Invisible Walls - Room Dividers

[skavan]

How does one create them? For the life of me I can't figure it out!
I have a large room that I wish to turn into 4 open plan spaces, separated by a NS and EW coridoor.

H-E-L-P (v17)

s.

[lkgrggrrl]

I'm posting here so that I can easily get to this from my profile, but also because I'm really interested to see what the moderators respond with. 

To date, what I've been doing is turning off the auto-floors for the open-concept rooms.  Then I manually create the floors and delete the walls.  The walls stay put, but you end up with a single label/area/dimension for the one big space.  One thing I find helpful is to use the text tool to manually put in the Room Names, areas and dimensions before I delete the walls, that way I still have that detail (and then I try not to move the existing walls at all).

That being said, I'm really interested in the reply is because I haven't yet figured out how to handle different ceilings using this method.  Once I delete the walls out, I'm stuck there.  I either have show or hide ceilings.  I want a ceiling over the Kitchen, but not the Great Room, but since I've now made them one big room, its one or the other.

One of the moderators, had a suggestion to use a transparent material on a different question I asked.  I wonder if that would work?  Materials, Custom Library Bonus Materials, Miscellaneous.  If you scroll down to the 8th item down, it is called "Black/Invisible" or "Transparent Black."  Couldn't we make the walls transparent?

[Patricia G.]

One of the moderators, had a suggestion to use a transparent material on a different question I asked. 

Sorry to add this note.
As I was the person that suggested the transparent material in the other post, I will just answer to this issue: FYI, I am not a moderator. I am an Architect (AIA - International Associate) working with these programs since 2001. I also wrote 3 books about the programs, and the fourth will be released by the end of next week.

I'm posting here so that I can easily get to this from my profile, but also because I'm really interested to see what the moderators respond with. 

No problem, let's wait for the moderators' answers!

Patricia

[thebrian]

One way I have used to sub-divide larger space into different zones for flooring material, ceiling material, space concept is to use a micro wall. I draw a wall in white space  and set it to 1/8 inch high and wide, and turn off auto-dimension. Then I drag and/or copy it to outline the zones I need It doesn't show in 3D and in 2D it appears as a line. The nice part is it retains a unique label per area. It will automatically let you assign a unique material to the floor. To assign a unique material to the ceiling, go to Edit | Set Object Elevation. Then enter the ceiling height in the Elevation field, Select the "Add to Current Elevation" check box, then click ok. This will allow these faux walls to be detected at ceiling height as well.

Hope it helps
cheers.

[Patricia G.]

Hi Brian,

The problem I see with the micro walls is the fact that they create some issues in the Estimator Power Tool.
This is how I'd do this:
1 - Create the large space => uncheck the show floor / show ceiling options
2 - The floor tool can be used for a lot of purposes: create manually the floors and ceilings for each "room / space"=> set the correct elevations for each element
3 - Apply the desired textures / colors
Hope this helps 

Patricia