Curtain Wall alignment - different system than Wall alignment?

[GabrielB (Gabriel Bouzelos)]

Often, I am using curtain-walls without frame, divisions, mullions etc, with just a single panel, for siding purposes, like siding of a slab.

I was never able to have an accurate alignment. The right, center, left, uses it’s own logic, different than wall’s system. I remember that even with frame, divisions, mullions it was never performing well, the alignment was never working for the cell, in my case the single panel.

I am wondering why it does have a different system than wall’s system (not great, left,center,right is not enough, but it does have an aligned logic with other element’s alignment controls in VA such as slab’s top, middle, bottom).

edit: also when i set alignment offset with more decimals than the resolution of the document it’s not accurate. Let me describe this:
i work with 4 decimals but the resolution many times is 3 decimals. When in the dialogue of native va objects I input 5,6789 it rounds it up to 5,679 but the change of the geometry relies on the 4 decimals accuracy (I’ve checked it). In the curtain-walls, setting 0,00675, rounds it up to 0,0068 and the result is not accurate. Does CW use different system than the other VA objects?

edit2: omg, it’s worse than using a different underlying system. The center alignement, is not placed in the centerline of the single panel of the CW. It’s placing the centerline axis in a place - without no obvious logic - maybe because it’s expecting to necessarily use mullion, frame etc? I really do not get it.

Q: also, I thought that CW intersections, was something already developed, maybe I am missing something here, or I remember this wrong.

[fsalla (Francesc Salla)]

@GabrielB

I was never able to have an accurate alignment

Hi @GabrielB the curtain wall alignment is measured taking the Frame component depth as reference. When there’s no Frame, the alignment is always centered to the glass panel. We can change this behavior.

@GabrielB

In the curtain-walls, setting 0,00675, rounds it up to 0,0068 and the result is not accurate.

Do you have an example of this?

@GabrielB

I thought that CW intersections, was something already developed, maybe I am missing something here, or I remember this wrong.

Curtain walls joins are applied to the Frame component only (when the end points of each curtain wall are coincident).

Curtain walls are not designed to be used as slab sidings (I’d rather use a beam object instead). As you noticed, there are some issues when they don’t have a Frame component. But they should work consistently without it as well. So we will revise these issues.

[GabrielB (Gabriel Bouzelos)]

Hi @fsalla , thanks.

Regarding the decimal/alignment issue, after increasing the document precision to 5 decimal places it seems to be resolved, so I’ll keep an eye on it and report back if I can reproduce it.

As for the siding, this is exactly where I am stuck. The current Curtain Wall limitations basically prevent me from using it for this case. A Beam is indeed the cleanest option geometrically, but it is too static for this workflow: changing the siding height/drop is not as direct as with a Wall, and it quickly becomes a matter of editing profile dimensions or creating multiple variants.

Maybe siding itself is worth looking into as a specific modelling case — whether through an existing object with more suitable controls, or otherwise. What I mainly need is something that behaves cleanly geometrically but still allows quick, direct height/thickness editing while at the same time it stays attached to the geometry it’s trying to cover and changes with that geometry.