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Print Model

The Model Maker allows you to create a template of your plan that can be printed to scale and assembled into an actual 3D model. Three groups of templates are used in the process. Walls and roofs are printed separately. These can then be placed onto a floor plan view, which is printed as a layout for the entire model.

Since different people build house models in different ways, the Model Maker focuses on providing the most necessary tools. It may not necessarily give you everything you might want in order to build house models your way. For example, you may want to affix tabs to certain wall or roof edges to help attach them to their neighbors. While you can draw some of these things onto printed sheets, the system does not provide them automatically. What it does provide is accurate templates for wall and roof sections. Combining these with your own skills helps you create professional quality models.

Printing the Model

The best way to understand how the various options affect the final product is to make a very simple two story plan and try them out.

To print the model templates, choose File> Print> Print Model . The Print Model dialog opens.

The Print Model Dialog

Printer - Select the printer for your model. Larger sheet sizes are better. Landscape is usually the best mode for printing models. If it is not your default printing mode, it can be selected via the Properties button.

Printer Info - Information about your printer and its current setup displays here. Check this box if you prefer to Print to File instead.

Walls - Clear the check box to prevent walls from printing.

Exterior Only - Check this box to suppress interior wall surfaces. Normally it is only the exterior walls that display in a model. If interior walls and surfaces are produced, much more paper is required. Interior surfaces are typically printed when composing a model of only the current floor, without a roof.

Fold Interior Down - Check this box to print the interior surface of a wall above its corresponding exterior surface and upside down. This allows both walls to be cut in one piece and folded over. This is convenient when making a separate model for each floor to show its interior.

Combine Floors - Check this box to print together the exterior surfaces of walls that are on top of each other. Interior surfaces of those walls still print separately.

Allow Offset - This modifies the outcome of the Combine Floors Option. Normally the main layers of stacked walls must be closely aligned and have the same thickness for walls to combine. Check this box to allow an offset of up to six inches (15 cm) and allow different thicknesses.

Railings - Check this box to print railings along with walls.

Outdoor Walls/Foundation Walls - Check this box to include Outdoor Walls and/or Foundation Walls in the walls group. This also affects which walls display in the floor plan view template.

Outdoor Walls - An Outdoor wall is normally a garden wall or a wall used as a fence. It may be a No Room Def. type wall, see "Wall Specification Dialog", or have exterior type rooms, such as Deck, Porch, or Attic on both sides of it.

If a plan has extensive outdoor walls, printing them all may use a considerable amount of paper.

Foundation Walls - Walls on floor zero, the foundation floor, still print unless they are specified as foundation walls on either the General or Foundation tab of the Wall Specification dialog. See "Wall Specification Dialog".

Roofs - Remove check from box to suppress roofs from printing.

Plan View Instructions - Remove check from box to suppress floor plan view instructions from printing.

Copies - Use the spin box to specify the number of copies to be printed.

Scale - Specify the scale to be printed in inches per feet. A simple ratio (1:48 for example) is used for metric plans.

The system arranges as many wall or roof sections as possible onto a single sheet. For larger scale models, a printer with a larger sheet sizes is helpful. If any wall surface, roof surface, or floor plan view covers more than one sheet, it prints by itself on the number of sheets required. Models with large surfaces may require a lot of paper.

Use Scale Wall Thickness - Uncheck this box to print walls to the width specified in the edit box, ignoring the scale width. The walls of your plan temporarily resize so that their interior and exterior surfaces accurately match the materials they are modeled with. These changes can be most readily seen when the floor plan view of your model template is printed. Changing the wall thickness is useful when producing a model with an interior using material of the specified thickness for walls.

Floor Thickness - Specify the thickness of the material you use for the floor platform.

Print in Color - This option depends on whether you have a color printer. Check this box to print in color.

Assembling the Model

Once the templates have been printed, they are ready to be assembled. You need scissors and an adhesive and a rigid material that can be easily cut and glued, such as thin cardboard or styrofoam, to provide support for the 3D model.

Floor Plan View Template

Begin by laying out the floor plan view, which is used as a layout for the entire 3D model. If your floor plan view template printed on a number of sheets, they should be combined into one. Exterior and interior wall surfaces should match throughout.

Adhere your complete floor plan view template to a sturdy and dedicated surface to provide support for your walls.

Walls

Walls should be cut and fixed to a rigid backing so that they can stand on their own and support the weight of the roof or floors above them. How they are cut and assembled varies depending on the desired final appearance of the model and how they were printed.

It may be helpful to take the thickness of the rigid material being used into consideration and override the scale thickness of the walls so that it agrees with your material thickness.

If your walls were resized in the Print Model dialog, you may see unwanted lines between floors that should merge together seamlessly. This is usually due to walls whose exterior surfaces match but overall thickness does not. You can prevent this by checking Use Scale Wall Thickness, which prevents walls from resizing. This is best if you do not want to print the interior wall surfaces, or are using a modeling material that closely matches the scale thickness of your walls.

Roofs

Roof planes are joined together when possible before printing. For each roof surface, the fascia and soffit surfaces are attached at the eave, so that the least amount of taping produces the roof and adjoining surfaces.

All flattened roof/fascia/soffit surfaces are placed into a CAD detail named "Model Detail." This is overwritten and updated each time the roof group is printed for a particular model. If the roof or portions of the roof need to be reprinted, those pieces can be printed from the detail.


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