From the course: AutoCAD Architecture Essential Training

Creating floor slabs - AutoCAD Architecture Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Architecture Essential Training

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Creating floor slabs

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- [Instructor] We're starting another chapter now in our AutoCAD Architecture course and we're going to start looking now at working with floors. Up until now, our AutoCAD Architecture model has not had a roof or a floor, which are fairly commonplace things in the building otherwise you've got nothing to walk on. Now what I've got here is a new drawing for you, it's called floorslab.dwg. Now you will recognize it, it looks remarkably similar to some of the other AutoCAD Architecture models we've used. But this time we've got kind of half a floor slab in there, if you see what I mean. And I've got that in the isometric view there, so if we went to something like the southwest isometric view, like so, you'll see that zooms in a bit closer and you can kind of see the floor a little bit more there. Now, it doesn't matter which view you start in, it could be one of the other isometric views, I don't mind which one, let's say the southeast isometric, and that gives you a bit more of an idea of the actual sectional view there on the floor slab that's already in the floor slab drawing. So, how do we add a floor slab to our AutoCAD Architecture model? Well, what I'd like you to do is go to the top view in your model first. Now, you can this here, in the pull-down menu and select top like so, or you can use the view cube, I don't mind which. Now, you'll also notice that I'm using a visual style of shaded. Now, the reason I'm using that is cause you can actually see the floor slab in your drawing, like so. So, if I just roll back on the wheel a notch you can see there's a big gap here, a big hole here, and that's where we're going to place a rectangular floor slab. Now, in order for us to see the detail, what we're going to do is go over to shaded, and we'll change this back to something like 2D wireframe. Now, the reason I've done that is purely because we can then snap a lot more easily to elements in our drawing. Now, in order to create a floor slab you can do it in a number of ways. What I can do is I can go up here to the build panel on the home tab, click on the fly-out here, you've got roof slab, roof or slab. If you select slab, the properties pallet appears, as usual, you can click on browse here and pick a floor slab that you want. Now, the one that I'm going to use is this one here in the styles browser, the ground floor screed 75 insulation 40 slab thickness void 150 subsoil. It all sounds very wordy, just pick the top left one in the styles browser, double-click on it, and close your styles browser as usual. Now, read the command line when you're placing your floor. There's lots of settings and tools there and we'll cover some of those later on in the chapter. But the idea is you can specify the style of floor, the mode, the height, the thickness, the slope, some floors have a slope for drainage. The overhang, how far does it overhang into the wall, for example. Do you need to justify the wall or do you need to match it to an existing wall slab? Or more importantly, do you need to create your own wall type? Now, in this case, I don't want to create my own wall type so I need to specify the start point. Now, we've already got an existing slab in place, so let's zoom in over here, and you can just see the edge of the slab, it's that purple line there, like so, and there's an end-point there, like that. Now, what I might do there, in a moment, is change the color of the layer for this, because it's a little bit dark on the black background, but we'll do that in a moment so that we can visualize it a little bit more easily, so I'm going to click on the end-point there, that's the start point of my slab, so I zoom out a bit on the wheel, I come across like so, and I'm going to zoom in here and get in nice and tight, and you'll notice my polar tracking kicks in, so I want to go to that point, and that's the plaster edge, and then I want to line in here. Now, you'll notice my polar tracking gives me a little intersection there, just click there and then it goes against the wall, and then you'll want to zoom out again. Now, I'm just going to pan upwards and around and down, I'm coming down here, and you want your slab to go underneath the plaster, can you see the green line of the plaster there, on the wall construction? So you just want to make sure that goes and follows the wall line and not the plaster line. So, as I zoom out and come across now, I'm coming across, you can just see the intersection there, there's the end-point. And then last but not least, I need to zoom out again, and pan upwards this time, and you can see that you're working your way around the perimeter of this rectangular space. Now, you can see that this is taking a little bit of time to do. Bear in mind you might have a much, much more complicated wall edge to follow. Now, I've done a nice simple one here, so that you don't have to watch me clicking and clicking and clicking, and zooming and panning, and working my way around. But the idea being is you work your way around. So, there's my end-point snap there, I click there, right-click, and I close the slab. So now, I've got two slabs available to me in the floor of this building. Now what we'll do is we'll jump into one of the isometric views, but before we do that, just press enter to finish the slab command. Properties pallet disappears as usual. Then, we go over to the view cube, and I'm just going to go to my southwest isometric. Now, in the 2D wireframe, it looks really messy, I have to say, that's because it's just kind of showing everything, but you can just see, down the middle, look, there's one slab, and there's the edge of the slabs there, touching each other there, like so. If we went to something like realistic in our visual style, everything looks a lot more sensible. Or we might go for something like shaded, and again you can see much, much more sensible viewing and visuals there, you can see the slab, you can see the glass, you can see the brickwork and the blockwork. So, what we've done there is we've placed our floor slab in that rectangular hole that we kind of left behind. Now, what I'm going to do in the next video is show you how to modify your floor slabs. So, let's get going and we'll start looking at modifying our floor slabs next.

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