Explore in-depth curtain wall customization techniques in 3D view. Learn how to set the initial framework, add all the customization, and avoid common mistakes while creating a unique design.
Key Insights
- The article shares detailed steps for customizing curtain walls, starting from a 3D view which provides a comprehensive perspective of both sides of the curtain wall.
- The customization process starts with setting the framework and then adding customization options including curtain grid and spandrel panel. It also involves the add/remove segments option for adjusting segments and curtain grids.
- Common mistakes to avoid during customization are highlighted, including adding a second curtain grid which can result in a zero-dimension piece of glass and disrupt scheduling. The article also provides tips for using the 'create similar' command for easier modeling.
This first assignment in this lesson is going to be to customize our curtain wall a bit, and I'm going to do all of this from the 3D view. And that's because we can see both sides of our curtain wall when we do this, and it's pretty much the easiest way to access all of these different options in here. When I look at it, I can go to my default 3D view, and then we can take a look here, and we can see that the curtain wall could use a little bit of work.
So first thing I'm noticing is, from our original design, that we have this really large glass panel here, and that's much bigger than we'd normally like to use in a real project, so we're going to want to break that down a bit. The next thing I'm seeing is that we have the ceiling being interrupted here at this location, which means that we'd probably see a unique condition at this area. Either we're seeing into the interstitial space, or we're seeing kind of a soffit wall or a back pan detail, and it wouldn't necessarily be consistent with the rest of our building.
We're going to look at a couple options with that. Just like we did last time when we modeled our curtain wall in the previous lessons, what we want to do is we want to set the framework for it first, and then go in and add all of the customization. So that's what we're going to do now.
The first thing we want to do is there's a curtain grid that we only used for the header of the door here, and since we have the grid already in place on this curtain wall, which would be the east curtain wall, we can go ahead and we can use the add remove segments option to add back these two segments here. Once we have those in place, we can go ahead and we can add the curtain grid at this location, and then we can have a spandrel panel that runs across here to hide this interstitial space and also break up the wall into a couple different elevations. So the first thing that I'll do is I'll go in and I'm going to just hover my mouse.
You can see I'm kind of moving it in this blank area, but as I move it vertically, you see it'll grab that curtain grid. If I select it by using left click here, then I get the option in the modify curtain walls, modify curtain wall grids contextual tab, where here I'm able to use add remove segments, which does both adding and removing segments. If I were to add a segment here by clicking on it, you can see it'll add that grid in and doing the same thing by adding it on that side.
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Once I've added both segments, I can hit escape, and that takes me out of that command. The most common mistake that I see here is people will go in and they'll actually add a second curtain grid in this location, and that is not what you want to do because it'll end up giving you a zero dimension piece of glass here, and it'll mess up all your scheduling and ultimately you'll have a hard time adding mullions to that location anyway. So to continue this on, what we'll need to do is add a grid going this direction.
So from my architecture tab, I can go to curtain grid and I'll just need to hover along this space here. And you can see if I go on the grid that's on the edge of the wall, it's going to highlight the one we just created, which means those two are going to line up, and that we have a continuous grid going all the way around on both sides on the two independent curtain walls. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a vertical curtain grid here to divide up this piece of glass, because like I mentioned before, this is a pretty wide and tall piece of glass, so we want to break that up.
If you are familiar with the command that allows you to use create similar, I encourage you to use that. If not, we can go back to architecture and curtain grid. But once you get familiar with using create similar, which is keyboard shortcut CS, you can essentially go to the curtain grid that we have here and type CS, and it'll activate the curtain grid command.
And so what I always say is that you really don't need to know how to model anything in Revit if stuff is already there. If you want to create a wall like this one, you can just select it, CS. Curtain wall mullion like this one, you just select it, CS, and you're ready to go.
So same thing worked for the grid. And now what I'll do is I'll just allow Revit to determine that location for me. And you'll notice as you go through, as I hover over the middle there, it'll actually tell me that it's the midpoint of the curtain grid.
If you look down on this portion of the screen here on the bottom left side, you'll see that when I hover over the middle, it says midpoint of curtain grid. If I go off to one side, it'll say one third of curtain grid. And so it gives us these little helpers.
And you'll notice as you move your mouse around, it'll actually lock in to those locations. So I'll add that grid. And now we're ready to go with the majority of our curtain wall system.
The last thing I want to do, though, is I want to have a solid panel at the bottom here. And to do that, what I can do is I can actually remove these extra curtain grids by using that same add remove segments tool. So I'll select, say, this one here that we just created.
And I can say add remove segments. And then I can click on the one that I want to remove. And then if I just click into blank space, you can see that now we have one panel here.
And I can do the same thing as I go around. But what I'll do is I'll first delete these mullions before I do that, because it's just easier to select them at that point. You will notice, though, as I'm kind of moving around, a lot of things are getting selected.
So it's really good as you get used to this to just go really slow and make sure you're selecting the right elements. Because if you're not on a curtain grid, for instance, you won't get this option. So I'll go through and just use that add remove segments to remove the curtain grid segments that we no longer want.
And what we should have here is a blank and one single panel here, a panel next to the door, and the panel where we added the new grid here as one. We should have three total panels that we can work with.
