A building, and a bit more…

Buildings have a habit of being more complicated than a box. Someone adds a room, puts a store on the side, or decides the roof needs to be a different height. Quite reasonable things for a building to do. Slightly more work for the software.

Automason Studio 0.3.1 lets you work with more than one component in the Blender sidebar. Each has its own name, position and dimensions. So a shelter can have a smaller annexe, without having to pretend they are both the same building-shaped box.

Here’s a short look at the controls and the resulting Sketch.

Each component now has its own collapsible group. Close it and the name stays visible. Open it and you can change its dimensions and position. It’s a small thing, but once there’s more than one part to the building, being able to see which bit you’re changing becomes rather useful.

The + button adds a component from the default template. The − button removes one, after asking you to confirm. Saving and loading the configuration keeps the components together, including their roof, opening and material settings.

There’s also the matter of the floor. A shorter annexe ought to stand on the same ground as the taller building beside it. Components of different heights now share the first component’s floor level automatically. You can change the height without having to work out how far to move the whole thing up or down.

Sketch still leaves out the cladding and roof slates. The exposed roof structure in the video is part of that quicker checking stage: look at the shape and arrangement before asking Generate to do the detailed work.

You can download Automason Studio 0.3.1, with its SHA-256 checksum. It’s still a development build, for Blender 5.1.2 or later. The Automason Studio page has the installation steps and release details, and the earlier demonstration shows the simpler workflow this grew out of.

Another small step. Though the building now has somewhere to keep its extra bits.