When you delete walls the cutouts on the the top plates are left as you can see in the image below, but a rebuild of the wall will heal those unnecessary cutouts:
Please keep sending in your bugs and feature requests. I am going to keep working on this plugin full time as long as the SU community continues to support me in this endeavor.
My goal is to have a robust, flexible and full featured architectural design tool that a lot of the SU designers and even DIY’ers can quickly pick up and use.
I am trying to figure out some sort of way that I could offer this at a drastically reduced price or even free so that anyone could take advantage of it but at the same time maintaining enough revenue so that I can keep developing it full time. Perhaps these two goals/objectives are mutually exclusive.
I think that, in the long term, future work on incorporating the necessary engineering calculation to analyse models made with all three of your extensions, with an output that could be quickly reviewed (and the plans stamped) by a local (to your extension user) certified Engineer, priced moderately for the occasional DIY user and priced much higher for professionals (builders, architects, and engineers) is more likely to result in your ability to support yourself through SketchUp extensions. And I include Layout extensions should they become possible.
In order to help kick off the new Medeek Wall Plugin I will be running a promotion from June 1 thru June 15.
All orders of the Wall Plugin will also include a free two year license of the Truss Plugin ($50 value) and a free one year license of the Foundation Plugin ($25 value).
If you have previously purchased either of these other plugins then your serial expiration date for each plugin will be extended by the time periods given above.
To take advantage of this offer, once you have purchased the wall plugin, simply email me with your client ID or username and that you would like to take advantage of the June 2018 Promo.
For clients that have already purchased the Wall Plugin, you can also take advantage of this offer by emailing me directly as above and I will add the Truss Plugin and Foundation Plugin to your client account or extend your serials as mentioned above.
This offer is only good until June 15, 2018. All Medeek Wall Plugin orders made on June 16, 2018 (PST) or later will not be eligible for this time limited offer.
Looking at garage doors this morning and I have my ideas on how one should trim these out but I am wondering if the rest of community is inline with my thinking.
Feel free to email me or post on the board a garage door jamb detail/section on how you would like these put together.
I’m also going to add in an advanced framing menu for the garage door option wherein the user can specify the parameters for portal framing the opening, however I may not attack this one until later since there are much bigger fires to put out at the moment.
This post was prompted by some comments made on the other board regarding wall justification and cladding materials. I think this is important enough that I duplicate my response here as well.
1.) The wall justification (front, middle, back) is something I have been treating as a basic property or parameter of the wall. This morning as I really put on my thinking cap I came to the realization that this is not so. The justification is only really needed during the wall creation process and once the wall is created there is no justification, the wall just is.
With that being said I need to rework the wall creation tool slightly, it shouldn’t be too big of an issue but will require some serious and careful thought. For now please only use the “FRONT” justification, the other two options are flawed by their very nature.
This may take me a couple days to fully think this through and come up with the correct solution. Please have patience with me while I work this one out, I need to do it slowly and carefully and get it right.
2.) I am not satisfied with the current system of applying materials to the wall assembly via the plugin. Since the plugin completely rebuilds the entire wall panel on any edit or addition of windows or doors it must somehow save the material being used for each element (group) within the attribute library. It is already setup to do this and works quite well.
One can also use the edit menu to select from a static list of materials.
I think a few things could help to make this better:
A.) The plugin can look at the currently defined materials in the model and give the user the ability to select from any of these materials as well as the hard coded materials within the wall edit menu.
B.) Perhaps and observer or something should be setup so that if the user manually opens up the wall assembly group and assigns a material to the cladding, sheathing or gypsum for a given wall panel this information is then updated within the attribute library.
C.) Provide an interface within the global settings where additional hard coded materials can be added to the existing ones. The user would upload an image, assign a name and specify the X and Y scaling.
Every time I think I’ve learned how carpenters like to do garage doors, the next one tells me, “No that’s not how there done.” I guess it depends on who you talk to.
BTW, sorry if you already mentioned it, but do you have Portal Frame Construction on garage door openings like that spelled out in IRC R602.10.6.X?
My intent is to add in the portal framing option into the garage door module.
Yes, it will comply with the IRC standard but also give the user a few more options to further customize it. Portal framing is actually much more complex than just the prescriptive examples given in the IRC or IBC, one can engineer these things to be quite a bit more substantial, as I have done in the past.
Take a look at this example below:
Here is a rather stout wall engineered with two portal frames and a shearwall:
It should be noted that once a material is defined by the plugin in SketchUp there is nothing stopping the user from editing that material and changing it up.
Once a material is assigned and created the plugin does not try to recreate or change the material so technically you could assign your cladding to red brick for example and then simple change it to whatever you like. The important thing is that the plugin is looking for the name of the material when it regens the model, it doesn’t care about all of the other properties of the material in question.
Just to prove my previous point about customizing materials I’ve edited the medeek_lumber material name that I use for all of the framing and applied a CMU image to it.
I then set the wall framing at 8 inches thick and switched to the no framing mode so that the walls are represented only by solid groups.
If there is an external brick facade with an air gap, the cladding can be turned on and air gap adjusted accordingly.
Even though I have not specifically set this plugin up for CMU or block walls theoretically one could use it in this manner to model this type of construction. The “NO FRAMING” mode may be quite a bit more useful than I originally thought.
My other thought is to simply add to the framing options: 2D, NO FRAMING, FRAMING, CMU
When CMU is selected the plugin applies the appropriate CMU texture and renders the walls geometry in the NO FRAMING mode,
You may already know this but the long-time standard method for domestic external wall construction in the UK is masonry cavity wall (brick-cav-insul-block) and stud framed walls (timber or MF) for internals. We often keep a clear residual cavity between the external masonry skin and the insulation to deal with driven rain (ahem). I have three questions:
can your plugin create internal and external walls of this makeup?
Would it work on multi-storey projects? (I’m currently working on a 3-story multiple apartment housing unit with precast floor units, masonry party walls, masonry external walls, some internal timber stud walls)
I work remotely for a number of practices who only have vanilla SketchUp. What are the consequences of them opening the models if I built elements within it using your plugins? Does it lose its parametric editability?
1.) Currently the plugin is focused primarily on timber construction however after I’ve put out quite a few more fires and dealt with a number of feature requests I will begin to look at other wall constructions and provide for enough flexibility so that these wall systems can be modeled.
2.) I don’t see a problem with multi-story structures. The wall panels can be placed on any floor at any height. I’ve only tried creating two story structures thus far but I don’t see an issue with multi-story at all.
3.) Correct. To edit a wall panel, window or door opening you would need to have the plugin installed within your version of SketchUp. The model is really very simple, each wall panel is a separate group with its own set of unique attributes stored in an attribute library. You can easily access this library and view its values using any other third party program if you like.
The problem of course is that to regenerate a wall panel you need to code base of the plugin to do that.
Of course if you hand off a model to someone without the plugin they can always manually edit it like any other SketchUp model, the geometry is laid out in a very logical fashion, with all the elements grouped into solids so that everything is tidy and manageable.
As a follow up to this previous post about a day ago I’ve enabled the wall cladding menus (draw tool and edit menu) so that option (A) as previously discussed above is now a reality:
I find this solution a potentially a bit messy since all materials are available within the drop down so there is a possibility of duplicate listings but overall it seems fairly robust and offers the flexibility needed so that the user can define their own materials within SU rather than having to rely on the plugin for a static list of pre-defined materials.
The mitered corner configuration for cladding is also now working.
I will address a few other small issues tomorrow morning and then release 0.7.6.
I’ve been told that I need to add a lapped option for the sheathing as well since leaving the corners open like we do in the western US doesn’t work out so well in the southeastern states.
I think the next big item on the list I’ll tackle is the garage doors so that at least we have one or two options for that available.
I also have the pseudo code put together for exterior wainscoting (dual exterior cladding). The code behind that wall configuration will get a bit more complicated but hopefully it won’t bog down the model too much.
I currently have 18 major items on the todo list:
Interior Trim
Garage Doors
Door casing for interior walls
Gypsum wrap for interior openings
Ext. Sheathing LAP option
Wall Split Tool
Wall Join Tool
Gable Wall Tool
Wall Grouping
SSW Module
Columns Module
Bug with outside corners less than 90 deg. (framing)
Exterior Wainscoting
Some additional debugging or checking with the draw wall tool as it relates to auto-corner configuration and defaults for inputs.
Global settings parameter allowing user to toggle between standard stud sizes and custom sizes
Beam Tool (add to the columns module, one additional icon for toolbar).
Wall justification issue (currently the FRONT option is functional)
SHIFT key snapping to X or Y axis during wall creation.
If there are other items you would like to see added to this list please feel free to send them in. Also this list is in no particular order, the squeaky wheel is getting the grease, so if you want something pushed to the top please let me know.
Some of the other long term items such as the engineering module etc… are not shown in this list, those items are on a separate list for long term future goals.
Currently pre-configured doors and windows are saved by the user and accessed by the plugin from the “library” sub-folder of the plugin. The problem I see with this is that if you want to upgrade the plugin and have to remove the “medeek_wall_ext” plugin folder then you must take the added step to copy the contents of the library folder and then put it back after the updated plugin has been installed.
Perhaps there is a better location for the user library or I suppose I could make its very location user definable?
Looking at the Sheathing Tab above you will also notice I am adding in the option to lap the sheathing at the corners. I figured I might as well knock this one out while the corner lapping code is still fresh in my head. If I wait too long I will have to recalculate and rethink all of the trigonometry (relearn my algorithm), I try not to work too hard, better to work smart.
