Exterior wall cladding — battens and siding in one toggle
Turn flat exterior walls into vertical battens or slat siding with a single dropdown. Per-wall overrides, plinth-aware bottoms, and openings cut cleanly — no manual modelling.
Cladding shouldn't be a modelling exercise
Battens and shiplap are everywhere in residential architecture and nightmarish to model by hand — strips per opening, mitres around windows, gaps that don't quite line up. zdraw's Cladding dropdown does the lot for you.
Open the Walls panel, choose:
- None — flat painted wall.
- Battens — vertical strips at your chosen spacing.
- Siding — horizontal slat boards stacked up the wall.
Pick a colour, set spacing (default 150 mm) and thickness (30 mm), and zdraw lays the strips across every exterior wall. Openings get clean cutouts; the strips above and below windows are split around the frame automatically.
Plinth-aware bottoms
If your model uses a base wall (the plinth band at the bottom — set via Base wall height), the cladding starts above it, not at floor level. So you get a concrete or stone band at the bottom and timber above it without any extra setup.
Interior walls are excluded by default
Battens and siding are an exterior finish — putting them inside the building looks wrong. The global cladding setting only paints exterior walls. Want an accent inside? Open the per-wall inspector and override on that single wall — it'll get battens regardless.
Per-wall overrides
Same panel — selected wall + Cladding dropdown — lets you turn cladding off on one wall (a render-facing brick face you don't want clad) or change colour and thickness on a feature wall. Per-wall settings always beat the global.
Outward face detection (the unsung hero)
The hardest part of automatic cladding is "which side is outside?" For a simple rectangle it's obvious; for L / T / U-shaped buildings it's not. zdraw uses the polygon winding of each wall chain to pick the outward normal — exact for any simple shape, concave or convex. That used to be a centroid heuristic that flipped inwards on one or two walls of every irregular plan; that's fixed now and reliable.
Quick recipe — Scandinavian board-and-batten
1. Default exterior walls (150 mm). 2. Base wall height = 200 mm, paint that band a warm grey. 3. Cladding Battens, colour #faf9f6, spacing 120 mm, thickness 25 mm. 4. Black-framed windows.
That's the look — done in 30 seconds, no modelling. Open the gallery for examples or the tutorial for the full Walls panel walkthrough.