Wall with fancy cut cedar shingles?

[junger]

I found that Shakertown has the DXF for multiple styles of cedar shingles -

http://www.shakertown.com/tech_drawings.html

I have a house that has a wall with one row of fishscale fancy cuts followed by one row of arrow fancy cuts with each row being a different color.

This gives you an idea -

http://www.laughingsun.com/houses/Eleanor/front_porch2.jpg

Any ideas on the best way to do this?

Thanks.

-josh

[Mike Sealander]

Well, Josh, I guess a custom surface pattern might do the trick. The help file on creating patterns is not bad. But before you embark, make sure your effort will be worth it. In other words, are you trying to render an image with your fancy cuts, or just show the pattern in elevation? Or, are you drawing contract documents, in which case a drafting detail would suffice?
I end up facing the "bang for buck" question a lot. Sounds like you might be in a similar situation.

[junger]

Yea... I was thinking just show the pattern in elevations. But... let's say I'm bored and I want to create an RFA... What would people recommend so that I can trim it against the roof?

Thanks.

-josh

[nancy.mcclure]

two thoughts:

1. A profile applied as a wall sweep is 2-dimensional - won't show sawtooth cuts, etc., so this would not be the 'best' approach.

2. An alternating hatch pattern WOULD give you the flexibility to align it to a roof edge, setting the pattern down from that reference, but would NOT show thickness detail in a wall section - but that could be handled with a Repeating Detail of the cedar/sawtooth sequence with a fixed distance setting.

[junger]

Thanks for the advice. Would the alternating hatch pattern allow me to color different rows of shingles different colors?

I tried the Generic Model route of creating families. I created one model for the individual shingle and then another generic model faced based family for the wall face. I still hit the problem of trimming it against the roof.

I guess the generic question is... how do I take a component and trim it against a roof or any other component?

Thanks.

-josh

[DoTheBIM]

why not have it as a the surface pattern of a wall layer? attach the wall to the roof.
doesn't really help with alternating colors though... you would have to split surface along the patterns and assign different color materials.

[Munkholm]

Josh.

Not that I would ever model to the detail level that you´re looking for...But the challenge that you´re having, seemed interesting, and could probably be used for other situations too.

Anyway, I´ve tried a few solutions, but neither seems to work 100% - But if you´re still bored ? the attaced family is VERY slow, due to the massive use of arrays/formulas, AND the shingles that are not directly interfering with to void, won´t be cut automaticly. But that´s as good as it gets for now...

PS. If you REALLY want the shingles into your project, just open the family, set the Width and Roof Slope (And window size etc.), and then manually use "Cut Geometry" to get rid of the remaining shingels...
ALSO note that I did not make the shingel sizes parametric...

Enjoy :beer:

[junger]

Pretty cool... thanks. You're right about the performance... that is pretty bad. When I played with the design using an RFA for each shingle and copied each shingle without an array, it had about 10X better performance but then I couldn't create a void. Thanks for the help.