Walls - Rhino Tutorial

- Now that we have a good idea of what these walls should look like in real life, we can model them accurately. So for starters, I know that the exterior wall right here actually is covered in clapboard. So I'm going to use my preexisting wall that I modeled and just copy that. First, I'm going to turn off my base model. And then in the top view, I'm going to select this wall and hit the copy command and copy this from the outside to the inside. Then I'm going to change this piece of geometry to my clapboard layer. There we go. And I'm also going to change its thickness to the actual clapboard thickness. I'm going to do that by typing in scale 1D, hit enter. And from the outside point to the inside, I'm going to scale this to 1/32 inch which is the real world dimensions for that piece. And I'm going to move this wall to this corner. There we go. So now we're getting a little bit more detail. As a side note, you might have noticed that this clapboard sheet doesn't actually have clapboard texture. The reason that is, is because we don't really need that extra detail. We could model it out, but for the purposes of laser cutting, all we're concerned with is getting an accurate outline of our wall. So let's just keep it simple and have it flat for now. Next, I want to extend my wall a little bit because I know that in real life clapboard doesn't come all the way to the ground of a building. So I'm going to turn on my base model for reference and I think I'm going to pull my structural eighth of an inch basswood down to the lowest point, which are at the stairs right here. So I'm going to turn off my base model and my clapboard and I'm going to use a command called extrude surface, hit enter, and I'm going to extrude this piece right here. And I'm going to turn back on my model, hit enter, and I'm just going to extrude this snapping to the bottom most point. Great. I'm going to turn off my reference model again. And with both of these selected, I'm going to bully in them together by hitting bully in union. There we go. So now these are one piece and I'm going to use one more command on this called merge all faces, hit enter. So that just cleans up this line right here. It's a little easier to look at. I'm going to turn back on my clapboard. So now let's actually model the corner that's going to wrap around. So this wall. So I think I'm going to turn off my windows and doors and go to my back view. And I'm going to first model my clapboard on this side. I'm going to use polyline and just snap to the wall outline. And right here, instead of snapping all the way to this edge, I'm going to actually snap to the edge of this clapboard on the other side. Remember, we don't want these walls to actually intersect. We want them to butt up against each other. Okay? And I'm just going to finish off my wall. All right. And I also need to create punch outs for this window in the store. And I'm going to use rectangle for that, going to snap to this corner, to this corner. And I'm going to hit space bar again to repeat that and snap from this corner to this corner of the door. Now I'm going to turn off my reference geometry and I'm going to take these lines and extrude them. I'm going to do extrude curve this time, hit enter, and extrude them to 1/32 inch, hit enter. There we go. And because we have project on, it's projected across the X axis. So we actually have to move this up to this side of the building. So I'm going to use the move command and snap this outside corner to this outside corner. Okay? And I'm going to use the same piece of geometry to create my eighth of an inch basswood that's going to be in the back. So with that selected, I'm going to copy it, snapping from the outside edge to the inside edge. And now I'm going to change what layer this is to my eighth of an inch basswood and I'm also going to change its thickness. So I'm going to use scale 1D, enter, and snap from this edge to the inside edge and type in my thickness, which is 0.117 inches. Enter. There we go. And I also want to make sure that it's the same distance as my other wall. So I'm going to extrude this bottom. I'm going to do that by typing in extrude surface, hit enter, and select this and hit enter, and make sure that I'm in the right layer. So I'm going to select my eighth of an inch basswood and I'm going to snap to the bottom of this wall. There we go. And I'm going to join these and use merge all faces, enter. Great. So we're looking good thus far. My only concern is that this geometry is intersecting with the clapboard. So remember, we want these to butt up against each other. So I'm going to trim off some of this geometry. I'm going to do that by using bully in difference and I'm going to make some cutting geometry. I'm going to use a box and snap from this edge to the outside edge. It doesn't matter what this box looks like. It just to intersect where you want to cut. And with the piece that I want to cut, I'm going to select bully in difference and select my cutting object, this rectangle, and hit enter. There we go. Okay. So now we have a really well-designed butt joint between my clapboard and my eighth of an inch basswood. Let's apply those same concepts when modeling out the rest of these walls. Okay. So I just skipped ahead in the wall building process so you wouldn't have to tediously watch me build each one of these joints. So here we can see how each building corner is designed with layered butt joints that aren't intersecting with each other. One thing that I would like to point out is that at this corner, that's going to be our exterior brick wall. You can see that the walls are actually intersecting. So the reason that is, is because we're going to have a miter joint at this corner, so that from one face to the other, the brick texture that we're going to edge into the walls will be continuous. So the laser cutter is just going to cut this piece straight up and down. And once we get that piece, we're going to have to do the post-processing of either running it through the table saw to get that angle, or sanding it at these two corners to get that angle and then glue it together. So it's okay if your model looks a little different from mine at this point. The way you design a scale model is really based on your building preferences.