Custom window symbols. How are they working for you?

[Gene Davis]

I use Sketchup for building custom symbols, and have been exploring the way Chief X6 does this window symbol thing. It is not ideal.

As far as I can tell, the only thing Chief has done in creating this class of symbol, is to make the symbol such that it is only placed in a wall, and when doing so, the wall gets a rectangular cutout per your input specifications, height and width. The symbol is resized to meet your h x w.

Any object you do in 3D will convert to a window symbol. See the images attached here to show what I got by creating a sphere in SU, then importing it as a window, and placing it in an exterior wall.

You can see that a.) the cutout is rectangular and is set to the x by y limits of the sphere, and b.) the sphere is compressed to a thickness equal to the total thickness of the wall assembly.

I have found the window symbol behavior far different from that for custom doors, in these ways:

1. First and foremost, a custom door gets a frame from Chief, while a window does not.

2. Next, almost as big as the first, the user can access the symbol for editing for a window, but not for a door.

3. Symbol behavior in the door mode behaves strangely for me using the sphere object. The sphere is compressed, but not to wall thickness,
and not stretched fully to the height by width.

4. Door thickness control in the spec dialog is limited to some kind of maximum. For my 7-9/16 o.o.b. stucco wall ass'y, 4" was all I could get.
There is no control at all for thickness, in custom window mode. Whatever the object thickess in the symbol's Y axis, the symbol is fixed at
the thickness of the wall assembly.

5. I have tried everything I can, but cannot get the 2D CAD block representation of a custom window to do what is needed, i.e., look like
a window opening in plan view. The block will not go inside the wall. But custom doors work fine.

So, what I have learned so far is this.

1. Build a custom window symbol with a frame, build the object to be only rectangular, and take care to match the symbol's total
thickness to that of the wall assembly into which it will go.

2. Accept the bad behavior for a custom window in 2D planview, and deal with it using CAD.

3. If your custom door is to have an arch top, your custom slab object should be modeled with the arch. Chief will into arch your custom
door slab like it will for the in-program full lite glass slab.

4. Blocking a door to a window won't work when the window is a custom-symbol-type window.

So, to go back to the headline of this thread, how are these custom door and window symbols working for you?