Unify two parallel thin walls?

[Anonymous]

Is there any way to create one wall from two parallel thin walls?  I am getting drawings that are made with simple linework and I need to get wall objects added to get the Calculation standards to work. 

My first idea was to convert all the simple lines, that define the walls, to walls using WALLCONVERT.  Then I have a bunch of thin walls that are set on the interior edge of each wall.  I can manually adjust the thicknesses, but this is extremely time consuming. 

My second idea was to define the Room Spaces with the space tool and somehow fill in the area between as walls, but that didn't work.  I can define the spaces, but I couldn't find a way to generate the walls.

I could always trace, but it will not be easy to make it accurate.  The floor plans are being created with laser measurements in the field so not all the walls have the same thickness.

Any suggestions would help.  I'm thinking about getting into the .Net API, but I would barely know where to begin.

Thanks in advance. 

[Laks-Autodesk]

I'm not sure if you found a workaround. Here's a suggestion if you are trying to do it manually. The basic steps invloved are to generate space, Generate plines from space, convert the plines to masselements and then generate walls from these masselements:

1, Use space generate tool (AecSpaceAdd > Generate) to fill in the space between the two lines that define the wall width. 

2, With the AecSpaceCreatePline command (available in the content ribbon when you select a space), you can convert the space to polylines (i'd create a new layer called pline and set it as current to be able to isolate the polylines that are generated from spaces).

3, Convert the polylines to masselements using ExtrudeLinework command.

4, AecMassElementSubtract command may be used to create a wall 'thickness', if there are multiple rings of polyline.

5, The masselements may now be converted to walls using the WallConvertBody command. For this command you may need to define the baseline to generate walls by drawing lines/ arcs for defining the baseline.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the work around.

The process worked well and I could see this being useful in the future.  The only problem is that I ended up with one giant wall, which messes up the Space Classification for the rooms.  I assumed just having wall between rooms would be sufficient, but it makes sense that this would not work because the program needs to treat each space/wall between rooms uniquely.  I messed around a little trying to separate the spaces used to create the walls before hand but that was taking as long as just creating each wall.  Maybe I can use some lisp to extend the lines and create unique spaces for each wall before they are converted to mass elements and then to walls.

Thank you.

[Gary_J_Orr]

This suggestion may not be of benefit to you as I do not know the scope of your work, however:

The best "long-term" solution would be to generate the spaces then "draft" your walls using a generic variable width wall style (with a width approximating the most typical), center justified, using the little used "between two points" object snap between the relative points of the created spaces. This will help mitigate the potential errors yet provide "downstream" usefulness if you need to flush out the model with more specific wall types/thicknesses.

Just a thought for you.

[Anonymous]

Gary_J_Orr, thanks for the response.  I agree with standardizing the wall thicknesses, but the original drawings are captured with Laser Distance Meters, so very few walls ever match.  Whether that is because the person taking the measurements has made a mistake or there are varying layers of paint on the walls or the wall really do vary from room to room, who knows for sure.  Center justified is something I hadn't thought of and would be helpful.  This is all assuming the walls are "drafted" manually.  I'm still looking for something to generate the walls, but thanks again for the suggestions.

[Anonymous]

When you select on wall, the ribbon above will have the Cleanup panel. Select the Cleanup drop-down where you will see the option for Add Wall Merge Condition. then select the wall you want to merge with. Then confirm the command. I found this method guaranteed when merging walls in the most complicated situations.