Medeek Project
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The House Builder is a fair bit more complicated than the Garage Builder so I have my head buried in the code for a few days with little to show for all my work. Here is a first look at some of the interface with a few random walls arranged for testing.
Notice the Start and End markers, similar to the Wall plugin. These will be an optional feature that can be toggled on or off. This is turning out to be a very interesting project and also quite challenging.
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First look at some walls with dimensions added:
I was going to setup an auto-dimension algorithm. However after building the manual dimension tool I found it so easy to use that I don't really see a reason to bother with auto dimensioning. What you see here I was able to do in about 2-3 minutes.
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I still have some rough edges to work on in the UI but progress is being made:
All dimensions are associative, there is no concept of an orphaned dimension, however I may eventually change my mind on that. The nice thing about associative dimensions is that when you change the location of a wall or opening all of the dimensions auto-update.
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Starting to work on the updated Elevations tab. Remember this is simply for preview purposes and not really designed to give a high fidelity (rendered) views of the structure/house.
Also I haven't even started with the roof yet. I'm still trying to figure out how involved I want to make that. I could just have it take the wall perimeter and build a complex roof (all hip) using my weighted straight skeleton algorithm. Additionally I could also allow the user the ability to modify certain roof planes (ie. gable, dutch gable, half hip etc...) I will need to give this some additional thought.
The same applies to the foundation (SOG vs. Stemwall) and then if a stemwall we need a floor framing plan. Also what do we do with a multi-story house? I think I've opened another can of worms.
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I've also added a "visibility reference" icon/tool. This allows one to not only toggle off the grid but also to toggle on or off the 1st level walls below the 2nd level walls. This should aid in lining up walls on different levels.
I'm also working on multi-levels, so things are getting interesting.
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Adding the ability to move edges and vertices:
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We can also add and delete vertices:
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After adding some geometry: Rim Board, Sill Plate, Opening Headers and Joists.
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We also need to be able to create annotations with and without leaders.
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We also now a have a rudimentary line tool to manually draw in extraneous geometry or create tables etc... The line weight, line type and line color can be set, very similar to AutoCAD.
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Is this a standalone app?
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I’ve only invested about a week’s worth of my time and energy into this new House Builder tool/app. I’m excited that I’ve been able to move it along quite quickly, thanks to the work I had already done with Garage Builder. I will need to circle back actually and add some of this increased functionality into the Garage Builder but for now my focus is on the House Builder since it is the more general tool.
I am really hoping that this tool will be as useful and well adopted as I think it will be. To that end I am investing quite a bit of time into it and will probably spend at least a couple more weeks sorting out all the intricacies of wiring up complex roofs and multi foundation types. I think we almost have the floor framing portion completed.
With the addition of more common drafting style tools (ie. dimensions, callouts, text, text /w leaders and lines) the tool has become much more interactive and the user experience or UI will be of paramount importance. I don’t want this tool to feel clunky so it may require a few iterations to fine tune these tools until they are a “joy to use”.
I think I will probably release an update of the plugin even before I’ve waded into the foundations and roofs so that the power users can begin poking and prodding this thing and expose its weaknesses
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Is this a standalone app?
No, it is part of the Medeek Project plugin that runs inside of SketchUp.
However you do bring up a very interesting point. Other than the one action of "Create Building" where the tool then sends all of the commands to the Medeek API to generate all of the geometry, this entire tool could be its own stand alone app. I am actually considering that.
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