Visual arq parametric door with grasshopper

Hi all, I’m a noob in visualARQ.
I saw a video on youtube explaining how to make custom parametric families in grasshopper and use them as elements in visualARQ. Im’ quite there, however, I’m not able to align the door (in particular the sides with the wall width) properly as I want, are there some guidelines to make custom parametric families or any video or tutorial explaining step by step the correct process?

Update:

By trial and error I was able to understand almost everything, I share what I know now to help people that may have had the same issues

  1. Aperture in the wall for doors and windows:
    the aperture can be calculated automatically with the largest geometry that VisualARQ finds (but this fails if the geometry moves, like a moving door without any frame). Instead I suggest you to use a silhouette curve or solid or polysurface to cut the wall, this geometry if input as a cut geometry will disappear and the depth of cut is automaticallycalculated by VisualARQ so you don’t need to add a parameter for that.

  2. The anchor point is the origin of world space (0,0,0), and the alignment of a window on a wal is along the plane xz (which makes sense actually). You should always set the origin point of your window or door were the middle of the wall will be.

  3. You don’t need to set the elevation of a window as a parameter into the grasshopper definition, nor the side and direction of the opening, these variables will be already modifiable into the dialog window in visualARQ once uploaded it as a new family

  4. To make visualARQ visualizing your geometry you need to input the result into a “Geometry” node before saving the grasshopper definition. All the “Geometry” nodes without any other output will be processed and visualized by VIsualARQ. I suggest to rename them to understand better which element is which once imported as a family.

  5. grouping the inputs will divide the inputs by the same groups in the dialog window as well (I suggest you to divide the inputs into “Dimensions”, “Aperture”, “Variations”… )

What I still don’t understand is how to divide my single entities into different layers once inserted into visualARQ, anyone as some clues?

1 Like

Hello Ricardo,
To have different elements on different layers make sure you have separate geometries of all such objects, and when you import your GH definition assign levels to the elements. Also, you can assign other properties for elemenst - materials, visibility etx. It works.
Regards, jaro

And the sample, the same applies for doors:



Regards, Jaro

Thanks a lot.

PS:
I have found a bug when you import geometries form the grasshopper definition into VisualARQ.

When you set into a Brep input component multiple Breps (internalizing them) and import the definition in VisualARQ, Visual ARQ will import only the first item of the list. To solve it is sufficient to input the Breps all in different Brep input nodes, so it’s not a big deal, it is just something I have noticed.

If you use a “Data” component to store all those BReps, they will be reocognized by VisualARQ when you create a GH Style.
Of course, we will try to fix this issue that prevents VisualARQ from reading lists of breps (or other referenced and “internalized” objects).

Thanks again!