Croatia
Joined: Jul 19, 2013
Post Count: 12
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Easy drawing mode
I'm a new user and I'm facing the same problem as I see many other new users face. Most of the users, I presume are taking measures of their flats with tape measure, by measuring walls inside each room and drawing sketch on paper. Later, they would like to be able to easily draw floorplan from measures and sketch they made on paper. As SH3D works in a way that it counts wall lengths from the middle of the wall, not inner length, it's not possible to transfer floorplan from sketch into SH3D without extra math (adding half of the wall thickness at each side of the room), which is annoying. Most often suggested workaround is to create room first, with the dimensions from the sketch, and then double click on it for the walls to be created around it. But that works good only if the room has all the walls of the same thickness, which in most cases is not the true. Most of the rooms in flats have different walls thicknesses, external walls are usually thicker then internal. If you modify one of the walls i.e. make it thinner, gap appears between the wall and floor edge, as wall gets thinner from both sides of the centerline, instead from room side, hence room dimensions become incorrect and require re-drawing to match the sketch.
To solve this problem, I would like to have e.g. "Easy drawing mode". In that mode I would draw one room first. Then SH3D would draw all the walls around it (default thickness, defined under properties). Then I would adjust thicknesses of each of those walls, and walls would stick to the room floor, not creating gaps like now. Then I would like to draw another room adjacent to the one just created. The process would be the same except for the wall between those two rooms. In "Easy drawing mode" it should not be possible to change thickness of the walls between two rooms (it's assumed that it's already being adjusted, and also it would confuse SH3D not knowing towards which room to move the wall). I would go that way from room to room until finished. For average flats with rectangular rooms it should be fairly easy. In "Easy drawing mode" walls would stick to the rooms so you could easyly move them. Once initial drawing is finished I would exit "Easy drawing mode" and return to standard mode which is how it behaves right now. There I would be able to make fine adjustments, if needed, and finish designing. Of course, with flats with complex floorplans with multiple levels, round walls etc, it might not work, and standard mode should be used from the start, but I presume that most of the flats users would like to draw, have rectangular rooms and are on a single level, so having "Easy drawing mode" would save a lot of the time. Additionally, I would like to have some toggle switch where, when defining length of the wall (by pressing enter) instead of having option to enter length of the wall center, user will have an option to define inner length of the left or right side of the wall so he could be able to enter measurments from the paper sketch.
Solving this issue would help new users to better accept new software, as this is the first problem they face when they try to use it for the first time and evaluate it.
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Nik
Joined: May 12, 2013
Post Count: 1545
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Re: Easy drawing mode
Interesting point, my wish to fix this getting started issue would be:
A "getting started plug-in" (a wizard, if you like), could be helpful in collating the key measures. A form asking: - Building footprint (?) (e.g. 600 x 1200 cm, inner/outer/centre wall) (up direction - degrees off North) (or co-ordinates of the corners) - Basement wall outside colour (foundation) - Outside wall default colour - Inside wall default colour Levels [ ] Terrain = elevation 0 [ ] Basement/foundatiion (elevation; height, outer wall thickness, floor thickness) [ ] Ground floor (elevation; height, outer wall thickness, offset from basement) [ ] First floor (height, floor thickness) [ ] Second floor (height, floor thickness)
With these these co-ordinates entered, the wizared could generate the basic house outline, all ready for the interesting stuff and the house corner would be aligned exactly to co-ords 0,00/0,00 and measures would be accurate.
Just a thought, and I really wish my digital skills extended beyond the basic form design so I could code it myself... :-(
