Compound parts - realistic to use? (your experience)

Compound Parts are great for complex wall assemblies when you know what the assembly is (at least to a certain level of knowing).  That said, at the beginning of a project you probably do not know what those wall types will be and as the project develops you develop the wall section.  I would recommend starting  a project with a "Default - Exterior Wall" and when you know what the assembly will be, create the compound wall and change the "Default - Exterior Wall" to the freshly created compound wall.  I would typically recommend keeping some samples of typical compound walls that you can use as a starting point for your Project-specific wall assembly that might have different dimensions/thicknesses.  This will save you time in doing the math.  Compound Walls can be really useful for creating spread footings with foundation wall.

You might also consider using Compound Walls for schematic space reservation as well.  Creating compound parts for massing casework (with or without toe-kicks, countertops, backsplashes, overhead cabinets) can save a lot of time for reserving space for casework early in the project and coordinating with other disciplines.  Schematic Curtain Walls can also be created with compound parts and these are nice because the can be stretched and you can place doors in them.  There are examples of both schematic casework and schematic curtain walls in the US Dataset.  

Note:  If you have a Company library of compound parts, I do not recommend having a project level library with the same Compound Family name.  This should not be a problem since the symbology is driven by the Parts that are assigned within the compound part and the parts can be concatenated.

HTH,

Travis

Compound parts work reasonably well if you have a building with the same storey heights. However if you are working on a building that has irregular storey heights then you need to maintain multiple variants of each and the limited productivity gain coupled with quirky behaviour mean it quickly becomes more economic to draw wall leaves manually.

I still don't understand why we can't define wall height at the point of placement with one leaf being the parent and setting the overall height and the other leaves adjusting height relative to this point. That change alone would make libraries more useful, but the reality is that they need to behave more parametrically, with scope to define and edit individual leaves and cavities at and after point of placement.

This would deal with the another significant issue is that you drop back to manually editing height to deal with things like steel beam depths within a wall leaf.

Also the fact that AECOSIM and its predecessors have no way of indicating the inside and the outside of a compound wall is a deficiency.

I think Travis's suggestion of a template is good advise, but I think the biggest question is whether to use them. You should decide on a project by project basis.

I also agree that they are most useful in the early concept stages of a project.

Hey Travis,

Any chance of a re-think of how BBD approaches Compound Walls, Compound Slabs / Roofs, Compound Cells etc?

Maybe Compound Walls should behave a bit like BRCM's cable trays, which allows multiple tray routing?

Thanks for your replies.

I'm wondering now: it seems logic to build compound parts within the project your currently working on, rather then building one big preset library with all possible combinations (which seems impossible...)?

So you could just make some 'samples' as T_Wollet suggests, and within the project F+Ps build that specific wall you need by adjusting heights, thicknesses, etc. So the general part library should only contain single part definitions.

Unknown said:

Any chance of a re-think of how BBD approaches Compound Walls, Compound Slabs / Roofs, Compound Cells etc?

Unfortunately that is not up to me, though I wish it was. :)

-Travis