When I insert several adjoining walls I frequently (but not always) find that the wall thickness suddenly increases and in 2D I get what looks like a cavity wall which is not of the thickness shown under Properties. What is the likely cause of this and can it be prevented?
can you post a screen shot or sample file?
The .jpg attachment shows a component of a chimney stack which is constructed from four 22cm wide brick walls. The lower sketch shows three components which have already been joined with the fourth still to be attached. The top sketch shows what happens as soon as the fourth wall is incorporated. What seems to be a 2cm gap appears outside the desired stack surrounded by a 10cm wide 'skin' which shows up in rendering as solid brick. This phenomenon occurs erratically and is not always related to enclosed spaces.
I suspected before you posted the image that you were using a brick veneer wall and your image confirms that. The brick veneer wall only adds the veneer when the walls join to form a 'room', which in your case is the chimney. The 'Core' measurement is only the thickness of the "inside" wall, it does not cover the width of the cavity or the thickness of the exterior bricks used as the veneer. The Core measurement is only the thickness of the wall if used internally or freestanding.
Unfortunately the naming of the walls do not identify the veneer walls so you have to join four walls as a test to see if the veneer is added. I would suggest you do that with each and rename the walls that add the veneeer, so you know for future occasions.
To resolve the situation now you can just hold shift and select each of your chimney walls, then with them all selected, right click and choose Replace, and replace them with a wall that does not have a veneer.
I am hoping that in a future release this will be addressed, as it is misleading and confusing, especially to new users. There also needs to be a way to set the width of the veneer and the cavity, or at least to set the total width when the veneer is added, in addition to the existing Core width setting. They also need to bring back the setting for the 'drop face' (extension of the bricks to cover the edge of the floor). At the moment it is automatic at 300mm and no way to change it or remove it, as you could in the previous version.
You may find these two posts useful too http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php/topic,872.0.html (http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php/topic,872.0.html) and http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php/topic,921.0.html (http://forums.turbofloorplan.com/index.php/topic,921.0.html).
Welcome to the forum by the way.
Allan
Thanks Allan. I had a suspicion from something I saw in another thread that veneers were likely to be the cause but I didn't know what they were or how to proceed further. I find that more than half of the walls in my catalogue are of this type which I have now clearly named. I agree with all of your comments about necessary improvements and only hope that these will be incorporated in patches for V.12 rather than having to upgrade to later versions.
I am surprised, however, about your comment about the drop face not being changeable frrom the default 300mm as my wall properties include a line called Drop Exterior Face under the Width setting and this is certainly variable. At least one can change the setting - I haven't checked to see if it works.
I have another query about AutoSave but I shall start that off in a separate thread. Thanks once again for clarifying the wall problem.
That is exactly the point with the Drop Exterior Face - it was in V12 but removed in V14. I have no idea why it was removed. I know that a Footings tool was introduced in V14 but I can't see how that affects the drop face and if it did it would only be the ground floor anyway. With the second floor, if the floor is only 150 mm, then you have a 300mm drop face of the upper wall over the top of the lower one and the two textures (even if the same) interact with each other when rendering the image.
Recently I had to go through all sorts of contortions to remove a drop face, by:
1. Raising the floor level in Locations by 300mm above the terrain (that lifted the drop face to ground level)
2. Reducing the total wall height by 300mm (since it now went through the roof)
3. Set the floor to 1mm thick (otherwise it was was raised as well along with the doors that were then 300mm above the ground)
4. Use the inside Wainscott to extend the inside wall downwards by 300mm to reach the floor and increase the height of the inside wall by 300mm (because the inside wall is 300mm shorter than the outside).
5. Lowered all the windows by 300mm (otherwise they were too high)
6. Lower the baseboard by 300mm (otherwise it was floating 300mm above the floor).
It was a real pain.
Dave: Is there any way to adjust the drop face that I have missed? If not, can we please have it restored some time?
Allan
I too have fiddled a bit with Drop Exterior Face as, being a novice, I decided to base all my calculations from floor level rather than terrain level. As you can guess I am still on version 12 and from what I have learnt I don't think I shall be moving to version 14 or higher until some of the 'improvements' such as deleting the Drop Exterior Face flexibility have been corrected.
You will find all vertical measurements are auotomatically controlled by the Building Locations (Settings Menu) and are all set in relation to the Terrain which is zero by default. You can set the ground floor level to zero if you want but the Drop Face is then minus 300 so it does not help, it just goes 300mm below ground. This is fine of course as it is not seen, but the house I was doing at the time was raised above ground level by 250mm but you could not see under the house as the drop face still covered the gap.\
This drop face is the only issue I still have with V14 now that a patch has been released to fix the help functions and a couple of minor issues. The additional tools and render speed probably make it worthwhile, but that depends on what you are using it for. I use it nearly every day, sometimes almost all day, so any new features are usually put to good use.
Allan
Removing this feature is not anything that I requested. At least not knowingly.
I have writen the dev team to try to see why this is not in v14. Thanks for bringin it to my attention.
Thanks Dave,
That would be great to have the 'drop face' restored. Often it is not a problem as it just goes below the terrain but if you have a house slightly off the ground (on 'stilts') it is a real nusience.
It would be good if at the same time the developers could look at the wall width setting when it involves a veneer. The size, in Properties, shows say 4" but then it adds the veneer when it joins to make a 'room' and is now 8". Causes all sorts of confusion for new ones, many of whom are not familiar with cavity walls (and they are not named as such either) and it throws out all their dimensions too. It needs to have at least two settings, the existing inside Core and 'total wall width' when the veneer is applied as an exterior wall. A third setting of Veneer thickness (or cavity depth) would be nice too if that is possible.
Allan