Fences, walls & panel runs

The 🪵 Fence-wall group on the left palette draws boundary treatments. All three tools place the same kind of object — a run of points with a style — and the style decides whether it is a fence, a wall or a line of repeated panels.

The three tools

• Fence — a light boundary line: close-boarded, lap panel, post & rail, bow-top railings, mesh, acoustic barrier or a clipped hedge.
• Wall — masonry with real thickness: brick, stone, rendered, gabion or retaining.
• Panel run — a library object repeated along a line. The built-ins are Railing panels 1.5 m, Heras fence panels and pedestrian barriers — the last two being what site hoarding and temporary works are actually made of.

Click to place points and press Enter or double-click to finish. Esc cancels the run you are drawing. Snapping and the typed-dimension box work here exactly as they do for the boundary.

The Fence-wall designer

Fence-wall styles… opens the designer. Pick a built-in to start from, then Duplicate it and change what you need — the built-ins themselves cannot be deleted, so there is always something to fall back to.

• Kind — fence, wall or panel run. This changes which options apply and how the run draws in plan.
• Height and width — real metres. Width is the thickness a wall occupies on the plan and in the 3D model.
• Material and colour — eighteen materials, from treated timber and facing brick through engineering brick, blockwork, render, natural and reconstituted stone, gabion, concrete, powder-coated and galvanised steel, welded mesh, composite board and clipped hedge.
• Junction piers — thickened at every corner. Intermittent piers repeat along the run at a spacing you set. Both take their own width and projection.
• Rails — horizontal rails along the run: the top and bottom rails of metal railings, or the three of a post-and-rail fence. Set how many, the section, and the heights of the bottom and top rail; any in between are spread evenly, and each stands a little proud of the face so it reads as a rail rather than a stripe. Heights are to the rail centre from the base of the run, so raising the fence moves the top rail with it. Two built-ins use them: Metal railings 1.1 m and Bow-top railings 1.1 m.
• Coping — none, flat, half round, saddleback, bullnose, splayed (weathered) or brick on edge, with its own material, thickness and overhang.
• Retaining and temporary — flags that describe what the run is for. Temporary runs are the hoarding and barrier kinds you take down again.
• Panel length and gap — panel runs only. Set the object, its length and the gap between panels, and the run repeats it end to end.

A 3D preview sits beside the settings and updates as you change them, so you can see a pier spacing or a coping profile before committing it to the scheme.

Building your own style

• Duplicate copies the selected style. ＋ New style starts a fresh one seeded from the built-in matching whichever Type is currently selected — so pick Wall first if you want to start from a wall.
• The Material list is filtered by Type. Masonry — brick, blockwork, render, stone, gabion, concrete — is offered on walls only; steel, mesh, composite board and hedge on fences and panel runs only; timber on both. Changing a style’s Type therefore resets its material and colour when the current one does not belong to the new type.
• Coping appears on walls only, and piers are hidden on panel runs. Retaining and temporary apply to every kind.
• Delete counts how many runs on this scheme use the style and warns before removing it. Those runs fall back to a plain 1.8 m close-boarded fence — which changes both the drawing and the appraisal, so re-style them rather than leaving them on the fallback.

Changing a run you have already drawn

Select a run and the options bar gains a style picker — switch a whole run from timber to brick in one step. This works on generated fences and hand-drawn ones alike.

Opening the designer from a selected run changes the buttons at the bottom, and the difference matters:

• Apply to selection restyles the run you came from, and closes.
• Draw a new one leaves that run alone and starts drawing a new one in this style.

Where the styles go

• Styles save with your template, so the palette you build carries to your next project. They merge by id on load rather than replacing: bringing a template in adds its styles without deleting the ones already in this scheme.
• Runs are measured in the stats and priced in the appraisal — fencing shows as a length, walls and panel runs at their own rates.
• Walls and panel runs export to DXF and to Revit as real walls at the right thickness, with piers and coping. Fences export as a line.