Think about it like this. When your dimensioning put yourself in the shoes of the guys trying to build it. That’s what is needed in a construction document. And they will layout the shell and add the finished to that. It’s up to you to compensate for the finishes and place the structure members appropriately.
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I should make a smart ass comment now…
Just a reminder for anyone who doens’t know - a steel stud wall assembly with (fluffy stuff of any kind) essentially render the exterior wall insulation between the steel studs practically useless. When steel studs are used on an external wall and have fluffy stuff insulation between the steel stud cavities, the r value goes from r20 in a 2x6 wall to roughly r5, all because of the fact that steel studs conduct most of the insulations r value away, making it pointless to even insulate that wall between the cavities in the first place using steel studs - better to than install exterior continuous insulation onto that wall assembly instead… Way off topic… Haha.
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Wondering anyones thoughts on this: Drawing in drywall or not:
I made a post about this topic, whether to draw drywall or not. I think it’s a good idea to draw finishing layers on a post or beam so that you can dimension to the structural part of the post or beam and not the finish when one is ready for construction document dimensioning. However when it comes to drywall, I know that things should be dimensioned to stud framing… My problem right now is if I don’t draw the drywall layer in as it’s own layer, than when I do renderings I will possibly see a gap between the wall and an object say that object is a cabinet in this example… Anyone have any good reasons not to draw drywall into a model and just paint it onto the studs instead? I think in special cases, maybe where there is let’s say a 2" brick or thick finish on an interior wall, maybe that gets drawn in, but just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this?.. This has been one of the hardest things for me to figure out in my workflow using sketchup and layout.
One could reconsider the level of detail needed for each drawing. Then decide. Even a gypsum board is build up with three layers.
I already commented earlier, but I’ll amend this:
- I still do a lot of 2D drawing in PowerCADD where I have a long standing practice of drawing both the rough walls and finishes on them, and it’s not hard to manage that.
- My SketchUp models start out as design work first, so I draw the finishes.
- I’ve been doing more with Medeek plugins recently, when it comes to making construction documents out of the SU model, and it manages both rough carpentry and finishes together. I can’t claim to have perfected this workflow, but still working on it.
Cool, thanks you guys for your input. I would really rather not draw in the drywall and I’m still unfortunately deciding if that’s a good idea or not. I think it’s only necessarry to do so (to draw in drywall as it’s own thickness for example 1/2") when I am doing a rendering with a fixture in view so that you don’t see a gap between the wall and fixture, say a cabinet against a wall… Still undecided, still frustrated that I haven’t figured this out, ha…
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The 1st part is a good point, but not flexible enough I think as renderings should work with any size drawing, where the user doesn’t have to change any parts of the rendering to suit different sized views.
Your second point, I don’t understand why anyone would ever want to model the 2 paper faces of the drywall and drywall compound between as 3 layers and how that would be useful to anyone either…
For me the end goal is I need to know where the final finish face is and where the studs are. So my layers currently are (and this is the best methodology I’ve come up with to date) is to model my studs as there own thickness and layer for framing dimensioning, model my exterior wall control layers as one single thickness including the siding and than model interior finishes as one single thickness against a wall surface regardless again of how many layers are within that.) This way I will always only ever have 3 layers on my exterior walls being - control layers, ext. wall studs, finish layer on interior side, for my interior it would always be - interior finish layer and int. wall studs… Just wish I could find a reasonable answer on how to eliminate drawing the interior finishing layers most of the time, and I say most of the time becuase in some instances it’s just best to draw in interior finishes… Months and months later, I still have no solution to that…
If its a layout drawing… eg 1:100 definately no… just had to reduce 1:100 dwgs of a hotel to model in SU… 500+ layers to 8 tags… ridiculous level of detail… meaningless layer names… nothing on the correct layer… blocks inserted in layers while the content is in other layers… and yes they drew the render thickness on the walls… (also drew the screws holding the window frames to the walls) would have been sacked if they were in my office!
I work on the KISS principle…
When employing new staff my first warning to them was " the work you do here is not yours… it is everyones…"
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@tvallee have you figured out a way to do this yet? I’ve always been looking to do this as well - I purchased a license of Skalp a while ago but have been too busy to implement it but I believe it still requires me to model each layer of the assembly for it to work (ie. drywall, stud, plywood etc). Let me know if you have or what you’ve found as a solution. Thanks!
if you want to do your layout to stud but also have layers of finish, just use Tags and you can hide all but the studs for dimensioning, turn on the finish layer Tags for other purposes.
For floor plans architects have been using two lines for a wall in plan for “ages” and It worked OK. Now we can do more, so go for it if it helps you.
I’m in the same boat - I’m coming off of using Vectorworks where I can control the elements of a wall (ie. drywall, studs, plywood etc) all in one wall and therefore can choose to dimension to whichever component I so desired - ie. centre of stud for interior and face of plywood for exterior) - I’m trying to leave Vectorworks as I find modelling in SU way more faster and therefore turning that around in Layout to quickly come up with my permit drawings but as with you, am finding it difficult to come up with a workaround for this particular issue of dimensioning my plans. If you’ve come up with any other workarounds that work for you I’d like to hear about them. Thx!
Hey! Yea the best thing I’ve come up with is in the example I wrote about earlier above. This is such a tough one hey haha… I’ll come back to this and share some more thoughts when I can.
True for those who model the actual finishes separate from the studs. However, I’m not modeling the actual finish (e.g. drywall) separately - it’s lumped into one wall object with one overall thickness to maintain some sense of efficiency in design - so my wall object is 9.5" (1/2" drywall, 5.5" stud, 1/2" ply sheathing, 1.5" exterior insulation, 3/4" rainscreen strapping, 3/4" cladding material). If there was an extension where you were able to specify these dimensional “offsets” and have them represented as line segments incorporated into the section fill (with hatch capability a bonus), that’d fit the bill just perfectly. Something like this screenshot, if you can make it out.
Medeek Wall seems to have enough parametric fields to accommodate all those layers at least dimensionally including a rainscreen gap, but won’t do the rain screen strapping.
Also, just about anything you can draw in a 2D wall section, Profile Builder 3 can extrude along a path into an assembly.
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Hi Robert - Thanks for the response and input - I’ll look into Madeek as it, as well as PB3, appear to be the frontrunners suggested in this posting. I’m not as interested in having the actual individual layers modeled than I am to having just a snappable representation of them showing up in plan section and cross section views in LO so that I can dimension to them. Obviously, it won’t have the parametric-ness that Madeek and PB3 offer but I’d be fine with that compromise.
What I don’t understand is how you create construction documents and dimension of of a wall object that is not the stud. In CDs the studs should be what are dimensioned off of, not cladding or anything else. How do you dimension to wall studs if you don’t have the studs as an individual group or component?
At the moment I develop gridlines that line up with the outside face of all exterior walls’ sheathing which also coincide with the outside face of the foundation walls. So my general notes state that the dimensions are to the respective exterior faces of exterior walls (plywood or concrete), then to the centerline of interior partition walls which are easy to snap to. I only dimension to interior finishes when I’m outputting draft sets for the homeowners - never for permit/construction documents.
Why I’m not too interested in producing fully parametric walls or separately modeled layers is simply because:
- I want to keep the model that’s used to produce the plans, elevations and sections light and not bogged down with various objects representing, frankly, layers that I don’t need in my workflow.
- my design process is quite iterative so I need to constantly modify plans so it’s important for me to constantly be building towards that final model used for documentation.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are those of you out there that are using extensions such as PB3 or Madeek within your workflow and have become really efficient at modifying them during the design process leading to the CD stage and if so, I’d love to hear about it, but for the two reasons above, I will stay the course and just deal with it the way I have.
That said, I still think it would be interesting to see an extension that produced “offset polyline segments” built into the section face that represented the various layers of a wall assembly.
Interesting. I don’t think I’d do this, but if you wanted to you could pretty easily create a group from slice (from a section plane), or grab just walls and flatten them using eneroth flatten plugin and than use a offset tool, than use the move tool to put it in alignment with your section plane view…
Yea, interesting what you do. I’ll think about it. Thanks for sharing.
I think you are doing extra work with the grid lines though. I only use gridlines to represent the exterior corners of a building, that’s it, it’s totally unecessarry for the builder or anyone else if dimensioned properly to grid line interior walls (my view, being once a builder myself). This way my grid lines are minimal and the exact same thing for each floor, they only represent the exterior corners of the building. I find this the simplest approach when using grid lines. Exterior walls are the most significant objects to grid line to, in my view. This way also serves as a solid datum as the floor plan levels change.
I do agree it’s extra work with the gridlines but it saves me from modeling the multiple layers (in your case, 3 layers, which I agree also is a good strategy) and gives me efficient control of whipping around walls when producing multiple floor plan options.
In my particular case, during schematic design, I use the Dibac wall extension which serves me well when coming up with multiple plan options in 2D and quickly producing walls in 3D all with a single thickness for walls.
Going back to your method, I do like how you’re also thinking along the same line as me in terms of keeping the walls as efficient as possible - do you manually model the exterior layer and interior (drywall) layer or do you use PB or Madeek or some other wall extension? I may give your method a try on my next project. Just so I get this right, when you need to move for example an exterior wall 6 inches, you’re going into the 3 separate groups and shifting each layer 6 inches ya?
Well ( unless there’s a way that I’m missing ) I find more gridlines very useful when discussing a project with the engineer, the builder, client or anyone else for that matter.
You can identify part of the project more unambiguously like:
“the new beam along gridline C” or “the bearing at the intersection of gridline B and 4” and so on…
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