This guide includes several small workflow tips to elevate your design skills with Arkio 2.0 to the next level.
When working on more complex Arkio creations, you want to reuse design elements and work on parts of the building separately. It’s a good practice to create your parts on movable Arkio plates instead of directly on the green Arkio tabletop. Examples of this approach can be found in our Arkio sample scenes found in the start panel.
When you create or import geometry on an Arkio plate, it’s easier to snap elements in the correct order to the correct surface. It also makes it easier to move and duplicate parts of your design after they are created, especially when you are still getting familiar with Arkio’s modeling tools or want to create a new variation, such as a new floor.
When working on floorplans of a building, you can use this method to streamline the creation of individual floors by using Arkio’s modeling system and automatic geometry gluing to your advantage.
You can start by loading a 3D map of your site to get a good sense of scale and create a few solid Arkio plates in the approximate scale of the building to import your reference images and geometry on. When placing the images, you can fill in a scale, but you can update the size of the images later.
If your imported drawing has dimensions, you can model some Arkio shape as a reference to scale the drawing to the exact size by dragging the corner points to scale the image uniformly.
After this, you can start creating the outline of walls on the floorplan using Arkio’s guides and snaps on your Arkio plate orientation (wall thickness can be set in the settings). When trying to connect the wall back to its original starting point, be sure to maintain a slight distance between the start and end point, as this can trigger a circular chain reference in Arkio that triggers an undo (known bug)
While drawing a wall, you can easily create new segments in a chain by pressing the menu buttons on your VR controller while drawing walls, or by pressing Ctrl+D on non-VR devices. After creating the exterior walls, you can make the interior wall chains in the same way by drawing the walls from the bottom corner of the exterior walls, following your floorplan. (wall thickness in settings)
Since my exterior and main supporting interior walls are mostly the same for this house, I could now use Arkio’s floorplates to my advantage by duplicating the plate with all the walls and content, removing the old floorplan image and aligning the image of the other floor to the top of this plate instead.
I can add Arkio door and window components, along with solid and void shapes, to enhance the design with more details. By making copies of my floorplate from time to time, I can ensure that I always have a healthy, flexible version of my design available in case I break something and need to restore a part of the building.
With all my building parts on plates, I now have an easy way to compile the scene of the house together into a multi-level house by moving the plates with all the content around. You can use a similar workflow to make reusable components of furniture or technical equipment in Arkio.
Let me know if you have any questions about this workflow, as I can add more details or create additional guides with tips you would like to see about Arkio! 