Let’s Draft a Job Up from Scratch in Cabinet Vision Part 2

Let’s Add Our Island Cabinets!

So back to plan, now we’re over to our island. So first thing I’m going to do is add in my panels for either end. I like to sort of work out, or start with the things I know. And I know that I want to keep my overhang consistent around my island, front and sides. So that is going to tell me where to place my end panels. So I’m going to go to objects and this is all for base, and I’m going to go to my panels. I want my panels to go to the floor so I’m just going to click and drag those in. And it’s hard to see because this is so skinny. So we’ll show again when we grab a cabinet. But you can kind of see that there’s like a pointed, triangle at the bottom of that panel. That’s showing me which wall it’s going to attach to.

So as I move it around the room, you can see that that shifts. Right now it’s pointing down, so it’s going to attach to the back of the wall. And here it’s pointing this way, so it’s going to attach to the front of the wall. So that’s what I want, so I’m going to drop it there. I’ll show you that again when we have a wider cupboard (cabinet), because it’ll be easier to see. Again, making it 16mm. And now my overhang is 35mm from the front of the bench to the carcass. So on the side here, I want 35mm from the end of my bench to my cabinet carcass, not to my end panel. So I’m going to type in from my clearance from the end, instead of 24mm, I want 35mm to the carcass. So then I’m going to take off 16mm for that end panel and hit Enter. So it’s gonna be 19mm now.

So if I use my little measure tool, I would have 35mm from the end of the wall to the start of the carcass. So I’m going to replicate that in the other end just by right-clicking, copy, and paste, and just going to move it in by 19mm. So now I’m going to switch to elevation. So now I’ve got my wall with my two end panels. I’m going to fill in in-between.

Okay, so now we’re going to work out how we’re going to fill in this island. We know that we want to have a sink centered to the island and we also want to have a dishwasher. Those are our knowns, our assumptions. And then we have some free space to play with to make up that, whatever’s left. So let’s grab our calculator and work this out. So we’ve got 2430mm to play with. The dishwasher is usually about 600mm or 602mm. So we’ll take that off. That leaves us with 1828mm.

So if we sort of thought we might have to, we might like to have a two-door cupboard (cabinet) in the middle for the sink. And then maybe another two-door or maybe a set of drawers on one side and a single-door on the other side. We could try and break it up into… one, two, three, four, five… even sections. So if we’d hit divide by five, it’s gonna be 365mm. So we might have a play with that and see if it’s going to work, but we might have to adjust it as we bring in the cupboards (cabinets) to see how well it works.

Let’s start with a sink cupboard (cabinet). So we’re going to go and custom cupboards (cabinets), base, a sink cabinet. With paired doors. Yep, that’s what we want. So we’re going to bring that in and drop that right in the center. Okay. So again, using these different positioning tools. We can work out where it’s going to sit in the center by typing in the full length of the wall, 2500mm, and just dividing that by 2. So now it’s got 1250mm from the center of the sink cupboard to either end.

Okay. So we had 365mm by 2 doors is 730mm. So if we make this 730mm and stretch it in from both sides, leaving us with 850mm on both sides. So it looks like we’re not gonna have five perfectly even sections, but let’s work out what we can do the best we can.

So first of all, let’s grab our dishwasher. Okay, so in this case, we’re gonna grab it from appliance. You might have a dishwasher saved in your cabinet catalog as well if you’ve got fillers in there for it. But we’re just gonna grab one from here. Okay, so we’ve got our dishwasher here that’s leaving 248mm on this side, which is pretty skinny for a cupboard or a set of drawers. But what we might do is include a built-in (trash) bin for this client, and there’s a lot of bins that will fit into a 300mm cabinet. So what I’m going to do is shift that dishwasher over to allow 300mm space by using clearance. And then I’m going to reduce this sink cabinet by 52mm by clicking and dropping.

So first of all, I’m going to add in a base drawer. I’m going to use the two-drawer option and I’m going to just leave it like that so that there’s a space for a taller bin underneath and a skinnier drawer above, which is really useful for the clients. And then now that this sink cabinet is not actually centered itself, that’s not too bad because we can still put the sink center to the island without actually having the cabinet center because the bowl and the drain board of the sink don’t have to be directly over the sink cupboard (cabinet) itself. So I think what we might actually do is put a set of drawers down this side and then even up the sink cabinet with those set of drawers and we’ll see how we like the look of that. So we’re going to use a set of three in there. And again, I’m just going to click hit control, click the next one, right click on the two and equalize those widths.

So it looks pretty nice from the front and what we need to do is also add a back panel. If I show you the 3D right now, we can see the back of the dishwasher, so that’s not looking too good. So, to do that, if we go to plan, zoom in a little, we can go to objects, base, fillers and panels, and underneath panels, we should have a base-back panel. I’ve gone to floor on the two ends, I’m going to go to floor on the back as well, so I’m going to pull that one in and attach it to the back wall.

And I think I did forget to show the little box placement trick. So, I’ll just show you with this sink cabinet. You can see that as I have clicked on it to be able to move it around, you can see that that triangle at the back of it is attaching to different walls as I move around the room. Where the back of that triangle is is the wall that’s going to attach to. So we could see that same thing on the end panels. It’s just a bit more difficult to see the triangle because the panels are so skinny. So just show you on that. So I’ll just drop that back in there.
And I’m going to go to the elevation of my island. Remembering I’ve got 19mm at each end for a bit of overhang. And if I click on this little smiley face up the top next to the wall, it will show me the back of the wall instead of the front. So it’s like you’re seeing the back of the smiley face as head, the front of its face. So, we’re looking at the back now, so I want to have that same 19mm gap from the edge of the island, and then I want this panel to span the whole island to 2500mm, but just taking off the 219mm overhangs, and stretch to the right, yes, hit enter. Beautiful! So now that’s the full length.

Okay, so now we have got all our cabinets in the room and our next step is going to be to add our bench tops (counter tops).

Let’s Add Our Benchtops!

So in this kitchen, we’re going to need to have three bench tops, one on either side of the stove and one on the island with a bit of overhang at the back. So, to add bench tops, you must be in the plan view. You cannot do it in the elevation view. You’ll see that there’s no option to add bench tops in elevation. So, in plan, you have the tops button. So, first of all, we just click on that and it brings up two options for us. Whether we want to auto build some tops or do a new top, which is manually build a top. Both are good in certain situations, and we’ll run through which ones work well, where and why.

Okay, so first things first, like we were talking about every cabinet has to attach to a wall, same thing for a bench top (counter top). Every bench top (counter top) has to attach back to a wall. The way to work out which wall the bench top is attaching to, and which side of the wall, the front or the back it’s going to be sitting on, is by using this little red dashed outline. It’s a bit difficult to see right now, so I’m going to click over towards this side wall on the back. So you can see that this red dashed line has appeared on the back of that wall. So right now, if I went to draw new top and manually drew a top along that stove wall, The bench top will exist and it will be there, but when I look at the stove wall elevation, it won’t show up because the bench top thinks, “no, I’m not, I’m not attached to that wall, I’m attached to the back of the left hand side wall. When you look at the elevation there, you’ll see me” kind of thing. So it’s important to make sure that wherever you’re drawing the tops, first of all that you have that dashed red box. On that wall, on the right side of it, before you start drawing.

Even when you’re doing auto build tops, if you click on that option, it will ask you for the entire room or for the current wall face. The current wall face is where that red box is, which right now we don’t want any tops there, so we’ll just hit cancel. Okay. So you can see as I click around the room, that red dashed outline will move around with me.

So let’s draw along this back wall first and this is probably a good spot to use the auto build tops feature. So I’m going to click auto build tops and just tell it to automatically build the tops for this current wall. And here, okay. You can see it has drawn up two bench tops for me, which is great. But if you notice, we’ve got quite a big overhang on the side here from the panel to the end of the bench top, same on this one, from the panel to the end of the bench top. And because we’ve got a stove in there, we only want to have just a couple of millimeters from the end of the panel to the end of the bench top so that it’s, it’s almost flush but just gives the bench top a couple of millimeters extra. So we’re going to need to edit both of these.

So if we right click on the bench top and go to edit shape. You’ll see the each of these lines becomes thinner and has a color. These colors represent the finish that the bench top has on each side. So green is profile, which is if you’re going to have like a bull nose or a rounded profile on your bench top. That’s where it’s going to be applied, is where that green is showing up. Blue is for a simple finished edge, so usually if it’s laminate; a square finish on the side of your bench tops, rather than the post form, that would be the profile. And yellow is for unfinished. There is also a splash style. Sometimes when you’re, again, we’ll get into this further down the line, but you can have your bench tops automatically have a splashback (backsplash) attached to them. If you wanted to do that, it would need, you would need to tell it where the splashbacks are. So that’s what that’s for. The butt button. The pink is for, if you’ve got, say, two bench tops into a corner, and they’re going to have a butt join between them. That’s what the pink, the butt join is for. Automatic is just a gray line and the program Cabinet Vision will choose which of these colors, which finish for you, without you telling it.

So we’re good with unfinished along that back wall there. So all our finishes are fine, but we need to bring in that overhang. So if I click on this blue line at the end, you can see that I’m given a center box and also a a small dashed line. This little dash line is gonna become your best friend, because it’s basically a way to offset the line by a certain amount from where it is. This center one is a little bit more tricky to work with, so we’re gonna stick to the little dash. So if I click on that dash and let go, and then I move my mouse, you can see up the top left hand corner there’s an offset. So it’s telling me how many millimeters further do you want this line to be from its original place? So if I sit it exactly over the top zero offset, but as I move it towards the end panel, you can see that that was a 35mm difference between where the blue line is right now and the end panel. I want to retain just maybe 3 millimeters of overhang. So instead of 35mm, I’m going to type in 32mm, which basically is telling the bench top, come back in, 32mm. So, and then I hit enter. And the line moves, beautifully. Easy-done, like that!

So then we just hit return to save that. It asks us if we want to save and we say yes. And then we’re just going to do the same on the other side. So again, click on the bench top, right click and edit shape. And then click on the line that you want to move. Find that little dash. It can be a little bit tricky to find it sometimes, if it’s a really long bench top line, but it’s just a zoom in a little and you’ll find it. So again, we’re going to click, we’re going to move it in the direction that we want the bench top to stretch or reduce into. And same thing on this side, 32mm. I’m going to type in and hit Enter. And then hit Return. And yes.

And now if I hit return again and I go to the elevation of this wall, you can see that I have two bench tops on either side, and if I zoom right in, you can see there’s just a small amount of overhang there between the end of the bench top and the end of the end panel; which is perfect. So if we go back to plan, now we’re going to add in a bench top on the island. So again, we need to go back into the Tops feature. And we need to find that red dashed line and make sure that it’s on our island. Now because the island is seen from both the front of the wall and the back of the wall, you have to sort of choose whether you want the bench top to be seen in the elevation from the front or the back. Because in this case, I have a lot more detail on the front. I want it to be seen on the front. Most of the time you probably want it to be seen on the front of your island. But if you do want it to be seen on the back, you can just click towards the other side of that wall. You’ll see the red dash line and that’s where it will show up.

So in this case, we’re going to use new top and we’re going to draw this bench top from scratch. I’m gonna click New Top, and you can see I’m given a lot of the same familiar tools that we get when we’re doing CAD drawing or drawing up walls. So in this case, I definitely want to have a rectangular island, so I’m gonna use the line box. So click on that, and then I need to find my starting point. So the best starting point for me right now is gonna be the end of the wall. So the end of the wall is just out here where you can see I’ve got my end panel and then that 90mm overhang. So I’m going to start from there and I’m going to drag my box out to roughly the shape that I want it to be. But then I’m going to use my width and height to type in the exact measurements that I want to get it nice and crisp.

So my island is 2500mm long. Match the wall of the island and everything that we’ve set out beforehand. So I type that in and I hit tab and then I can move down to the height. So the height is the distance from the back of the bench top to the top right now. So I want it to be 600mm on the front of the island, and I’m going to hit enter. But then I also… I’m just going to hit select so that I can use the normal cursor. So then I do want to extend the back of this wall down out towards the back to provide that overhang for seating that we’ve been talking about. So again, I’m using that little offset, click on it, move your mouse in the direction that you want, and then type in the amount that you want to offset it by. So 300mm in this case, and hit enter.

And as you can see each of these sides are that grey automatic colour, so Cabinet Vision is going to automatically choose some finishes for me. So I’m going to let it do that by hitting Return, and it’ll ask me if I want to save this shape, and I’ll hit Yes. And then to double check what finishes I have on each end, I can just click back on the bench top (counter top). And as we went through before, we’ve got Blue–for two finished ends. Green on the front for a profile, but the back right now is the splash. It’s automatically chosen that, but we don’t have a splash back there. We want that to be a profile on the other end too. So we can just right click and go to edit shape. Click on that line, and then over on the side here, change it to profile, and hit return to save.

So now, I have a look at my 3D of my room. I have three lovely bench tops (counter tops). My island with an overhang, all looking perfect. So that is a really easy way to draw bench tops (counter tops) in Cabinet Vision. The main thing to remember is to just make sure that you’ve got your red dashed line on the correct wall before you start drawing and then from there editing the size of the bench tops is really simple.

Let’s Make Some Final Modifications!

Alright, so a kitchen is very nearly finished. We could leave it at this point, but there’s a few little additions we can make just to really finesse the kitchen and make it look really good for our plans and also provide a bit more information for the installer, the plumber, the electrician. As well as we can make a few customizations to make our kitchen stand out for the client.

So, the first thing that I want to do is add a few inner drawers into the pantry. Having shelving all in a pantry is absolutely fine, and it’s very economically friendly. But in terms of the best storage, drawers are always a winner when it comes to those bottom few hundred millimeters of the pantry. Having a few drawers in there, where you can pull out the storage to really see it is going to make life so much easier for the client. So let’s put those in.

So to do that, we need to go into the section of the pantry. To go to section, we can either be in elevation and right-click and go to section. Or, if I just hit escape, we can also just directly double-click on the cabinet, and that will take us into the section view. If you double-click, you’ll also have access to the face, plan, end, 3D, and reports. But all we need for this is to be able to access section. So, let’s go back to elevation, right-click, and go to section.

So from here, we can either section the face, which is how we can change it from being pair-doors to a single-door or from being two tall doors to maybe four with two small ones at the top and bigger ones down the bottom. But we want to section the interior, so let’s move across to that option. So then, we can click on each of the individual shelves inside of this cabinet. So what I’m going to do is from here, which is almost equal with the bench top down. I want to have maybe three inner drawers in there.

So first thing I’m going to do is actually just delete this adjustable shelf by clicking on it and hitting delete on my keyboard. Then if I click into that blank space, all that blue area is a blank space with a height of 917mm. So I want to add in three drawers. I’m going to use this horizontal multi-split option. So I’m going to click on that. It’s going to come up with a little box asking me how many openings. So it’s not asking me how many drawers do you want. It’s asking me how many gaps in between those drawers do you want. So I want three drawers, which means I need four gaps. So right now it’s going to make those adjustable shelves, but I want them to be drawers. When drawers are inside, they’re often called a rollout. So we’re going to call that a rollout and hit Ok.

And now you can see that I have got three drawers inside of this cabinet with even sections in-between. That could be perfect, but I also might want to drop this bottom drawer right down to the bottom as close as possible to reduce any wasted space. So clicking on that space, I can change the height of it from 125mm to just 20mm. And I can lock that height in so that it won’t change if the height of the cupboard (cabinet) was to change. So from there, now I’ve got quite a big space above this bottom drawer and smaller spaces above these two. That could be good if I thought maybe the client wants to store tall things in that bottom drawer, but if I want to even it out, I can right-click on each of those spaces and go to equalize height. So, the first one it won’t do anything because there’s nothing for it to equalize with, but then when you click on the second one, and the third one, it will make each of these spaces an identical height.

So I’m really happy with that, so now I can just get out of the section view by hitting return and now I’m back into the main view, and it does look like those draws have just disappeared, but I think that’s just got to do with the different view that we have. Right now we’re in one called architectural, if we go to engineering… Yeah, there we go. So those draws are still there. They’re just not showing up on this architectural view. We have different views for different reasons in Cabinet Vision. Again, we might go through that a bit further down the line. So right now we’re going to go back to architectural and just leave it on that, but don’t worry. Those draws are still there. They’re just not shown on this architectural view. I guess the same as the drawer hardware of these ones that actually have handles. We can’t see that hardware inside, but we know it’s there. So same for here. We know those drawers are inside, we just can’t see the hardware on this view. So that’s how we can section a cupboard (cabinet).

The next thing we might do is add in some appliances. So if we go to objects. It’s pretty clear that this is space for a stove and a space for a fridge, but we can actually add in some appliance models to make that even clearer. And with these models too, later down the line, when you have an actual fridge and an actual stove, you can change the dimensions of it so that you can get all that information right into Cabinet Vision, see how it relates to the cabinets and make sure that it’s all millimetre perfect for your factory. So, to do that, we’re going to select catalog appliance. And from here, we’re just first of all, going to choose a fridge. So, let’s go for an American fridge freezer. We might use number one. Again, this little box down the bottom is just gonna show you different fridges. They all look pretty similar, so we’re gonna just take that first one.

So you can see, the dashed box for this fridge is way too big for this opening. So what I’m going to do, is I’m just going to bring that dashed box out over to the right hand side onto the white space. And if I try and drop it there, it’s going to want to attach itself back into the wall. But I really want it to just stay there for a second while I adjust it before I move it into the kitchen. So what I can do is hold down control and click, and that basically tells Cabinet Vision. Please don’t override where I’m dropping this cabinet and even if you think you know better right now, right now I want it to be exactly where I want it to be. So that’s holding down control as you click.
So now I’m going to go onto the fridge and I’m just going to change the height of it to 1800mm so that it will fit in our space. It’s quite a big fridge and instead of 1.6m for the width, we’re going to make it 850mm. Beautiful. So now that’s a much more ordinary sized fridge, especially for this little unit. And can you hear how that’s giving me a little ‘duh-ding’ sound? For some reason, it doesn’t want to drop into there. There might be a bit of a conflict from the appliance, the way it’s set up. So again, I can just hold that control down and click, and I can drop the fridge exactly where I want it. If you’re ever having a problem where Cabinet Vision doesn’t want to drop a cabinet or an appliance where you want it, you can override it by holding down ‘Ctrl’.

So now we’re going to add in a stove. So again, we go to objects and appliance. Down to ranges, and we’re going to use a duel-fuel. We’ll just grab number one and drop it in. Looks like it’s going to be a tiny bit too big as well, but I think we can just drop it in there. And if we escape, click back on it and try and adjust the width. We’ll see if that’s going to work. No. So you see, I typed it in, but it didn’t actually change it. It didn’t want to change. Sometimes when you’ve got conflicting items, it gets a little bit difficult for them to know which side to take their measurement from. So to make that easier for it without having to redo everything, sometimes a little trick I use is just to make the elevation really high, like bring it up above everything. So I’m going to make the elevation 3 meters to make that stove sit up, way up high, and then I should be able to adjust the size of it here. Yes, it will let me, so… I’m gonna take it from the right and then while I’m here I’m gonna adjust the depth, it’s a bit deep. And then from there I can just basically drop it back down by making that elevation zero. Beautiful.

So now you can see in here it’s got 12mm gap from one side and 0mm from the other. Let’s just even that up by making them both 6mm. Beautiful, so now we have a lovely looking stove and a good looking fridge. We’ve got drawers in that pantry for our clients. That’s all looking really good.

One other thing that we might do is if we move over to the island, we’re going to add in a sink here. So we might do that in the plan view. Again, we go to objects, appliance, down to sinks, and we might use the one-bowl 3D. That one’s probably a bit small for our type of kitchen. We just might look through them till we find one with a drainer. Most kitchen sinks probably are going to have a drain. So let’s use this one. So again, click and drag it onto the page. That’s where we get that little triangular box to show us where it’s going to attach to. So we want it to attach to the island. We zoom in a little. I want it to be in that sink cupboard (cabinet), and I want the bowl of the sink to be pretty much centered to the cabinet doors. So hopefully if I hit control and drop it in there… Beautiful!

So that’s looking pretty good. If I go to the elevation. Yeah, you can see that the bowl there of the sink is pretty much over those cabinet doors exactly. So that looks really good. Okay, so now we’ve got that sink in. We might even add a tap to that sink. And we could just add it in straight to the elevation onto the plan, but we can also add it into the sink itself. So if I double click on the sink and I go to plan, then I can go objects, appliance, go to faucets, and just see what a mono-faucet is… Yep, that looks like a nice kitchen tap. So I’m going to bring that one in and just drop it. And then if I go to the 3D, you can see it’s in there, but it’s sitting way too low. So if I go to face, you can click on that tap, and bring it up to sit on top of the sink. So bring it up by 170mm. And then go back to the 3D, and now I have a sink with a tap. So I hit return, and return again.

So now, if I look at the 3D of my kitchen, it looks really complete. It’s got different appliances in there, a sink and a tap. There is different furnishing that you can also add, if you wanted to add some stools for the back of the island. We could go to furnishing, table and chairs, stools, and then we could just find this number one stool. And again, hover those in, hold down control. Cause we don’t want them to be like directly on the back of that island. We want them to sit out a little bit. So hit control, drop those in.

Ok, so now we’ve added that furnishing in. We have got ourselves a lovely finished kitchen. So it’s looking really good. The only thing that probably is a bit outstanding in this is that the colors are not quite realistic right now. So we can change all that using textures and finishes, but we’re gonna leave that until the next module and then we’re gonna learn how to set those up and really make those 3Ds pop.