationale I’ve heard in terms of why that makes sense from an architectural point of view is that you might be ordering the curtain wall doors from a different source than interior or exterior standard doors.  So maybe that makes sense.  A workaround, if you want to have doors in a curtain wall that are scheduled together, and you want to use all the standard ArchiCAD doors as options, is that you could create an empty space in the curtain wall, put in a tiny piece of wall there, and pop in a door into that wall. So essentially, you are creating a hole and putting in a wall with a door into it.  Then that door will show up just like a standard door.  So that’s a rather clumsy work around, but it may suit you in terms of providing an option to have those curtain wall doors scheduled the same way as regular doors.  [1:06:54]

Let’s look at some other questions before we finish up.  Luis asked about loading another custom panel.  I’m going to go back and try that here, but I don’t think that works.  If we go back to 3D and I select this and edit it and select the door and go in here.  In terms of custom panel, it’s not showing up here, there’s no option to load another custom panel.  Now if I go here and load other curtain wall panel, I didn’t save it out as a separate file.  So it’s not in here.  It should show up as one of these panel types.  Actually here’s one, “Curtain wall custom panel 17”.  This may allow us to – hey, there it is great.  So instead of choosing it to be a door, I’m going to choose its use a custom panel that allows me to choose. [1:08:14]

If I just make this wider so we can see this a little easier, it allows me to choose one of the ones that I’ve saved as a custom panel.  So this one now is a rather odd shape here. So I’m just going to tell it to use this and there we go.  So it doesn’t think of itself as a door, is thinks of itself as a custom panel.  So that at least is one part of the solution there.  Let’s see if maybe I have the option for this.  Let’s say OK here, I’m going to select this. And what if I went to the mullions and instead of saying generic – there’s no custom frame here.  So that didn’t solve that one.  So I will have to research that. [1:09:09]

Thank you Luis for prodding me to look a little further at how we could get a custom panel like we had created here into the curtain wall.  Okay, so that gets some applause from Luis. I’m glad at least to succeed on that level.  I think this is probably a good point stop, unless there are some remaining questions that you have. I think I’ve gone through all of the questions that you’ve typed in.  Of course in the ArchiCAD coaching program that is part of the Best Practices course, if you have specific questions that you want me to look at in terms of a curtain wall in your building, and you want me to try to help you to resolve a design challenge, that will be my pleasure to do that. Let’s see if there are any final comments or questions.  I see another thank you.  So please add your comments and questions and feedback to the page down below this video.  This is been Eric Bobrow, thanks for watching.

[END OF AUDIO 1:10:26]