Wall Styles - Advanced
In my first few articles in this series, we have been focusing on drafting cleaning walls. We used the default standard wall style then. We even tried to create a new wall style and added a sweep to it. Now it's time to begin creating detailed wall styles. Before we dive in, let's understand a few points:

1. A wall style can be just a simple single component; e.g., a CMU wall, 190mm thick.
2. A wall style can be also made of multiple components; e.g., a CMU wall with a plaster of 20 mm on each side.
3. A wall style can be more complex with many components; e.g., a CMU wall with a rigid insulation, air gap, stone, and plaster.
4. A wall style is not complete if we just add the components. We should also configure the wall for a proper display at different plot scales such as 1:50, 1:100, 1:200, 1:20, and so on.

   Below is a CMU wall with components such as rigid insulation, air gap, stone, and plaster. See how the wall changes its look based on different display configurations such as plan 20, plan 50, and plan 100? Also notice the outermost thick lines on the wall called Shrink-wrap, which commonly appears in all display configurations(except Plan-Diagnostic).

   

   

   Compare the normal AutoCAD® process of drawing this wall and preparing it for various scales and display configurations! You will be spending most of your time hatching, trimming, and cleaning. Lots of redrafting will be involved. You will have to create huge numbers of layers for those different hatch patterns and future dimensions for different scales. I can't imagine a scenario when design changes occur and all my hatches go haywire.

   But what you see in the above picture is just one wall, which is just one single object in a single layer, but displayed differently in different paper space viewports.

   We need to understand the concepts of 'Display representation' and 'Display Configuration' to create wall styles successfully.

5. One should never neglect 'Wall End Caps', without which a wall style is incomplete. Every wall by default has a Standard wall endcap style assigned to it. You can achieve complex wall end conditions quickly by using endcaps. You can also define opening endcaps to control the way wall ends are displayed after adding a door, windows, and other openings.

   

6. Materials play a very important role in creating wall styles. People who are into 3D modeling and rendering would have used materials mainly to achieve the proper texture on the models such as wood, fabric, and masonry finishes.

   In AutoCAD Architecture, however, materials play a very important role in addition to showing textures while rendering. Materials decide the plan line work, section line work, elevation line work, plan hatch, elevation hatch, and section hatch of all wall components. For example, we can create one material called plaster and assign it to the plaster component of many walls. This way, we save a lot of time configuring the plaster component of each and every wall style.

   

7. Once you start using wall styles, there are situations where walls of the same style or different styles will meet or cross each other. In the earlier exercise we saw how to draw walls successfully cleaning with each other. But then we had only one component, which is the wall itself (called 'unnamed' component). What happens when walls with different components meet? This is where 'priority' of wall components comes into play. You will have to prepare a chart identifying all the possible components that you will encounter in a project. Then you should decide priorities and materials for the components. Here is a sample chart that shows a few commonly used components of walls and their priorities.

   

The lower the number, the higher the priority. Here is a snapshot of walls cleaning up with each other.



8. Once you create such a wall style, it stays forever. You will never create it again in your lifetime. Other wall styles can be created by copying one style and then modifying it.
9. Most of the wall styles should be created and kept ready before you start the project. New walls can be introduced anytime in between.

Creating a successful wall style depends on many factors. Keep all the points in mind. See you next month with more wall styles.

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Tharakesh Ananthakrishnan is technical/project manager for OMNIX International - Dubai. He has more than 12 years of experience as a user and an instructor of CAD software in the AEC and GIS fields. His Autodesk product specialties include AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, Revit Architecture, Autodesk VIZ, 3ds Max, AutoCAD Civil 3D, Land Desktop, and AutoCAD Map. Tharakesh was the first Autodesk Certified Professional in the Middle East and is an Autodesk Authorized Instructor, an AUGI member, and AUGI Training Program instructor. He can be reached at a.tharakesh@gmail.com .