Aligning Walls to a grid with an offset

[Andrew Dobson]

I need to align two types of in-situ concrete walls to a structural grid.

I have two types, 300mm concrete walls centred on the grid, and 225mm concrete walls aligned to the grid with 75mm one side and 150mm the other side of the grid line.

It is easy to lock the core centre line of the 300mm wall to the gridline, but rather more complicated to align the 225mm wall how I want.

I have drawn a wall with a 150mm concrete core layer and a 75mm concrete skin layer and aligned and locked this wall to the grid by core face, but I now have a thin line separating the two parts of the concrete, where as in reality, the wall will be cast as one.

I know that I can use a dimension to constrain the wall to the grid by a set amount, but this is a pain with lots of walls.

I have attached a PDF to illustrate what I am trying to do.

Is there an easier way to acomplish this?

Thanks in advance

[tomnewsom]

You've already found the two easy ways to do this.

Annoyingly, you can't use filters to turn off common edges for specific walltypes :(

[Andrew Dobson]

Thanks - I have found an item on the wish list requesting the ability to align with an offset (and then lock to this). This this is what I am looking for - maybe I should have voted for it!

[sifuentes]

If you just want to align walls by their centerlines, do a reference plane at the appropriate offset from the gridline.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Andy,
Give the two component wall a unique name (Concrete 225-PH) and use it as a placeholder. Place them the way you are doing it now and create a second wall type that is just the 225mm concrete. When you need to plot (without the additional line) you can replace the placholder wall with the single wall. Just select all instances (be sure to change the location line to centerline of wall) and then pick the 225 wall from the list.

[tomnewsom]

Andy,
Give the two component wall a unique name (Concrete 225-PH) and use it as a placeholder. Place them the way you are doing it now and create a second wall type that is just the 225mm concrete. When you need to plot (without the additional line) you can replace the placholder wall with the single wall. Just select all instances (be sure to change the location line to centerline of wall) and then pick the 225 wall from the list.
Neat trick, but I can only begin to imagine the fuss that wall joins are going to make, especially if you;ve got some 'fancy' ones...

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Wall joins shouldn't be an issue in this case as long as both walls have all layers set to the same wall function. Probably right though, this might cause a few issues with more complex wall types.

[Andrew Dobson]

Good idea, Dimitri, thanks for this