Problem inserting door into wall - diagonal line between wall surfaces...

[tremor]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to the forum - I have browsed through a number of very helpful topics but I couldn't find anything relating to this problem.

I'm using v15 and I am trying to insert a door into a wall but when I do, it does not form a clean door insertion. A door is placed in the wall, but I get a diagonal line going from one face of the wall at one side of the door, to the other face of the wall (so going through the wall itself). I have attached a screen shot because it's easier to look at it.

I've tried re-drawing the wall and it didn't help.

Any advice will be appreciated.

[Allan Chesney]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

It seems to me that the wall is corrupt in some way. I would suggest deleting the wall and rather than draw a new one simply extend the end of the existing wall at the top of your image right down to the bottom. I strongly suspect that these existing walls are not exactly in line or are different thicknesses and that this has caused the problem.

I notice too that the door frame does not go right through the wall - it shouldn't, but that may be contributing to the problem if the wall itself is dodgy.

Another issue may be the other floor above or below. It has a door in almost the same place. Are you sure that the wall on the other floor, or the top or bottom of this door, is not intruding into the floor where you have the problem?

Let us know how you go.

Allan

[tremor]

Thanks Allan,

I guess it was a corrupt wall. I am drawing a guest house and this wall was part of a long corridor with rooms coming off it. I had drawn the corridor first with one long wall, then added the room walls to split it up. I was finding I could not insert a wall in any segment of this wall. In the end I actually re-drew this long wall from scratch, deleting also the room divides and putting them back in and now it is ok.

One thing I did in the original drawing was to duplicate some of the walls from the ground floor to the 2nd floor. But my second floor wall height is 155mm less than my ground. So I then had to select these walls and elevate them -155. I am not exactly sure what implication that has on the floor below - if the wall actually now protrudes 155mm down into the walls below? In any case, some of these walls which were elevated -155 were joined to this main wall which I had drawn fresh (0 elevation). I wondered if this might be why the door insertions weren't working but to be honest I did exactly the same on the other side of the corridor (it's a symetrical building) and I had no problems there.

Unfortunately I had to learn this program for one job only - drawing up a building on a college campus and I have a limited time to complete it so I'm learning as I go and havn't got to grips with doing things quickly yet. By the time I learn the best method of drawing a building, the project will be done and I may never need to use it again! But hey ho, such is life, lol.

I really appreciate your help and quick response. Very useful forum 

[Allan Chesney]

Good to hear you got that problem sorted.

One of the key factors in using the program properly, is to understand how Building Locations work. (Settings menu). This controls all the vertical aspects of the model and it is essential that they add up. If you study the illustration on this dialog it shows how everything is built. Simply put, the Ground Floor's Floor Level setting is the distance from the ground (Terrain) to the top surface of the floor (default 300mm), so this is your floor thickness. The wall sits on top of this and the Wall Height setting controls the height of new walls you insert on that floor (Location). The Floor Level of the Second Floor is the height from the Terrain to the top surface of the Second Floor, so it is the Ground Floor thickness, plus the Wall Height, plus the Second Floor thickness. The roof the sits on top of the Wall Height on the Second Floor.

If a Ground Floor's walls were pushing through into the Second Floor for example, then you would raise the Floor Level of the Second Floor and everything inserted on that floor will move up accordingly. These vertical dimensions must add up or you will get protrusions into other floors or gaps in your building between the floors.

In your case, by dropping your walls 155 lower, you moved them through the floor of the second floor and depending how thick the floor was, you may have moved them into the walls on the ground floor, potentially leading to wall corruptions. If the wall Properties are set to Auto Extend, they will assume the Wall Height set for that location and automatically extend to the roof.

I hope that helps if you did not understand how that works.

Allan

[tremor]

Yeah I think I understand the location settings - I did spend some time trying to work out the best approach to drawing a large building with varying wall heights in it. In the end I kind of built it up by height - so I drew all the ground floor walls on this location even though some of them are higher than others. Then I created a new location for part of the ground floor that is still single story but has a higher roof - I then just traced over the walls from the ground location that needed to be higher (and I set the floor height for these "wall extensions" to be the ground wall height + floor height).

But anyway this part where I had the corrupt wall was a part of the building that has 2 stories. The upstairs walls are 2445, while the downstairs are 2600. The reason I elevated them downwards was because I right clicked the downstairs walls that are pretty much the same upstair and duplicated them to the 2nd floor location. Problem is it carries the ground floor wall height over even though the upstairs is set at 2445. This was a bit annoying because I had drawn some walls from scratch and some duplicated and when you switch to 3D view, you see... oops all the duplicated walls are sticking up to high. Are you saying that this is not a problem because if they are set to Auto extend then when I put the roof on, the roof will go on at 2445, and those walls that got copied at 2600 will automatically be adjusted then to meet the 2445 wall? Or would they stick up through the roof?

I have basically worked my way round it for now although there are no doubt much faster ways to do things that I know at this stage, but I am still interested in case I do do another project, if I need to worry about how walls copy between locations.

Thanks

[Allan Chesney]

Are you saying that this is not a problem because if they are set to Auto extend then when I put the roof on, the roof will go on at 2445, and those walls that got copied at 2600 will automatically be adjusted then to meet the 2445 wall?

Basically YES.  If the ground floor walls are set to AutoExtend they will adjust to the "Wall Height" set for the Ground Floor when you insert them - so if your Location setting for Wall Height was set to 2600, then the walls will extend to that height as you insert them. If now you duplicate these AutoExtend walls to the Second Floor, they will automatically adjust to the Second Floor "Wall Height" setting (2445). This will be the case whether the roof is on or not.

However, even if the Location's "Wall Height" setting is 2600 but you override the AutoExtend and force the Ground Floor wall to be 2600, when you duplicate it to the Second Floor, it will still be 2600. This also means it will poke through the roof, because the roof is still inserted where you told it that the top of this wall should be, as defined in the Location setting. The Building Location setting will control all the vertical settings IF the walls are set to AutoExtend. If the wall heights are manually controlled, then there could be gaps or overlaps in the vertical aspect of the building.

Allan