Exterior Renovation Project Assistance

[bclarch]

We have a project that involves the exterior renovation of an existing townhouse complex. The project consists of 51 buildings of 6 typical building types - 4, 6 & 8 unit buildings with shed roofs over the rear bay and 4, 6 & 8 unit buildings with gable roofs over the rear bay. The existing roofing and brick are to remain. We are changing out all of the siding and trim. There are currently 14 different color schemes and we could easily end up with twice as many when we are done. Since there are going to be so many different color schemes we want to issue color elevations to the contractor for each building along with the finish schedules in order to help avoid confusion. My plan is to create a file for each typical building type and the use phasing and / or design options to depict the various color shemes for the individual buildings of that type.

I wanted to tap the collective knowledge here and get some feedback on my approach. Some of the things that I am thinking about and would like feedback on are:

1. Should I create three or six base buildings? Since the buildings are just shells, creating six files vs. three isn't going to be a big deal. It seems like managing just the color scheme options in each file will be easier than managing both the roof types and color schemes together in each file. The project browser will probably be a nightmare in either case.

2. I am planning on using design options to create the various color schemes. Any issues that I should be aware of? Any reason to using phasing or a combo of phasing & design options instead of just using design options alone?

3. I plan on checking the help files and tutorials on this, but are there any tricks I need to be aware of to create or manage the finish schedules for each option?

4. What is the easiest way to create the various colors for the materials? Can I scan in color samples and extract the RGB settings somehow? Someone please say yes since there are 4 or 5 color options for each material and I really don't want to have create 20 to 30 material variations from scratch. :(

Thanks in advance.

[adegnan]

I think you should model the 6 building type shells, and use changes to material settings to change the building. After you do each material change I'd save-as to a new file, so essentially you'll create 3 shells, then create 2 rooflines for each shell, then modify the materials and end up with a separate file for each instance of building-roof-material combination.

That is, as long as you will not need to make any other changes to "all" of the buildings or "all" of the rooflines.

I think you'll run into more difficulties with design options because I'm not aware that materials can be changed within the same object. That is, you'll still end up with multiple objects, a red wall, a green wall, and a blue wall, right? So why not just save as a different file, it will be much easier to manipulate and keep track of.

[bclarch]

Abe

Thanks for the input. There shouldn't be any need to make global changes to all of the buildings once they are modelled but it still seems rather unwieldly to create 51 unique building files for this project when they are all just variations on a theme. Seems like just the sort of thing that computers are supposed to be able to do in order to make our lives easier. I too, am not certain whether design options allow you to just change material colors. I was figuring on making different walls, roofs, trim, doors, windows, etc. with the different material colors assigned to them and then just swapping them out using design options. As I write this, even that sounds like it might be more complicated than I thought. I'll have to keep my thinking cap on while I wait and see what other feedback I get.

Any rendering gurus have any thoughts on item #4? Maybe I should check out the Accurender website.

[hand471037]

Yes, with Design Options you can't just control the Materials, so you would have to have multipule walls and such.

Keep in mind that you can copy model bits that aren't part of a Design Option yet into Multipule Design Options at once. So you can model the base, and then copy it into many Options, and then change the color in each. They you could Mix & Match. This would mean you would have lots and lots of Options, however, but from what I've heard that won't slow the system.

Also keep in mind that when you link one of these files into another, the Primary option is what comes in. I don't think you can swap it then to another option, either.

[christopher.zoog51272]

Personally, I would model just three buildings, and use design options to control the colors and roof options. You will wind up a with a few options sets with several options each. IMHO this is much, much easier than dealing with multiple files. It's true that you have to include the walls in the option set, but you can used the paint bucket tool to quickly change the surface pattern without having to make a gallizon wall types.


<broken record mode> use design options, they are your friend </broken record mode>

[bclarch]

Chris

Am I understanding you correctly? Are you saying that a paint bucket color change can be saved as part of a design option? If so, then this looks like the way to go. Now I just need to worry about generating accurate color representations.