Creating walls and their components is fundamental to all architectural projects. Autodesk® Architectural Desktop 3 offers a complete set of intelligent design objects—intelligent objects know their form and function and how they relate to other drawing objects—and tools that make modifying them a quick and easy task. The following tutorial will help you better understand how to use some of these tools and commands.

Located under Design on the software's main menu, the Wall drop-down menu contains the commands you'll use to make and modify any type of wall (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Wall drop-down menu.

For this tutorial you will need four Paperspace viewports in the Work-3D Layout.

1. Start a new drawing using the Aec arch [imperial] template, and select the Work-3D Layout from the "Select a Template" drop-down list.
2. Change to Paperspace by selecting the MODEL or PAPER button at the bottom of the screen, below the command line. (If the button reads PAPER, you are already in Paperspace.
3. Select the Erase icon from the Modify toolbar, and enter all at the command line, then press the Spacebar to erase the default viewports in the Work-3D Layout.

Creating the four Paperspace viewports
1. Now select View > Viewports > 4Viewports from the Main toolbar (see Figure 2).

2. At the command line, accept the default <Fit> by pressing Enter or the Spacebar. <Fit> expands the viewports fill the entire printable sheet.

Figure 2: The Viewports drop-down menu.

3. Activate the View toolbar and place it in a convenient place on the screen.

4. Set the Viewports to the following views starting at the top left and moving clockwise: Top View, Front View, SW Isometric View, and Right View. Save your drawing as Wall_tutorial.

Creating Walls
1. Activate the Walls toolbar and place it in a convenient place on the screen (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: The Walls toolbar.

2. Select the Add Wall icon to bring up the Add Walls dialog box.

3. In this dialog box, leave the Style as Standard, change the Width to 12", and change the Justify to Left, which causes the wall to be drawn to the right side of the cursor as you move from left to right.

4. Click the ORTHO button , then click in the Top View viewport, drag the cursor to the right, and enter 30' in the command line. Press the Spacebar or Enter key twice to complete the command. Now perform a Zoom Extents in each viewport (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Four views of the wall.

You have just created your first wall.

4. Select the Modify Wall icon from the Walls toolbar, select the wall in any viewport, and press the Enter key to bring up the Modify Walls dialog box.

5. In this dialog box select CMU-8 Rigid-1.5 Air-2 Brick-4 from the Style drop-down list, and click OK (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: The Style drop-down list.
(click image to enlarge)

Figure 6: The wall components automatically change to reflect the changed wall style.

6. Select the wall in the Top View, right-click, and select Add Selected from the shortcut menu that appears. This brings up the Add Walls dialog box.

7. At the Add Walls dialog box click in the Top View and insert a wall perpendicular to and intersecting the existing wall. Close the dialog box (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Walls that intersect automatically clean up at their intersection.

Figure 8: Continuous and discontinuous brick where two walls intersect.

8. Select the vertical wall to activate its grips. Grab the center grip and move the wall to the left. Automatically the wall cleans up again at the new intersection.

9. Select the Line icon from the Draw toolbar and place two vertical lines perpendicular to and intersecting the horizontal wall (see Figure 9).

Figure 9: Place two standard lines in preparation for a TRIM command.

10. Select the Trim icon from the Modify toolbar, and trim the wall segment between the two lines that were placed in the previous step.

11. Erase the lines and notice that the wall cleans up correctly with an appropriate end cap (see Figure 10).

Figure 10: After you've used the TRIM command, walls automatically clean up.

Try using the TRIM and EXTEND commands to intersect and join walls. Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3 uses many of the standard AutoCAD commands to control the Wall object.

Conclusion
The intelligent design objects implemented in Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3 mean, for example, that Wall objects can automatically clean up after you've edited them. This eliminates many drafting operations and saves you time and money. CleanUp is only one of the many automatic operations provided by these intelligent objects. In next month's column, we'll take a detailed look at the CONVERT TO WALLS and WALL STYLES command.