*Note: Just a reminder that the Alt key is the hotkey for toggling the wall justification.
**Note: To call the wall_regen method: Medeek_Engineering_Inc_Extensions::MedeekWallPlugin::Wall::MedeekMethods.wall_regen entity
where the entity is the Medeek wall group.
Reminds me of a question I just had yesterday: Can a post be made to interrupt all the plates (top and bottom)? There are times when compression perpendicular to the grain of the plates is too much, so the post can take it, but the plates can’t. In fact it can be too much for the subfloor in cases (made that mistake on my own house), and the subfloor needs to be cut away to a PSL/LVL or concrete below.
Some updates are minor and some are more substantial.
The column update required modifying at least 10 files and took about five days of concerted effort, some of it quite tedious and I will say boring, but yeah, it is always worth it. Basically an entire rewrite of the in-wall column module, a lot of the code under the hood was reviewed and updated to bring it up to speed with the highly efficient beam module. Now all of the menus are HTML as well.
The addition of the API took all of 15 minutes to add.
The wall justification was only about another 1.5 hours of work.
Mostly it was me deciding whether it would muddy the waters too much to go from three options to four (front, center back → front, center, back, sheathing). You will notice that when you use the draw wall tool now it will show a small text near the wall length dimension letting you know which justification mode that you are in. The placement and the size of this specific text may yet require some fine tuning, I want that information to be available to the user but I don’t want it to be so obtrusive that it is annoyingly so. Feedback required…
With regards to structural composite lumber and the new Custom Column Library. If you specify in the column name one of the following three key words, the plugin will then apply the appropriate material/texture:
I’ve been going through all of the plugins updating as many menus to HTML menus as possible since they are much more customizable and easier on the eyes. Correct me if I am wrong but I think this is the last non-HTML menu in the Wall plugin. I still have a ways to go with the Truss and Foundation plugins.
I’m not sure if I know how to use the shear wall tool right or maybe hitting a bug? Is there documentation or video anywhere?
Right now I need to make one Int-Int, 2x4 wall a shear wall with plywood both sides, and then GWB on top of that, and I’m not succeeding.
Edit: I’m getting somewhere. Such an old hand, I don’t think to look at the text prompts in the lower left corner. (Doh!) The plywood co-exists in the same plane with the GWB, so need to think about how to address that. Is there any wall setting that would result in a wall that is:
This feature is still somewhat in BETA so there is no solid documentation on it yet. I’ve been meaning to make a video for it for a while but I do think there are a few more items I would like to address before I pull the trigger on that.
Correct, the plywood will exist in the same plane as the gypsum (for now). The workaround for this is to enable the 2nd layer of gypsum and turn the first layer off, this will create the air gap for the SW plywood. Just be sure to set the 1st layer gypsum to the appropriate thickness (same as plywood).
Finally got a chance to test this regen call. Works perfectly! So now, I can just select a bunch of walls, tap my custom keyboard shortcut, and my script will go through and reconfigure each wall depending on which tag is assigned to it, and it regenerates each wall as it goes. HUGE time saver, and eliminates a bunch of human error potential on my part.
Nice. Note that this regen method works for all wall types (rect, gable, shed, hip).
Currently this is the only method I have created for the Medeek API but as the need arises I can create others for specific tasks.
This is the reason why I like SketchUp and its API so much, I or any other user can potentially custom program a routine or task to automate SketchUp in some way and with an entire programming language at our disposal (Ruby) the possibilities are really limitless.
When you start tying things together where different people and organizations can share and manage data things become even more interesting.
I’m grateful for the right click Edit Assembly and right click Regen commands. I mostly use the last while adding Custom or Subtracting elements.
BTW, I recently was thankful for the addition of garage door tracks. A client wanted to know if they could put a car storage lift in their simple garage addition. I’ve done one before, and so looked to see if the framing needed adjusting, but realized in the model that the door and tracks were a bigger limiting factor, something which hadn’t been an issue on my previous project. It says a lot about BIM, clash detection, and GIGO; if you want to find all the problems, you have to draw everything.
I recently developed a json import/export API for one my Building Creator customers. They could draw a building and extract the building as json. Then modify the json and feed it into the API to have the building redrawn to the new specs. This enabled them to create drawings from there quoting system, or take drawings and feed the specs into their system to generate a quote.
That’s the beauty of json. Since I was already storing all the info in component dictionaries as json, I simply had to consolidate everything into a single json object adding info about the component’s position.
