CompuServe Thread

Ya know, I've seen these log wall discussions before, but haven't paid much attention, since the focus has been on rendering in the past… But now that I think about it directly, yeah, Softdesk Auto-Architect would do it – at least kinda-sorta… Facade wouldn't do it in any way I can think of, or any other product I know of. A-A has Wall Styles that allow you to define a wall profile that can be "extruded" horizontally to create walls. Other applications are starting to use wall styles for wall definitions, but to my knowledge, A-A is unique because it allows you to use individual 3D faces in your Wall Style definition. These 3D Faces can be oriented other than orthogonally, so you can simulate things like cornices or crown molds at the top of a wall, for instance, or gawd forbid, a mansard roof… <g> It won't allow you to extrude a real curve, but you can approximate a curve with enough straight sections… It wouldn't take many facets before the profile would render as a smooth curve, say, 4 per log profile on each side, maybe 6? So, yeah, that might work, as long as the objective is a rendering. 4 facets would obviously be less successful as a hidden-line AutoCAD plot, so you'd need to use more faces to get an acceptable curved appearance… There are some limitations: Any single Wall Style can't use more than 24 3D Faces as part of the definition, so you probably couldn't define a full height wall… Say you did use 4 Faces to form a half-log, you could only define a 6-log section – half that if you wanted to have log profiles on each side of the wall in one Wall Style definition. But you could define several Wall Style's to make up the lower third, middle third, and upper third, and do it in three passes. Or use the same Wall Style at three elevations… Also, I'm not sure if you could use additional Faces, beyond the 24 limitation, to form the caps on the "logs", or if you could make automatic capping work at all… Normally you can define capping pairs to make sure that corresponding faces are capped properly for a wall that ends in space, but I don't _think_ these can be in addition to the 24-Face limit… I'd have to look into it a little more to be sure, but it might be hard to get the extended log corners to automatically cap properly, and you might have to do something manually here, maybe AutoCAD Donuts… You'd have a similar problem where you broke the walls to insert doors and windows, unless these areas were covered with a wide jamb section… But other than that, this might work rather well, compared to any alternative I can think of. In any case it's probably worth checking out as a starting point, at least…

James: It would certainly be something we would consider for a future release of Facade. Right now, the walls are flat surfaced, as are the walls in virtually every other architectural front-end I have ever seen. It might be possible to create a wall-style with KETIV's package that would mimic a log profiled wall. Check with them. You might also try getting in touch with a company called Panabode just outside of Vancouver (in Surrey I believe). That's area code 604. They're a major log home builder (we're talking pre-packaged and shipped world-wide). They developed their own log home application for AutoCAD. They're taken it to the point where it actually produces cut lists for their specially profiled logs. But they also did a pre-design/visualization program that lets a designer sit down with a client and quickly put together a log home and then view it in 3D. They might be willing to share some of their expertise with you. David