Draw-Walls and Single Walls

Draw Walls

Select Walls > Draw Single Wall command. The Track Walls dialog is displayed. Since we will be effectively ‘tracing’ the underlay plan, the digitising options dialog is displayed. The usual constraints will be multiples of 45° and 10mm. This will force the wall lines to be square and rounded to the nearest 10mm, thus substantially improving digitising accuracy.

Select the wall corner on the underlay plan and left click at each end. Use the middle mouse scroll function to get closer to the corner if required. This helps in selecting the corner more precisely. Then zoom out, and back in to capture the other end of the wall line. Note that you cannot use middle mouse snap, because there is no line end point to snap to – the underlay is a bitmap or pixel image, there are not lines yet.

Extra precision is possible by typing the actual length of the wall line using the direction prefix U, D, L, R (up, down, left. right) for example R2750 will draw a line precisely 2750mm instead of being +/-10mm of the digitised location.
The wall line will be inserted. Be aware that if an edge changes from one wall thickness to another, the line needs to stop and start again so that a different material can be applied at the next step.

After selecting the end point, you may continue in a new direction for the next wall line. Right click the mouse to finish that line and start a new line. [Continue] digitising more wall lines until you have captured them all. If appropriate, consider inside versus outside of the wall and aim to select the outside.

The walls are drawn on the CPL (Construction Plane) which would usually be the floor in our situation where we have not defined the roof. At this stage we are not fussed about the type or thickness of the wall material. This will be set in a subsequent step.

The command will also ‘snap’ the line end point to the Z of any intersecting lines that it finds within the pick box on the cursor (the little square at the intersection of the cross hairs) and the prompt area will confirm that a line has been ‘snapped to’. This ensures that lines are neat and tidy and the required length.

Figure shows traced wall lines over scaled PDF underlay. Model is full size after correctly scaling the image.

The wall lines are on the CPL and essentially define the location of the wall base lines. They are ready to be projected as required – to the roof plane or to a height.

 Draw-Single-Wall

This command allows you to digitise or track around the outline of a single wall in elevation. This is typically used to create a wall using an underlay image from the Microsoft Windows clipboard of a PDF document or a scanned image of a wall elevation drawing.

For walls, clip the image of the wall elevation:

Digitise the wall (Walls > Draw Single Wall) and generate the wall panel cut list (requires AppliCad Roof Wizard module) using function Walls > Apply Wall Set-Up > Generate Wall Panels.

These functions are easy, quick and accurate (as accurate as the images permit). For more details on digitising, refer to the section on digitising roof geometry above.