Shipping Containers as building materials?

[sterling]

I am designing a house made from standard ISO Shipping containers.
I need to know if there is already an object like this I can import? Is this possible?
Standard ISO Shipping Containers make excellent building blocks for a house or any structure and they are weather proof pretty much earthquake proof unless they go for a ride.

I am using these like giant building blocks and will stack and link them into rooms to form the layout.

Here is what I am after...
I know I can make a block object and then fool around with how they all fit together. But I'd like to have a complete Object that is an actual ISO Shipping Container that I can treat like a room and like an object I can move around. It will be a Module.

I want to make a slab foundation with retaining walls left/right and rear and the containers slip onto the foundation, get locked and fused together into place and a master roof over them all... 2 story... the bottom floor will be under ground on a slope with one open end a small 2nd story above ground. Bottom floor will be 2 40' containers and 1 20" in a U shape giving a large area in the middle for living space and rooms to the side and rear.

Garage and storage will be another set of Containers with a breezeway between...

ISO containers are 8x20 and 8x40 standard sizes usually with one end having doors. These make excellent building blocks!

[Lamina]

This would be quite a project. If you had Home Designer Architectural or Pro you could create a custom wall type to represent the sides of the containers.

In Suite I think you would have to create containers using soffits or the Closed Box symbol from the library, which you would be able to block together and add back to the library as a custom symbol. You could then insert these into rooms with invisible walls of the same dimensions so that you have room definition.

Once you have them in place, unblock them and add your furnishings. The invisible walls will allow you to generate a roof over your containers.

Suite also has the ability to import symbols from outside sources. Like Google’s 3d warehouse. I’m not sure how they would behave in regards to whether you can place items within them or not but you could experiment.

[mray708923]

Yes, it would be important to be able to explode the block into constituent parts so that one could, for example, easily remove the corrugated metal from one side, if that were to open up to further living space. I bet there are blocks of this sort of thing available on the internet. Please post back here if anyone finds such a block. Thanks.

[mray708923]

For example, with an $18 membership, such files can be gotten here:

http://www.isbu-info.org/permalink/a...h-draw-cad.htm

That's probably what I'll do. The time it would take to draw one would be worth more than $18.