Using Wall StylesUsing Wall StylesUnstyled walls can be used in the Vectorworks Design Series products. The attributes of an unstyled wall can be changed from the Attributes palette. The use of wall styles, however, facilitates drawing walls by saving the wall preferences settings so that they can be easily selected as the default style when drawing new walls, or so that they can be applied to existing walls. Wall styles are resources that can be imported into other files and shared as office standards.
A wall style contains a significant amount of information:
● Wall composition and structure (components for standard walls, and frames and panels for curtain walls)
● Insertion options (height constraints, caps, classing, and energy analysis values (Vectorworks Architect required))
● Wall attributes (fill, pen, line weight, classing, texture resources (Renderworks required), hatch resources)
● Vertical wall constraints (by layer elevation, layer wall height or, for the Vectorworks Architect program, story layer levels)
● Component constraints, for standard walls
● Other non-geometric data (wall style name, thermal data, product data, and so on)
Because a wall style contains so much information, it can be time-consuming to create one from scratch. However, a variety of wall styles are provided in libraries. A selected wall style is automatically imported into the current file and displays in the Resource Browser; see Resource Libraries.
Depending on how you use wall styles and which product is in use, usually only one type of wall style, simple or constrained, is needed. Wall styles provided by the Wall or Round Wall tool in a blank file are simple wall styles that use the conventional method of determining the top and bottom wall height according to the layer elevation or layer wall height. However, constrained wall styles are provided in templates named with a BIM prefix; these are available for Vectorworks Architect users from the Use document template list in the Create Document dialog box. These wall styles are constrained to the story level settings in those templates, and they provide additional wall detail, accuracy, and flexibility. More information on using wall styles and story levels with BIM is available for drawings set up with metric units and with imperial units.
A selected wall can be converted to an unstyled wall by selecting Convert to Unstyled Wall from the Style list in the Object Info palette. The component settings of unstyled walls can be edited by clicking Components from the Object Info palette. When a wall becomes unstyled, it loses all its non-geometric data. An unstyled wall’s properties can be converted into a new wall style with a right-click (Windows) or Ctrl-click (Mac) on the wall; select New Wall Style from Unstyled Wall.
The insertion options of a styled wall (including wall height, constraints, class, and caps) are properties that can be changed from the Object Info palette without requiring a new style definition.
Worksheets listing the current wall styles and wall areas in the drawing can be added to the drawing from the VA Create Schedule command (in the Architect workspace) or the Resource Browser. From the Resource Browser, select Vectorworks Libraries from the Files list, and open the default architectural reports file that is included with the Vectorworks Architect product (see Resource Libraries). Drag the Wall Area and/or Wall Style Report worksheet to the drawing. The worksheet is populated with information from the objects in the current drawing.
A wall style resource can be exported to another Vectorworks file; see Exporting Custom Resources. To make a custom wall style available as default content from the Tool bar and dialog boxes, place the file that contains the wall style in the appropriate default content folder. See Creating Custom Default Content Libraries for details.
Unused wall styles can be purged; see Purging Items from a File.
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