Using wall styles
The optional use of wall styles 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, for Vectorworks Architect, energy analysis values)
Wall attributes (fill, pen, line weight, classing, texture resources, 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)
Curtain wall styles are based on the grid definition on the Wall Preferences dialog box Definition tab. Custom edits to the frames and panels in the curtain wall instance cannot be saved as part of a style.
Because a wall style contains so much information, it can be time-consuming to create one from scratch. However, a variety of wall styles is provided in libraries and, for Vectorworks Architect users, in the Architect templates. A selected wall style is automatically imported into the current file and displays in the Resource Manager.
To convert a selected wall to an unstyled wall, select Convert to Unstyled Wall from the Style list in the Object Info palette.
The insertion options of a styled wall (including wall and component heights, constraints, class, and caps) are properties that can be changed from the Object Info palette without requiring a new style definition.
Select Tools > Reports > Create Report to add a Wall Area and/or Wall Style Report worksheet to the drawing. Alternatively, from the Resource Manager, select Vectorworks Libraries\Defaults\Reports_Schedules\Architectural Reports.vwx. 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 resources. To make a custom wall style available as default content from dialog boxes, place the file that contains the wall style in the appropriate default content folder. See Creating custom resource libraries for details.
Unused wall styles can be purged; see Purging items from a file.
