Creating a Wall Style with Actual Masonry Widths

The imperial masonry wall styles that ship with ADT use nominal dimensions for the masonry components; for example, an 8" CMU component is given a width of 8". Some may prefer to have the actual component widths used, 7 5/8" for the 8" CMU noted previously. A question came up in a thread in the Autodesk Architectural Desktop Customization Discussion Group from someone setting up such a wall style, having started from one of the out-of-the-box styles. After changing the widths of the masonry components, as well as reducing the Air Gap to 1", the wall endcap did not appear as desired. I posted a response and a sample file illustrating the need to create a new wall endcap style for the modified wall style, as ADT will scale the polyline graphics used to create the endcap for each component, to suit the actual width of the component. Since the two masonry components got 5/8" narrower, the scaled-down version of the original wall endcap resulted in the masonry component endcaps being "shorter" than those for the insulation, metal furring and GWB, whose widths remained the same. Here is how I created the new wall style, wall endcap style and wall opening endcap style in ADT 2004 for the modified wall. These same concepts can be applied any time you make a copy of an existing wall style and modify the widths of one or more components.

I used the out-of-the-box CMU-8 Rigid-1.5 Air-2 Brick-4 Furring wall style as my starting point, using the Style Manager to copy it from the out-of-the-box source file to a new file started with an ADT template file. I then copied and pasted that style in the new drawing file, renaming the style to CMU-7.625 Rigid-1.5 Air-1 Brick-3.625 Furring and editing the description of the wall style to match the planned changes. I also copied the associated CMU-8 Rigid-1.5 Air-2 Brick-4 Furring (End 1) wall endcap style and CMU-8 Rigid-1.5 Air-2 Brick-4 Furring (End 1)(2-Sided) wall opening endcap style to create the CMU-7.625 Rigid-1.5 Air-1 Brick-3.625 Furring (End 1) wall endcap style and the CMU-7.625 Rigid-1.5 Air-1 Brick-3.625 Furring (End 1)(2-Sided) wall opening endcap style, respectively. I edited the new wall opening endcap style to reference the new wall endcap style at the jamb start and jamb end. I then edited the CMU-7.625 Rigid-1.5 Air-1 Brick-3.625 Furring wall style and assigned the new wall endcap style and new wall opening endcap style on the Endcaps / Opening Endcaps tab as shown in the image belowand edited the widths and offsets of the components on the Components tab, changing the widths of the Brick to 3 5/8", the Air Gap to 1" and the CMU to 7 5/8" and the offsets to coordinate, as shown in the image below. You can also see my preference for using engineering units rather than architectural units; I believe that the file I posted is set to architectural units.Note that even though new endcap/opening endcap styles were created and assigned, the actual endcap remains identical to the original, out-of-the-box version. I created the copies and assigned them up front in order to make it easy to generate the new endcap style using the Endcaps > Calculate Automatically option from the wall-object context [right click] menu. The default action there is to redefine the current wall endcap style, so by having a placeholder style with the desired name already in place, I need only to say "Yes" to the prompt and I am done.

The image below shows one end of a wall drawn with the original, out-of-the-box CMU-8 Rigid-1.5 Air-2 Brick-4 Furring wall style, with the polylines that define its wall endcap style positioned just above the end and a dimension string showing the widths of the various components. I generated the polylines using the as Pline option of the WallEndcap command. This typically inserts the polylines all "bunched up" and oriented for the right side of a horizontal wall; I rotated the polylines and lined them up relative to each one's respective component.

The next image shows what a wall using the new CMU-7.625 Rigid-1.5 Air-1 Brick-3.625 Furring wall style but with the out-of-the-box CMU-8 Rigid-1.5 Air-2 Brick-4 Furring (End 1) wall endcap style would look like. Notice that the ends of the Brick and CMU components are inset from the ends of the other components, due to the scaling of the defining polylines to match the reduced widths of those components. This is the condition that the new wall endcap style will need to address.
The final image shows the new wall style with the new wall endcap style. I copied the polylines from the original, out-of-the-box wall endcap style, then edited the polylines for the Brick and CMU components to reflect the modified component widths and moved them all to properly align with the wall components. I also copied and modified the dimension string, to show the changes in the example file and in the image below. Finally, I selected the wall, right clicked, and chose Endcaps > Calculate Automatically from the context menu. Following the prompts on the command line, I selected the polylines, chose not to erase them [as I wanted to keep them for the sample file - you may want to delete them if you are certain they are correct, or keep them and erase them later after you are certain the endcap is correct], said "Yes" to modify the current endcap style [but only do so if you have already assigned a new wall endcap style to the wall, as noted above - otherwise you would be changing the wall endcap style assigned to the original wall style, which would likely not be something you want to do] and asked that the "new" [modified] wall endcap style be applied as the wall style default. And that is it - except for editing the end of the example wall back to its original position, as I had the polylines in the position shown when I updated the wall endcap style, and ADT will extend the wall to align with the polylines when the WallAutoEndcap command ends. WallAutoEndcap, by the way, is the command that is executed by the Calculate Automatically menu choice; if you are allergic to the context menus or prefer to set up a tool palette tool, toolbar tool or a keyboard short cut to initiate the Calculate Automatically process, WallAutoEndcap is the command you will need to reference.
Download the sample file I posted in the Discussion Group thread if you want to see it live.