Curtain Wall Rough Openings

[Mike.FORM]

Just out of curiosity, how do people deal with rough opening sizes for curtain walls?

Unlike with door and window families in which you can add in a parameters and and reference planes to make the opening cut slightly larger for the rough opening, curtain walls do not have a parameter or OOTB way to indicate this.

Currently I will make a slightly wider perimeter mullion that is the width of the mullion plus the shim space width. For example if I have a 50mm wide mullion and a 10mm shim space I will make a 60mm wide mullion type.

Then in my CW elevations I will indicate the RO dimensions and then add a note indicating perimeter is 50mm mullion and 10mm shim space.

I'm just curious if others do anything differently?

[barthbradley]

"Rough Opening" in Curtain Wall? That sounds mighty strange. But that aside, why can't you build the RO into the Door Panel itself?  

...maybe there's an application here for "regular" doors hosted to Basic Walls that are converted Curtain Wall Panels (e.g. select CW Panel and replace with Basic Wall Type of same thickness and material as CW Panel)?

[Mike.FORM]

I am talking about Curtain walls or storefronts embedded into walls. In this situation I have a RO that is 10mm greater at the edge of the CW to account for anchor.

[barthbradley]

AH! Got it! Much clearer now. 

What about using Mullion OFFSETS to get there?  

[Mike.FORM]

The Offsets in the properties only move the mullion front/back not left/right.

I don't know of a way to do it in the profile family either since reference planes in profiles don't define the boundary, the lines do.

[barthbradley]

Sorry, I meant OFFSET the Mullion Profile. 

[PhilvK · Accepted solution]

I sometimes create a mullion type for a rough buck and use it for the Borders 1 & 2 types.  I got that idea from a response to one of my posts from a couple years ago,

[ToanDN · Accepted solution]

Use the nest curtain wall approach.  Create a curtain wall type with caulking border mullions, no interior mullions, set the default panel to use your actual curtain wall type.  Place this curtain wall with the rough opening dimensions then you have your actual curtain wall with caulking around it.

[Mike.FORM]

@PhilvK That is currently what I do. Make a separate wider mullion for the borders and then clean it up in details.

@ToanDN that us an interesting approach using another curtain wall as a panel I will have to try that to see if I can get it functioning how I would need it.

[Mike.FORM]

I got it to work the way you were saying. Made a 10mm wide mullion type for my caulk/shim space. then set the panel to use a nested CW type that has 50mm wide profile for all the mullions. 

The one thing you have to be careful of is that if you are doing custom mullions you need to make sure you tab to the nested CW panel.