Attaching tops and bottoms

When you're working with walls in a floor plan, there's going to be instances where you're going to need to override the top and bottom constraints. There might be times when you're furiously and drawing the walls and you don't set those constraints. In other words, instead of setting the wall to level two, maybe you set it to level three or something like that. So you're going to run into these issues. You might also need to attach walls to a roof. Or go beyond a ceiling grid by a specific distance.

All these things can be taken care of within Revit's walls. So, let's take a look at it. Let's go to Floor Plans. And first floor. And you'll notice that one of the useful tools that you can use when working with a model, is to create a number of sections. These might be called temporary sections, but they might also expose problems that we might have. So let's take a look at what we have. Why don't you go to the project browser, and I want you to go down where there's a category called sections.

What we're looking at first is office wall, so click on office walls. Now in this section, you look closely. We have three walls that are part of our office partitions, and all they do is they go up to the ceiling grid. They do not go beyond the ceiling here. So, maybe what we'd want to do is have these partitions go up six inches above that ceiling line. We'll pick up this first one. And since it's an instance, you'll notice here that we have top off set at zero, which means that it's actually set to the first ceiling floor level.

And we're going to change that by coming in here to where it says top off set. I'm going to put a six in there and then hit Apply. And you'll see, it actually is now above the ceiling level by six inches. Now you can do the same for this one as well. Pick that, and come in and change this top offset to six inches and hit Apply. Now, this next one's a little bit different. You have a number of choices here that you can make.

We would most likely want this particular wall to connect to this beam let's say. And if we click on it you have basically a grip you can take this shape panel and actually move it up to there. Something like this. And then you could then lock it in. I'm going to do an Undo. You can also measure it, and take the measure from this point to the bottom, and it's about one foot two.

And by doing that, you can take this piece and then come over and set the offset at one foot two. And it too will go up to that size. Or, you can do another one, which is basically align. You can pick wall and zoom in. And pick the Align tool and we want to line it to the bottom of the steel. And click there and it will also align that way. So those are three ways to work on that one particular wall and then using offsets for the tops in order to go above a ceiling grid.

Now, let's take a look under sections Wall issue. So we're going to click on that and we'll zoom in on this first floor. And you'll notice that this particular wall is just floating out there in space. What we're going to have to do is make some changes to that too. So going over to Properties, you'll notice that the base offset is two feet, let's change that to zero. And the top offset, we can again change this by coming in. We know that it's about one foot two, so I'm going to put in one, two and hit Apply.

And you'll see now that that wall fills in the space, so now it's connected to the floor. And also to the steel above. So that takes care of the wall issue. The next one is a Stairwell wall. And in this case, this being a stairwell, most walls are supposed to go right up to the roof in order to have a good seal for fire protection. In this case, it doesn't. It's actually kind of short. If you look at it, here'e the wall.

And it's not meeting where the roof is. This is a steel beam. And the roof is up here. So, we're going to kind of zoom in a little bit, so you can see that a little bit more. And we're going to use another tool. We're going to go to the Modify Wall panel. And you're going to see one here that says attach top and base. So I'm going to click on this, and I'm going to basically select the roof. And by doing that, it will go ahead and attach that wall to the roof.

Now you can also use a detach tool if you need to. But that's generally how you would go about and change that. So by use that particular tool, the attach to roof tool, you can avoid having to manually edit the walls profile, when you make your design change. All you have to do is use that tool. You can modify and attach walls in any number of ways. Use top and base constraints to change the height of the walls. Use the Attach, Top, and Base tool to extend walls up to another element, such as a roof, a grid, or maybe even a grid line.

And in most cases, when working with walls, when you start to draw a wall, make sure in the beginning that you try to set the wall with the right constraints. Otherwise it turns out to be a lot of editing going back and forth.