After making a grasshopper wall style, I thought I’d jump on the forums and see if anyone’s had any luck creating a wall definition that mimics the entire section of a stud framed wall. I’m really trying to see if I can save some time and not manually model the board and batt on this project.
This first attempt almost works, but has some issues when it comes to vaWallExtend and also with openings.
Before I start documenting all the strange behavior my definition is exhibiting, I wanted to see if there are there any best practices anyone has or any tips that might make this debugging process a little less circuitous?
And if you do multiple of these at the same time, more failures are observed. If a wall is extended with a window in it, the batten objects fail to draw in the area of double intersection.
I’m sure that VA is doing lots of work to interpret this GH file and I’m amazed that it even kind of worked, which is why I was curious to see if there were any guidelines for how to build robust GH scripts that VA will be able to interpret.
Regardless, the end goal here is to be able to build a wall that will accurately represent battens and studs, so any guidance is appreciated, as always.
Hi @Clayton_Muhleman thanks for reporting all these issues. I’ll forward them all to the development team.
Right now the windows can’t figure out the thickness of walls created as Grasshopper Styles, so it’s difficult to place them aligned with the interior or the exterior side. But if you create the Geometry in the GH file as if the wall had the path curve in their central alignment (on the X axis on 0 coordinate), the window will be inserted in the center of the wall if you chose its “Center” alignment too.
Something planned for future versions that might be useful for a wall like that is the option to detect openings in the GH file, (to figure out their profile and position), so the wall can react on that and distribute the parts or the add new ones accordingly.
And there should be also a “thickness” input or output parameter that could be linked with the real Thickness property of the wall, which doors and windows could use to align correctly on these walls.
Sounds good, thanks for passing that along. Also, it’d be good to know if there are any guidelines for making GH scripts that are easier for VA to interpret.
One other question I had, I couldn’t seem to find anything but I might as well ask, is there any GH method to extract layers from existing VA walls? If I could extract the exterior layer boundary from an existing wall, creating a script to just drop these battens on the exterior would be simple and relatively efficient.
I guess so. You can deconstruct the wall style to figure out the thickness of each layer, and you can explode the wall to get the breps of each layer, and therefore the exterior layer boundary. In this script you can see an example of this: Wall layer area and volume | Food4Rhino
Thanks, the help document is useful. Since VA is moving so fast, it’s always useful to know what’s currently possible, and what currently isn’t possible.
This script can find a named layer on a wall, as long as that layer has a unique thickness. There’s definitely a path here to get where I need to be for now. Thanks!
