How I prepare files for architectural model making

hey hello hi welcome welcome to a laser cutting tutorial and actually not even laser cutting but rather preparing your files to be cut by a laser type of tutorial in this video I'll show you my process and how I tackle this problem and it might not be the most optimal way of how to do it but then hey that's the one that works for me every damn time so I'm sticking with it and I'm making a tutorial about it so hopefully it's gonna help you out as well okay so I guess without any further blah blah blah let's just jump right into it first step the first step is always always building a 3D model of the physical model that you're going to be making and you do this because during the construction of it you first choose what kind of material you will use as well as you plan ahead you plan for how you're going to be constructing it the time that you sing making this kind of go comes back when you don't need to kind of scratch your head and figure out connections later down the line as you're building it in the real world in my case I chose to use a one millimeter balsa wood for the exterior um for the cladding and whatnot as well as the Terrace uh 2.4 millimeter balsa wood for the inner structure inner shell so thick voice three by three millimeter pine wood long boys for the construction or for the poles and two millimeter cardboard because I will need a lot of it so I chose a cheap material the reason why we kind of make this is because for instance here I have my poles already modeled out into the landscape right so they penetrate the landscape meaning that once I have the 3D model of just one second just the landscape it already has holes for the poles and once I add the poles here I will have a really good understanding of how everything needs to fit together right so the tolerance of the building itself of the building model itself will be pretty low right so that's that's one of the one of the benefits anyway I'll show you a quick little clip uh a super cut if you will of me making this 3D model uh perhaps you're gonna learn something from that and nights just for fun isn't it okay let's let's watch it [Music] thank you welcome back so once the model is done it's time to move on to actually creating 2D layouts of things that are going to be laser cut and for that we make measurements we draw according to the measurements we lay out every bit and piece on flat on the ground and then we kind of export it into our laser cutter that's that's the short version of it right for this I don't use Rhino I use a different kind of software that is called ZW CAD which is by the way also the sponsor of this video but not to say that I only show it to you because they sponsor this video this is an actually a tool that I do use right it's it's a AutoCAD replacement that is cheaper and faster so it's it's a quite a no-brainer for me to to use it so I got really excited once they actually reached out to sponsor yeah win-win in terms of of the workflow the first step that the thing that I do is I get the 3D model in in here just to be able to check if something is wrong I I tend to go back and forth between Rhino and ZW CAD in this kind of a workflow but just having a 3D model here on the screen is also quite nice so here in the command line I'll just type in insert uh not insert in import sorry import and from my desktop I already have a SAT file exported from Rhino so I just selected here in Rhino you just select everything you type in export and you just choose acis.sat and you just name it I already have it so I won't be doing that so we select it we hit open and it's going to import it and it does not look great because we're watching it you know in a wire wireframe view from straight from the top so for that we kind of need two viewports we need the left one for the 3D and the right one for the 2D and to get the two viewports you click on this little minus sign right here right next to top the minus sign and you choose viewport configuration list and choose two vertical I believe yep two vertical so this one is going to be of our 3D model and this one oops this one is going to be our of our CAD or 2D drawing right or draw draw wings so for the 3D model let's just switch from Top View to perspective like that and then from a 3D wireframe let's switch to flat there we go that's that's all you need to do so now to rotate or you press and hold shift and you hold the or do you need to hold shift yes uh you hold shift and you hold the scroll wheel and drag and as you rotate if you want a pan you just hold the scroll wheel without the shift right you can and scrolling is zooming that's the basic navigation so just having it somewhere here that's always uh always nice for me right just being able to zoom in and check without needing to Tab out into into rhino okay so the first step is actually to um well the first step is actually to get the the nasty bits in right the nasty drawings and the nasty drawings are of these um parametric bench right so this parametric bench is a little bit um Niche and it's going to be a little bit weird but since it's made with parametric software I do need to use the parametric software to get the drawings out of it but that is going to be a pretty good opportunity of me showing you how cleanly the cad drawings from Rhino import into ZW CAD let me actually play you a quick little clip of me creating the parametric drawings from this particular portion you can see the portion in dark green I'll just play the clip so that you can understand what's going on and then we're going to import the drawing right so clip time thank you foreign [Music] okay so hopefully that was well some of you caught what what was happening it was basically just a mealing out every single piece here flat on the ground and extracting the the drawings from it and then numbering is very important numbering every piece and nesting it onto these rectangles and I'll talk about that in just a second so to import your exported DWG file all you need to do is just go to where you have exported it and by the way you export the DWG exactly the same way as how you export the S80 you select the drawing and you type in export I have this parametric out dot DWG we just drag and drop it in and there it is we click and hit enter once twice three times right so uh the first time that we click it I believe is the scale in X Direction how big it is in the X Direction the second time we click it we hit enter it's the scale and Y Direction third time we hit it it's rotate zero basically we were saying that it should not rotate that that's that's all it is right so this all of these kind of more complex elements have imported here and you can see that they import as a block right so if I select this you can see on the right hand side here it says block reference and that's typically how DWG files import into ZW CAD which is absolutely fine to get rid of the block we can just explode it if you want to we explode it and now we have ourselves separate lines right and this is where I will need to just select these numbers and actually move them M enter move them uh into the elements because that's because that was not done in the parametric software right so I'll spend some time doing that and actually I'll do that off recording so I will not record myself just moving every single element here but this should be like a few minute workout section with me and my mouse um but that's that's not gonna be recorded what's going to be recorded though is or some of it is going to be the measurement measuring of these elements that we have here for instance the the roof and so on all of these segments and making measurements of those and actually drawing them here in in the 2D View getting ready to be laser cut to actually measure them I can type in distance dist and from this point there we go from this point until there it is I have 170 ML and then if I repeat the command from this point on here to here I have 81.3 millimeters so so 170.88 and 80 1.3 now to actually draw out this piece all I need to do is just I don't know where is it uh just make a rectangle right so I'll just type in rectangle start from anywhere actually in the screen but I will choose uh Dimensions rather than um specifying a chord coordinates I will write Dimensions right so I'll type in D enter for dimensions and now it's asking me to give it length of the rectangle 170.88 enter and the height 81.3 come on there we go so that's and also the orientation you just click once so that's my rectangle from here translated to here right so I will spend a little bit of time just going through all of these bits here just making sure that I have drawn drawn out every single one of them and a trick is to actually I you can I also do this the same thing in rhino in terms of the measurements right so you just go in here and you measure from this point to this point and you get the same 170.88 millimeters right but the trick in both softwares no matter where you measure it is to delete so you select and you delete the elements after you have made the measurements right and after you have drawn them out so you don't laser cut twice by accident some some element right so that that's the trick okay let me go through this really quickly or not quickly but let me go through this off camera and and just draw out every single piece that I have here there we go there it is okay so as you can see the 3D model is not existing oops the 3D model does not exist anymore meaning that all of the bits and pieces have been actually drawn out yay yay okay so now we don't need the two viewports anymore so we can actually click on this little plus sign and we can choose single viewport mode so from now on we're we're just in 2D now on to the next step which is the landscape and unfortunately like for for the landscape you could get it through ZW Cad and you could kind of outline and draw out the outlines in ZW cat but the trick is to be as fast as possible or not the trick but aim is to be as fast as possible so instead we just simply use Rhino to generate the drawings for each landscape piece as well as numbering in a similar way of how we did the the bench and if you're curious to know more about this kind of parametric design then I'm I suggest that you watch my earlier videos about just about that right because it's it's a huge topic and it's pretty hard to get into and here I'm just showing you the basics right so with this in terms of the landscape let's just give me a second and I'll import it into my file yep there it is there it is it's it's a long boy it's it's for sure a long boy right we have plenty of these um slices which will you will need to pack as as well as possible and by the way speaking of of these slices and parts and packing I forgot to mention that you always need to have this kind of a outer rectangle that is the size of the material the sheets of material that you have in my case I have a 10 by 50 centimeter sheets that I will be using meaning that everything that I do needs to be packed into those sheets right hopefully that that makes sense it should right so in terms of the landscape my sheets are going to be 4 100 by 400 millimeters right so this one completely fills it up while these ones might stack a little bit nicer but basically it's it's all trying to push things as as neatly as possible okay in enough about that now on to actually preparing for uh laser cutting right because now we have all the material that we need we have our bench we have our like the building parts and we have our landscape part so now it's time to actually get going one is to create two layers under layer properties while I imported a bunch so there's there's a bunch here but we click on layer properties and here we just simply create new layer and we will call this one cut that's going to be our cut layer and the cut layer is set to White and then we will have another layer new layer and we'll call it engrave it's three layers sorry sorry let's make three layers second one is called engrave and that one is going to be full red so you choose red color from here okay white red and the third one we call it sheets and that can be green there we go cut and Grave and sheets right so basically a laser can do low power engraving high power cutting or it can just ignore lines if they are in a specific layer such as sheets the sheets are only used for placement of the parts not for cutting so what I can do is now I can select these elements here and I can just move them to my sheets layer and you you move them here by opening it up and choosing sheets bam easy now now they're in the sheets layer and I can actually hide it so that it's not getting in the way now let's deal with the curves here right those need to be cut right so those will go into the cut layer let me actually let's first select this bad boy here um and just hide it and once I have hidden it oh there's one more this one once I have I've hidden these two layers I can just select all of the curves here and I can just move them into my cut layer cut just like that perfect and now you can hide temporarily hide my cut layer enable my like two of the imported engravely layers enable them select everything here and just move that to the proper the newly created engraved layer like so that's that's that now with all of this done you can see we have our sheets we have our cut lines we have our engraved lines and that that's all there is to it right I will do the same thing well this one is going to be easy right we just select all of it and we just changed it to cut and we this is going to be important we select this we change this to cut and you can see there's still black why are the black well that's because we changed the block to be in the cut layer not the lines inside of the block so the lines inside of the block are still in there whatever it landscape layer they're in right so only the block is inside of the cut layer that's a little bit annoying so what we're gonna do is we're going to select this type in explode so that it's not a block anymore select all of them it's a little bit annoying with the selection but it's fine and just place it into the cut layer properly okay so you can see at this point from from the way I work with with the software it's basically very similar to AutoCAD except that it also has a few kind of nice things about it and I'll make a pause here to just kind of show you those things because I feel like that's interesting and important to to talk about so one little thing is the gestures the mouse gestures so if I press and hold my right Mouse button I can type not type in but I can make this kind of a L gesture and it starts a command called line right so I can just draw a line I can make a c gesture and it draws a circle right I can make uh what's the I can make a gesture from bottom up and it starts a new file if I make a gesture from bottom down it closes the file which is a little bit dangerous so don't do that right so to access all of these gestures you can type in Mouse I'm trying to remember gesture Mouse smart a smart Mouse config yes smart Mouse config right you enter it and here you can see every single gesture that there is right so there is zoom there is regeneration of the viewport and so on we'll we'll talk about region in just a second and then there there's the erase right so you can tailor your ZW cat to fit with your workflow as much as you want my suggestion would be to go in here and immediately untick the close the closed gesture because that might really mess things up for you real quickly if you're trying to go fast right but yeah here you can just choose whatever whatever gesture you want you can type in the command and it's gonna gonna simply simply work okay save we're done so give me a second I will clean this up and as I'm cleaning it up I'll figure out a way of how I can show you the speed of ZW cat actually before we start cleaning sorry I I changed my mind before we start cleaning cleaning it up I want to create hatches for um the planks so I I think this building would look nice if it had planks so what I want to do is I want to engrave the Planks on top of the facade of this building right so everywhere here and I the way I laid it out here it's it's kind of unfolded right so the Hat should fit quite quite well so let's just make one right so I'm gonna make engrave my active layer that's because the hash should be engraved and I'll just type in h enter enter pick internal Point sure that's my internal point right it doesn't look great so let's start changing things around A and S i 31 the typical hash that you all love right we choose that and for the angle I want it vertical so we're going to change it to 45 degrees something like that oh at this point we can talk about region that that's going to be nice then in terms of the where it should be anchored I will just pick points and I'll click on oh my bad that that's picking internal points I'm I'm being stupid I am sorry okay so we select the hatch and we find yeah there we go set origin that that's the that's the one where where we can set up where it starts so set origin I click on the top of the roof uh store as default origin yes and now this is going to be the new origin for every new hash that's going to be created which in this case maybe was a bad idea but doesn't matter uh we'll we'll adjust them so all of these lines will be engraved right the problem is that most of the cad not cat sorry laser cutting software um does not understand hatches right so what you need to do is you need to explode the the hatch into separate lines right so make sure that you do that all right so I'll just go through all of this and I will add the hatch in to all of these bits and pieces let me just do a few more so that you understand what what I mean something like that looks good something like that that's off center so I will fix that up by set origin like that and I'll just go through the Remy remaining ones and now now it's time to actually clean things up be right back while other goodness is cleaning let me show you a cool little thing about CW CAD which is actually the speed the speed of it I have this poster right here of our beloved CRT character that I've made in Rhino as a as well as ew cad actually a pretty similar workflow as what I have shown you uh shown you today in this tutorial right so here we have a lot of lines and a lot of control points right it's a pretty pretty heavy drawing right with a bunch of Curves and then whatnot and let's just simply import it and see see if ZW CAD will handle it of course it will I know already that it will it's not not even a question okay so I'll just select the file drag and drop it in as per usual scale factors enter enter enter zoom out and there it is without any hitches I should open it in some other software to show you how much it lags because this seems like it's it's uh you know it just simply works but no it's actually uh impressive how fast it is and if I double click it and I go into the block the block editor works like a charm right and I can go in here and I can edit all of these lines well okay this one does not have that many control points but but but but the red boy red boy there we go this one hey that's a lot of control points isn't it and also you can see that it's kind of kind of jagged so this is where the region comes in so there are two ways of how you can regenerate the viewport one way is by just doing this I believe or is it up and down yeah it's up and down right and it's going to just simply well it takes a while it's a heavy file but it's going to Simply regenerate right another way is just typing in regen and it's gonna work right this is fast this is impressive just wanted to show it to you if you have heavy files the software will handle them I'm yeah I'm happy about it let's let's okay back to the video so that took a while but we do have ourselves uh cleaned up drawing with all of the bits and pieces all of them stacked into the material sheets that I own that I have right so here it's hatched all of the lines are separate I have created text for every single landscape piece some pieces I managed to cram into one sheet these are all 2.4 millimeter thickness pieces and all of these are one millimeter thickness with red lines being hashed and if I or engraved sorry I'm tired if we disable the sheet and the engrave preview this is only the cut lines can let's go for engrave I can hide the cut this is all just the engraved lines right so basically that's that one last thing I promise is the last thing if I zoom in to the text right the text should be exploded the reason for us exploding the text is because we in doing so we get rid of the hatch the solid hatch that is inside of the text that is quite an important thing to do because if you keep the the hatch the the laser cutter will go for rasterized Engraving which is much slower right so you want it to be your your text to be lines rather than hatch that that's that's about it okay let's move on to cut to actually showing you how you export it for laser cutting right so you have your sheets you everything's ready to go what you do is you select all of the sheets that belong to a separate material let's say one millimeter balls of wood and just export them separately as a dxf all right it can be a DWG as well that that that's fine too and you export it you can also just simply save as and here you can just choose like to to save it as a DXL file that that that works too and basically you will have the three files now we have a little bit of a problem and the problem is called the laser cutter is in another country in Lithuania in in my office in Lithuania very good architecture company by the way check out the link in the video description for the office webpage check check it out check check it out anyway um so I need to I need to go there and that's actually what we're gonna be doing let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this is where it gets tricky because the laser that I'm using is called D1 X tool D1 and it's actually this one right here it uses its proprietary software meaning that at this point the tutorial becomes a little bit split depending on what kind of software you use you would export or your drawings into different types of programs right so the principles are still quite the same right we have our line work and we will be importing it into some sort of a plotter think of it as a 2d printer right printing in 2D except that instead of ink you're using a laser line right so I'm going to show you this on the software that is used for x2d1 but for you it might be some sort of other software again depending on the laser cutter that you're using the software that I use for preparing the lines to be laser cut for the D1 is pretty simple to use it's called X tool creative space and basically it's a proprietary software for that particular laser cutter anyway so what I've done is I've created a separate file for each different sheet right each different sheet of the line work that we have prepared and also I have separated them out into one millimeter thickness material 2.4 millimeter thickness and two millimeter thickness material types right so we have um that's the landscape right so all of these are um each of these are one landscape slice okay so if we go for one millimeter and zero one dxf if I just grab that one and drag it in you can see that it starts migrating it says design elements are being loaded in and if we wait a little bit there we go um it just simply Imports and now this is where I can start explaining why do we use that Green Layer that is called that we called sheets that is for the positioning we want our elements to not be positioned abruptly like randomly but rather we want them to be placed exactly according to the material size wait let me one second come on [Music] to the material size that we have right and in this case this is going to be 10 centimeters in thickness and I'm using 50 centimeters in length or was it 40 centimeters I don't remember right so the positioning is important that's why we preemptively draw the sheets once the sheets are placed in your cutting software then what you need to do is just delete that layer right we don't need it anymore are you sure you want to delete the layer yes I am and now we're left with layer 1 and layer 2. in terms of these separate layers we will have one of them set to be cut so layer one the black one is going to be the one that's being cut and here for the settings we can either in in this case I can either choose a material that I already have kind of Saved into the system or I can choose the power and the speed by myself so I always use um 100 power for uh cutting and then I adjust the speed according if if it's too slow too fast and so on right so these two knobs so to say are available for any laser cutter and they are the most important thing how strong do you want it to be and how fast do you want it to cut each laser is different each laser comes with a separate sheet of materials that have power and speed listed on them I will not be giving you guidelines because that would be a very bad idea if you're using a different kind of laser right but the general idea is that you have your power you have your speed and you adjust them according to the material then for layer 2 which is our red lines right here uh we will have scoring set rather than cutting or you can honestly you can use cut and just reduce the power that's literally the same thing but I will try out score like that I will uh for the power I usually go for around 50 30 percent of whatever power was used for cutting beforehand right so if something cuts at a hundred percent power then I will use uh 30 maybe 40 percent of that power to score the material and then for Speed I will also use uh probably double or even triple the speed right with all of this done we can now actually start setting it all up and start cutting because it's all Wi-Fi based so let's go for the laser cutter good Burger [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Gediminas Kirdeikis

Views: 4,927

Keywords: architeture, design, arch, architec, proces, how, client, clients, rhino, family, house, lithuania, company, very, good, architecture, vray, d5render, render, real time, free, for free, rtx, gpu, bim, revit, archicad, section, dynamic, drawing, visualarq, visual, v ray, v-ray, v-ray66, skechup, material, rhinoinsiderevit, rhinoinside, rhino.inside, .insiderevit, zaha, hadid, beam, block, ibeam, grasshopper, gh, adaptive, shecule, cinematic, d5, d5 render, course, tut, ue5, unreal engine, archviz, beegraphy, parametric, zwcad, autccad, laser cut

Id: bkoF7XcokoA

Length: 41min 0sec (2460 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023