Joined: May 12, 2013
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Re: Problem with wall thikness and room surfaces.
okh I did not complain about the lack of 3D
Sorry if I gave that impression. Not the intention and I never thought you did. My comments were of a general nature as a follow-up to the ensuing discussion.
As for inside-outside-middle measurements you will find several discussions about this in the forum. For inside measurements one solution is mentioned in Puybaret's reply, just draw the room first and double-click with wall-tool to create walls with correct inside measurements. The Advanced Editing Plugin can be useful to get the room right, but also for connecting walls, moving points etc.
Still, doing the calculation between inside/outside/middle is pretty straightforward when you work with straight angles. For instance that in a rectangular house the outside length is the middle length + wall thickness and so forth. Some calculation when drawing is hard to avoid, in any software.
Btw, some can find it helpful starting with a solitary first wall in the upper left corner modified to accurate co-ordinates and dimensions and later use Wall-tool-ENTER to insert accurate values (e.g. inside measurement + wall thickness) helps getting subsequent walls accurate. Double clicking inside and outside walls with the Create Dimensions tool occasionally also helps double checking that everything is correct.
So while your point is understandable, it may not be something you miss after while. As mentioned, the strength of SH3D is indeed that it only takes minutes to learn the basics. Getting to use it efficiently with shortcuts, key-combinations, plugins and other features, well, in my case that took a while longer.
Do not know which video you watched, but the many YouTube SH3D instruction videos vary quite a bit in quality. There are some worth watching, but some of them seem to miss key SH3D features.
Which software is better is of course a matter of personal taste. Blender and Sketchup are very different from SH3D, but SH3D is arguably faster and easier for room planning when using a combination of mouse and keyboard. The commercial (architectural) packages are pretty expensive and will be a total overkill for many.
Joined: May 12, 2013
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Re: Problem with wall thikness and room surfaces.
PITA to draw a thick wall aligned correctly to room borders
It would be, but you do not have to. Just to clarify, if there is a misunderstanding here: - draw the room with correct measurements, - make sure the new wall thickness is set correctly in preferences, - double-click with the Wall tool inside the walls, - then the walls are created automatically.
If there are different thickness walls, you adjust thickness for those walls, change the start/end values and/or SHIFT-move them. It really does not take that many seconds once you are used to the various commands.
Several of the YouTube SH3D instruction videos do, surprisingly, not cover the automatic room/wall creation.
Western Europa
Joined: Mar 29, 2014
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Re: Problem with wall thikness and room surfaces.
you could draw rooms first, then with the wall creation tool, double-click in each room to create walls around it...
@Manu: Excellent, I didn't know this tip !
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Evil progresses when good people do nothing! --- SH3D 7.1 and nothing else - W11 64b in 4K
France
Joined: Feb 26, 2017
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Re: Problem with wall thikness and room surfaces.
okh I did not take it that bad ...
I am going to measure a real house; there will be odds. FreeCAD seem able to handle odds, but at the cost of a hugely longer work time. I will probably draw two plans; one for exact dimensions (FreeCAD), and one with nice 3D look and stuff names (SW).
FreeCAD will allow me to be very precise and accurate, by placing reference dots; I can work with triangles (from measurements from real world)): not assuming any square angle, and draw polygones (almost rectangles) based on their diagonals. This will imply the use of many lasers and meters at the same time. In particular, just my ground floor is laying at 5 different heights inside the building; and the garden around it is very slopy. There is no way SW can handle that.
SweetHome will be used to draw general shape of things, in a way I can easily select a part of the building to provide to people only the part of the plan they want. Most people may not be interessed by small details.
Walls set your way around a room may not fit my needs. Rooms never have walls of identical thickness in my case; always at least two different values, sometimes 3 or 4. Adjusting them would take ages in SW.
How can I receive email notifications for this forum ? Did not receive email notification for either moderation(publication of thread) or answers received. It's activated, but, no mail in inbox of junk.
Yes, it is one of the better YouTube videos. However, it shows a (rough, inaccurate) free-hand illustration that does not show working with accurate measurements: does not use Wall/Room-tool+ENTER, Dimensions-double-click, Wall/Room-double-click, multiple-select-modify, Ctrl-move, Shift-move, etc, etc. So therefore that video can also be a bit misleading and does not really show the SH3D features you seem to need: "allow me to be very precise and accurate". Just know that SH3D has many features that makes it easier to work with mm precision not shown in the video.
I have done two old buildings in SH3D. And yes, of course, it takes some more time when all walls are different and most angles are off by a couple of degrees. But my drawings are accurate with an error margin of a couple of mm. So I disagree with Adjusting them would take ages in SW.
Long and short of it is, that equipped with a Laser Measure (forget ultra-sound with laser pointers), a laser level and a piece of paper, it was fairly easy just to enter accurate measures in SH3D afterwards.
Do not get me wrong, I also use other software, but in terms of drawing up and editing an accurate house plan, I have yet to come anywhere near the speed and ease of use of SH3D with any other software. Once you learn the tricks, that is.
