Certain Alignment Offsets (when window geometry collides with both walls at once) can force window opening through both walls but it can be an undesired position of the window.
Is it possible to have the window or door aligned back but cut through two walls at the same time? (I don’t want to use Substract Solids workaround.)
Window placed in the back wall can’t make the cut through the front wall
Windows are designed to cut one single wall. However, why do you need to create a different wall? Maybe you can create an additional layer and apply an elevation offset to it.
I tried to use exclusively “smart” layered walls even in Revit but this can lead to failure and frustration on many occasions… In simple scenarios, simple walls you will get away with this approach but not every time.
Often drawing separate layers as separate walls can be much quicker, much more flexible, and more intuitive. The more uncommon the task is, the easier is to draw layers separately. Especially if the project scale is not very big, this costs an acceptable amount of effort.
Also, I think that users relying solely on Elevation offsets for complex walls puts much more pressure on the developers than letting users draw different layers separately and cut multiple walls with one window. You would need to provide the tool that works every time in every rare situation
There is a property “Cut depth” in the window properties that allows specifying the depth of the solid subtracted from the wall. Unfortunately, as the other wall is not intersecting the window, that solid does not affect this wall. But I can make a small change in VisualARQ so this cut depth is taken into account when looking for near walls, as long as they are parallel.
Sounds good!
There is already some logic that removes wall edges if two walls are “sticked” together and have the same pattern.
Maybe this with a combination of Cut depth can be enough to determine how window should make wall openings.
I think that I can make it even easier: I can just treat parallel walls like if they were part of the wall, so the doors and windows that are inserted in any of two-or-more parallel walls will make a hole in all of them. What do you think?
I highly doubt anyone will place a wall parallel to another wall with doors or windows expecting to block all openings.
This logic will probably change to “same material” instead of “same pattern”…
I think it is a good idea as long as I don’t think about making window reveals out of wall layers.
With current behavior, I can manually subtract solid from one wall, but if windows will have “more power” in making openings it might be not possible anymore.
I think this feature is needed for the “detailed prototyping” phase when you don’t need nor have all the details yet, and you just need a quick way of changing window positions to evaluate facade options quickly, I wouldn’t want it to be a 2 step process per window.
I am trying to leave ArchiCAD behind and I am happy to see that VA can handle multi layered walls, as this is one of the biggest reasons I grew frustrated with it, together with the lack of openings trough multiple layers!
Off-topic: I switched to Rhino/VA because I started wanting to model my projects 1:1, full detail stopping only at fasteners. Is there a forum or community for this topic? Haven’t been able to find it.
This is the forum, I am not sure if there is another thread for this topic. Anyway, if you need to create more detailed objects, you can do it in two different ways: