Building / floor plan wall solidify

What I’m currently trying to do is modeling a building basic structure (floor and walls). It is pretty straightforward as long as the walls and floors are just single surfaces.

The problem now, is how to efficiently give them a non-zero thickness, meaning walls and floors consisting of 2 surfaces with a constant distance between. Effectively like solidify, but with clean behavior at openings and working with interior walls. I found the inset operation quite useful, when used on all of the floor at once, producing an edge loop with a constant offset. But from there things get messy, requiring a lot of extrude, removing faces, ‘bridge edge loops’ and such until the topology is correct.

If feel there must be a more efficient way to do that. Any ideas?

Sketch the plan, extrude and solidify, half offset of thickness, complex mode … :

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Ah, yeah, that might actually a better idea, to start like this. The walls thickness it will handle fine.

What remains is doing the floor and ceiling. What comes to mind right now is:

  • fill the floors with faces
  • duplicate the complete floor and move it downwards
  • connect the copy to the original with bridge edge loops
  • remove the interior faces (the faces of the initial sketch)
  • do the same for the ceiling

Not sure, there might be better way for that, too. An ‘auto-fill’ operation for the first step would already help…

Geometry nodes can do this.

Actually, geometry nodes can do all of this

To be honest, my knowledge of geometry nodes is quite limited. So far I did only rather obvious things with it, like placing instances, deformation or material replacement.

Currently I don’t know how to usefully operate on a single mesh. No idea, how one would e.g. do basic operations like extrude or bevel.

How would you fill the floor? Boolean? And bridge edge loops?