Adding a flat-roof material - Revit Tutorial

I suppose the best roof to start with is going to be the easiest, is this the easiest, though? Well, what you're going to start to see is that roofs are all pretty much created equal, think about it. All roofs have some sort of structural elements, all roofs have some layer of either asphalt or rubber or EPDM to keep the water out. The objective of this video is to create a roof from scratch. We'll then edit the type and create the different layers that comprise a flat roof with four inches of insulation. Then we're going to plant the roof into our model to get started, let's open up our Revit's Roofs file. You can also open up any file that you've been working on that you want to put a roof on. In the project browser, let's make sure where on three roof. Let's go to the Architecture tab, now let's click the roof button. Make sure define slope is unchecked and let's set our overhang to zero. Let's go to our Properties tab. Let's make sure basic roof generic twelve inch is the current roof. Let's click on edit type, let's click duplicate, let's call it flat roof with four inch insul, click Okay. Make sure your preview button is selected so that we can see a preview of our roof as we build the structure up. On the structure row, click the edit button. In structure 1 between the two core boundaries. Let's click into the material category. In the material category lets click on the builder button right here. In the material browser make sure your show hide library panel is turned on. So we can see the outer desk materials. Let's click in to the search dialog and type c o n c. Let's grab concrete light weight, for the surface pattern, let's click on the Sand icon right here and let's click, No Pattern. The Cut Pattern, let's keep the Concrete, now let's hit OK, for the Thickness, type in six inches and hit Enter, be careful not to type in six feet. Now let's add some material above the core boundary to do that let's click on the row number one core boundary. Now let's click the insert button, for the function let's click the drop down and select substrate two. Under material, let's click into Material, and let's click the Builder button again. This time, let's type in insul. Perfect, let's select Rigid Insulation, and let's click OK. For our rigid insulation, let's give it a thickness of four inches and hit Enter. Let's add another layer on top of our substrate so let's click on our number one row, let's click insert, for the function let's make this Finish 1. In the Material category let's click into the box, and let's click the builder button right here. In the material browser, let's type in EPDM for our roofing membrane. Let's select roofing EPDM membrane and let's click OK. For the thickness, let's give it a quarter of an inch and then just hit enter. Let's click OK, let's click OK. Now, we want to put the roof on the inside face of all these walls. What I like to do is simply hover over one of these walls then, I'm going to hit my Tab key and select all of the walls. Before I do that though, on my drop panel, I want to make sure that I'm picking walls. That means when we're done with our roof and if the walls move, our roof is going to move along with it. So, I'm going to go ahead and hover over the inside face of this wall to highlight it, once it's highlighted I'm going to hit my tab key then I'm going to select. If you accidentally put your magenta line to the outside, simply click this little grip here, this will flip your roof in or out. Let's make sure it's the inside, in our properties, let's make sure that our base offset from level is set to zero and hit enter, we'll keep the rest of the settings as default. Once that's all set, go ahead and click the green finish edit mode button and hit Escape a couple of times. Let's go to our default 3D view, save the project if it wants you to. Let's check out our roof, it's a little bit high. So let's go ahead and push it down a bit. I'm going to select my roof, then we can control our height offset from level. Click into where it says Base Offset From Level. Let's type in minus 2 feet and hit enter and I'll just his escape a couple times. Notice that we can control the level of the roof. We can push it up or down. Now, if you move down to your lower right hand corner, you'll see a button that says select elements by phase, make sure that that red X is turned off. That way you can select your elements by phase. Now, once we have that selected all we have to do is hover over the roof and you'll see it'll select the entire surface, go ahead and select your roof. Notice that it gives you a transparency and it's easier to swing the 3D model around. Let's hit escape a couple times and we're all set. So really one size fits all, when we create a new roof be it flat or sloped, we still need to do this one procedure every time.