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Architecture

zLouver

Louver panel on a flat face

zLouver builds a louver panel on an existing flat face: an outer frame plus a stack of slanted blades. It is typically used for mechanical screens, vents and ventilation openings.

Good for:

  • Quickly making louver panels on a flat face such as a wall opening, an equipment band or a screen opening.

Not for:

  • A multi-face Brep when you want every face processed. Only the first face is used.

Quick start

  1. Run zLouver.
  2. Pick one or more planar surfaces, Breps or extrusions to mount the louvers on.
  3. The dialog opens with a live preview. Adjust FRAME and BLADE.
  4. Bake creates the real geometry. Cancel discards the preview.
  5. To change a baked louver, select it and run zLouverEdit. See Good to know for the limits.

FRAME

  • Format: the display unit for every length field.
  • Width: how wide the outer frame is, measured inward in the plane of the face.
  • Depth: how far the frame is extruded along the face normal.
  • Offset: pulls the outline of the mounting face inward before modeling, so neighboring panels have a gap between them.

BLADE

  • Spacing: the center-to-center spacing of the blades, top to bottom.
  • Angle: the tilt of the blades from horizontal, from -89 to 89 degrees. A larger angle makes the blades closer to vertical. Near 0 they are almost horizontal.
  • Thick: the thickness of each blade.
  • Depth (read-only, no checkbox): always equal to the frame depth divided by the absolute cosine of the angle (Frame Depth / |cos(Angle)|), so the blades exactly fit the frame depth. It cannot be typed.
  • Extension: extra length added to the blades beyond the automatic Depth. Always editable. To make the blades longer, change Extension.

How the settings work together

  • Depth always follows Frame Depth and Angle and cannot be typed. Extension is added on top of this automatic value, and the two together are the real blade length.
  • Angle affects both the tilt and the automatic Depth. Changing it changes both, but Extension stays as it is.

Good to know

  • The mounting face must be flat and must not be horizontal. A non-planar face is skipped with the message that it is not planar. A horizontal face is skipped because it cannot define a vertical direction for the blades. The face must also have a closed outer boundary.
  • Only the first face of a multi-face Brep is used. The other faces are ignored. To make louvers on several faces, split the object into single faces and pick them separately.
  • You do not need to flip the face. The tool matches the real face normal, and the frame always grows toward the inside of the real normal.
  • If the mounting face is deleted, the louver can no longer be edited with zLouverEdit. The louver is always rebuilt from its mounting face. If all mounting faces are gone, the edit command refuses and says the source face no longer exists in the document.
  • If the mounting face is moved or scaled, a baked louver does not follow. It updates only when you run the edit command and bake again.
  • Manual changes to a single blade (moved, recolored, edited) are discarded when you run the edit command, which deletes the whole set of old blades and builds them again.