Home Builder Walls

Hello and welcome, my name is Andrew Peel and in this video I'm going to be explaining everything you need to know about working with walls in HomeBuilder. Drawing walls is very easy to do but I still recommend watching this video because I'm going to be showing you some helpful tips and tricks when working with walls. So to start out here in the HomeBuilder tab in the rooms category we have the draw wall command. Now below this we have the default wall height and thickness and if you want to change the units that you're using you can go to the HomeBuilder menu and click change units and here you can switch between imperial and metric and inches, feet, meters, millimeters, whatever you want. I'm familiar with inches so I'm going to go ahead and leave it at that. But if we want to start drawing walls we can click the draw wall command and down here at the bottom left we'll notice that there are some helpful tips that we can use or different commands that we can use when drawing walls. And so here if we left click we can set the start point or we can right click or escape to cancel the command. So I'm just going to go ahead and left click and we can see that we can move our cursor to set the wall length and here as we just click points that's going to start drawing out our room. Now you can always right click or escape to cancel that command and if you wanted to continue drawing walls again if you click on the draw wall command and if you move your cursor to the end of one of these segments it'll highlight that wall and notice you have to be close to the end there in order for it to continue drawing. So here if we left click that will allow us to continue drawing walls and also down at the bottom here we'll notice that if we hold ctrl we can set the angle. By default walls are going to snap in 90 degree increments but if we hold down ctrl you notice that we can set the angle to be whatever we want there and then we can just left click to draw that wall. You'll also notice that you can type in numbers to set the wall length and so here if I typed in 60 and then hit enter we can draw walls at the exact dimensions and then finally we have this close room option by typing the c key. So rather than clicking the last point if you type c that'll close out your room. Now if we want to draw interior walls in this here we can click the draw wall command and we can move our cursor over one of the existing walls. We want to make sure that if we get too close to the endpoint it'll snap to that endpoint but here we can just left click and move our cursor in the direction that we want. Click again and we can draw interior walls by just selecting those points and when drawing this room you'll notice that I drew the room clockwise and that's important because there is an interior and exterior to home builder walls and so you want to make sure that you draw your walls this direction and not this direction here. You'll notice that if you're placing cabinets on walls and they're snapping to the wrong side of the face it just means you drew it in the incorrect direction so go ahead and just delete your room draw it going clockwise and everything will snap correctly. Now at any point if you want to change the wall height or thickness of all of the walls in your design you can always make that modification here and click this refresh button and that will update all of the walls in your design but if you want to make modifications to an individual wall you can left click on it you can see here we have the properties for the selected wall so we can always change the length height or thickness of an individual wall. Another thing that's important to understand is that home builder is set up to work with a prompts interface and almost all assets have this to where if you right click you'll have at the very top here the prompts for that asset so here if we click on the wall prompts we can see that this is the length of that individual wall and we can also specify its location but since a lot of these walls are connected to other walls this is going to be the location of the first point in this run of segments here and so if you wanted to set the location for this individual wall independently you'll have to disconnect that wall and now when we change its x and y location you'll notice that you can set that independently it's still going to be connected to all of the next walls that you've drawn but you can always select on another wall and go to prompts and disconnect that wall and now you have all free floating segments here. Next if you don't want to use the property so if we go to the prompts here if you don't want to enter in the length using an exact value you can always turn this option on here and this will show you the x dimension object so you can see how that displays a new object in the viewport and now if we click on that and here we can use the blender transform widget here we can just stretch this out so this is really helpful when you need to snap to other objects in your scene and here if we switch to vertex snapping we can hold down you can see you can snap to all these different objects in the viewport here you can also use the blender hotkey so if i just type g i can use that command but also keep in mind that you may want to switch this to be local transform coordinates because here if we turned on the x dimension object for this wall and selected this you can see that the x dimension is still going in the global coordinates so if we specify this to be local that's always going to be pointing in the correct direction for that one wall that we have selected so now here we have a mess of a room here so let's go ahead and delete some of these walls and we want to make sure that we use the home builder delete command and that's going to be available in the commands menu so if we right click and notice that you not only have access to the prompts but you have access to commands and all home builder assets will typically have their own commands that you can use to work with that specific asset and so here if we want to delete that wall we want to use this command you don't want to use the default blender hotkey to delete the wall using x or the delete key if you use this this will delete all of the other objects that are associated to that wall and so the blender hotkey command will just delete the mesh object but here the home builder command will delete everything associated to that wall and if you wanted to delete multiple walls here if we click on a wall and then just box select everything the delete wall command is going to delete all of the selected walls that you have now there are a couple other commands that are available for walls so here if we just draw out a few more walls here here if we right click you can add in the wall length dimension and so that's just going to add in the dimension for that wall and i'm going to have a video that focuses specifically on creating 2d drawings and dimensions this is just a real simple command that you can use to where you can click on these walls you can add their wall length dimension then if you click on the dimension itself and then right click again you're going to have the information for that specific asset so we can show the properties for the dimension and here we can specify the leader length we can change the arrow size we can change the line thickness you can change the font size that's used there and if we want to update all of the dimensions in the scene with these properties we can click update all dimensions and then click okay you can see it updates this dimension as well now by default it doesn't recognize what the length of that text is so if we right click and go to the properties that's going to automatically clean that up so any overlapping lines will be fixed automatically and then the last command in there if we select on one of these walls we have the edit wall command and once we click that that's going to go into edit mode on this wall and so here we can select the individual vertices and we can use all of the standard blender modeling tools to make modifications to the shape of this wall and so you only want to use this command if you are needing to create something that's very custom for this wall you have some odd shape wall that you're trying to create because once you use that command and here we type tab to go out of edit mode you will not be able to use all of the commands that are available in the prompt so you want to make sure that that's the very last command that you're running if you do need to make modifications you don't want to use that to change the size of the walls you want to use this length command here to make sure that home builder understands what the length is and just use the edit wall command as the very last command that you're running to make modifications to the shape of your room so next let's go and talk about this current room interface here and to demonstrate this i'm going to go ahead and draw out a simple room and click a point and make this wall 50 make this wall 250 50 and then this wall be 100 and then we'll just type c to close that room so here we have a very simple room layout and if we go to the current room tab we can click collect walls and that's going to give us a list view of all of the walls in our scene now here on the right hand side we have the ability to hide specific walls and this is really helpful when designing smaller spaces you can just hide the walls you don't want to see you can add cabinets and do your design and then enable them when you're finished and then next to that we have this view option so here for this wall too if i just wanted to see this one wall in an elevation view i can click on that command that's going to give me an elevation of just that one wall and this is helpful for some users they like to design in this view to where you can just drag and drop your products onto that wall where you're just working with that one individual wall and you're still working in a 3d view here and when you want to get all of the walls back you can just come back through here and then just enable these walls it also will switch you to an orthographic view and so if you want to toggle back to perspective you can click this button right here you can see that will just toggle between ortho and perspective we also have a couple basic commands to add a room light and a floor and so here if we click on add floor that's just going to add in a very simple mesh object as a representation of the floor but you'll notice that it's not going to cut out any corners or fit the shape of the room and since this is just a standard mesh plane you type tab to go into edit mode here you can use all of blender's standard modeling tools so i can type ctrl r to create a loop cut and then to again select this wall extrude this face out and we can just make that modification to fit the shape of our room and then the room light command is very similar to where just going to calculate the size of that room and add in one area lamp this is just a very simple lighting setup that allows you to get lighting in your room very quickly you also notice that with this room light selected if you use that command if you right click you can access the light prompts and so this allows you to change all of the standard blender settings from the color to the wattage to the type of light that's being used all sorts of different commands so the last thing that i want to show is how you can trace an image to create your room and so here i have some images that i created from a standard pdf so i just took a screenshot of a pdf and here you can just drag in any image so this is a png file i'm going to drag this into the blender viewport and this is just a standard blender command you can do this with any image but here i have a portion of a floor plan that i want to create now the first thing that you need to do is set the scale of this image and so we need to find a dimension that we can see in this drawing here so i can see that this island from here to here is nine feet and so if i go to the current room if i have an empty image selected like this we're going to get access to the set scale with two points and so just make sure that you have one of these imported and you'll see this command and so once we click that that's going to have us enter in a known dimension so since i know the dimension is nine feet i'm going to type in nine feet symbol which is going to convert it to 108 inches and so now when i click okay i can click those two points and so here i'm just going to click right here and then right here and that's going to change the size of this image but it's going to appropriately scale that image so now i can start drawing on top of it so here if i go to my walls category here i can just click the draw wall command and here i'll go and select this point and this point we can see that is just about 108 inches and so if i click that that is the correct size now since we're just drawing right on top of an image it's not snapping to any of the pixels or anything like that and so you may need to right click go to the prompts and just adjust these dimensions but this still gives you a very quick way of creating a room from a drawing so here i can just click draw walls and it's going to start somewhere up here so here we can just click these points i'm not going to worry about any of the door openings right now i'm just going draw all of the straight wall segments that we have and this one too let's go right up here and so here i have all of the walls laid out since this wall right here is actually going to be for the island i'm going to set the height of this to be 34 because this is just kind of a fake wall that the cabinets are placed on but here i can now add in all of the doorways so rather than trying to create this as a separate wall over here if i go to my products and go to doors and windows here i can just drag in this double door and i'm just going to put my cursor over this wall so it snaps to it left click and see that adds in this wall or this door here so if i go to the prompts of that door like everything else i can change the width to match that opening i can also turn off the panels and the hardware that way it's just an entry for this room here and we can see that we've got a few more walls or a few more doors over here so i'm just going to add in this single door and we can see here i can adjust the size and location of this i'm just going to move this on the x dimension and then change the width a bit you can also see that it swings into the room we can notice that that's going to match this is just the door for the pantry it looks like we have one other door here we can just drop this right in and do the same thing we can just change the outswing of this and so now that swings into the room like it shows on the plan and again just by clicking those points you may need to you know select on these walls and just type in the exact dimension so if this was actually you know 32.6 or something along those lines you can enter in the exact lengths and your room will be drawn accurately but having this laid out now it just kind of allows me to quickly place my object so if i go to my appliances i can see there's a range right here so i can just drop this right into the scene i can see there's a refrigerator on this side so i can just drop this on the right side and just allows you a really quick way of laying out your spaces by looking at an existing plan drawing now i'm going to have some more videos that will be released soon that will go over an actual design so subscribe to this channel for notifications on when those are released i'd like to thank you for taking the time to watch this video and i'll see you in the next one