114 — Feature Strips, horizontal and vertical

A Feature Strip is the recessed band that breaks up a blank panel face — what the drawings and the trade usually call a reveal or a rustication. ConstructiVision’s word is Feature Strip, and that is what you search the menu for.

There are two, and they behave differently in practice.

Note

This lesson also exists in the browser. Work it in ConstructiVision on the web — same steps, same values, so you can follow either and end up with the same panel.

Horizontal — the normal case

Across both sample projects — 146 panels — 82 carry exactly four horizontal strips:

horizontal strips	panels
four	82
none	44
one	7
six	6
five	4
three	3

Four is overwhelmingly the working answer. A panel with a banded face almost always has four bands up the elevation.

Vertical — the exception

vertical strips	panels
none	135
six	8

Only eight panels in the entire corpus carry vertical strips, and every one of them carries six. Vertical is a deliberate architectural choice on a specific elevation, not a default. If you are reaching for them, it is worth confirming the elevation calls for them.

Placing them

1. Enable a row. Each row is one strip.

2. Position and size locate it on the face.

3. Face — Up is the face toward you in the casting bed, Down is against the bed.

4. OK.

Note

Down is the default face, and that is deliberate. A strip cast against the bed picks up the form’s finish; one cast up is troweled. The product treats Up as an explicit addition rather than an equal choice.

The vocabulary, once

you say	ConstructiVision says
reveal	Feature Strip
rustication	Feature Strip
reveal band	Feature Strip, horizontal

The vocabulary index carries the full list.

Watch the lesson

Warning

What this recording does and does not demonstrate. It places a four-strip horizontal set and shows the panel redrawn. It does not exercise vertical strips at all — it narrates them and places horizontal ones, so a vertical-strip regression would not fail this lesson.

Vertical strips were broken until recently: entered in the dialog they never drew, because the count read horizontal rows only. That is fixed. But with only eight panels in the corpus using them, no test we own would go red if they broke again — this page is currently the only place in the product’s documentation that exercises them at all.

The four strips in this recording were checked by position once, when it was made: they sit at 3’-7”, 7’-10”, 12’-1” and 21’-0”, each 2 1/4” wide and 3/4” deep. The recording’s own gate requires the strips to be drawn, but it does not check where they are.