Placing the columns for the front porch

- [Instructor] Now that we have our foundation walls underneath our front porch, the next thing we need to do is add columns to the front porch, Which will hold the weight of the roof up above the front porch as it's coming down and then support it when it reaches the actual foundation walls underneath the front porch. To do this process, I'm going to zoom in to the lower left hand corner, and I'm going to use a process which will allow me to just draw in some lines so that I have an idea as to where each of these column locations should be at before I even start to draw 'em in. So what we need to do is go to the Annotate tab, select on Detail Line, and then find a spot which is right about here, right at the endpoint of this wall. And I know that the first column needs to be five foot zero and 3/8ths down from this point. So that's what I'm going to type in, five foot zero, space, three slash eight. And technically I could just hit Enter at this point, but I'm one of those people that just always likes to put the inch sign at the end, so I usually will. I'll hit Enter to that, zoom out, and now we can see that that five foot zero and an eighth, down in this direction, that's this point right here. The next thing that I'm going to do is draw a line from right about this point. One foot zero and 5/8ths to the right. So from the edge of the deck, I'm going to type in one foot zero, space, 5/8ths of an inch in this direction, then I'm just going to draw a line that goes straight up in this direction. Also, I want to draw a line that goes from the endpoint here all the way on over across my deck. So that's also a detail line. I'll pick the endpoint here and come across. And where each one of these lines is at will be representational of where I need to have my column locations. The next thing I want to do is bring a column in, and that column will be at the intersection of this line and this line, and that'll be the first column that we place. We can find our columns if we go to the Architecture tab. Then we'll notice that Column is one of the options. But I would click the little arrow next to the word Column, because there's technically two different kinds of columns in the Revit environment. One is a structural column and the other is an architectural column. For this example, I'd like to use an architectural column. After selecting on the architectural columns, if we look here underneath Properties, if I click, we can see that we have rectangular columns, but also loaded into this project is a rather decorative Doric column, and that's what I want to add to this project. So I'm going to select on the 10 by 10 Doric column, then move over here into this direction. Now one of the things you'll notice is that it doesn't automatically snap to these lines, so you just have to get it close. So I usually just zoom in by just spinning the wheel on my mouse, and then this cross hairs, that'll be the center of the column. So the second that you can no longer really see where those cross hairs are located at, you know that the column is probably in the right spot, so you just click once to place the column in, and then you can zoom out to see that column in that location. Now I'm going to hit the Escape key a couple times on the keyboard to get out of the command, and at this point I really don't need to have this line anymore, so I'm going to select on it and hit Delete. I really don't need this line anymore, so I'll hit Delete to that line. I don't need this line anymore because we've already centered the column, so I'll just hit Delete to that, as well. Now something that I know that I'll be doing is putting that exact same type of column in the same location, same distance away, over here on the other side. So to accomplish that, I'm just going to select on this column and then move up here to Mirror - Draw Axis. And there's really two different kinds of mirrors. One is the Pick Axis and the other is the Draw Axis. We'll be using the Draw Axis command. Then come down here to the front of your deck, and then when you see this triangular shape appear, click, and then just draw straight up. Now if I zoom in ever so slightly, you may be able to see a little bit of a line that shows up there, and that's the line that we'll be mirroring around. Once you get to that point, you can click, and see how it's mirrored around that axis point that you've just drawn, and now there's another column over here in the perfect location in that corner. The next thing that I want to do is to make a copy of this column which is just six feet away from where this current column is at. So select on the column, hit the Copy command, pick a point, move to the left, and then just type in six feet. Now we have this column, which is spaced six feet away from this column. So now the front of our building has three columns going across the front of the building. Now the next thing that we'll do is just click anywhere out in here. I'm going to hit the Escape key a couple of times and make sure that this object is no longer selected. Then because we have this column in the right place, we can now use it to create a column up here as well as another column over here. So select on this column, go here to the Copy command, make sure that Multiple has a check mark, put a check mark here, come straight up, click, come straight over, and click. Now we have columns that are lined up, in this case, with this one and this one, a column that's lined up from here to here, and they happen to be the same distance away from the edge in all those different locations. The next thing that we should do is just go ahead and remove this line that we had as reference before because we just don't need it anymore. So you can select on the line and then hit the Delete key on the keyboard. And now I'd like to make a change to the individual properties for each one of these columns. Now start by selecting on any of the columns, then hold down the Control key on the keyboard, and then with Control held down, select on each one of the columns. The first property that I want to change is the base offset, and this is all based off of the construction of the column that we placed here inside of our project. I happen to know from experience that it needs to be negative five inches down from the first floor level, so that's what we'll put. Base offset of negative five inches. Then we have the top offset, and that top offset should also be a negative number, and it should be negative one foot four inches. In fact, I don't even need that negative sign after the four. I'll just put the negative one foot four inches, like that. Now what that means is that the top of this column will be dropped one foot four inches down from the top of plate, and this will help with actually holding up the roof at a later time, one we come in and start to draw in the structural members that hold up that roof. Once that's accomplished, you pretty much just need to make sure that your cursor gets moved into this area, and it'll automatically take on those properties. And now we have columns in those places which have the appropriate heights. Now that we have our columns in place, let's take a look at it in a 3D view. So come up here to the default 3D view icon, click. Notice how we now have our columns in each one of these locations. I'll also want to point out that because these are architectural columns, they've actually started to take on the properties of the walls that they're associated with. As a result of that, they happen to have the same base properties, in this case, more of a CMU block look, here down here along the wall. Also, if we select on where it has the word Front and then take a look at it here, we can see how these windows are now centered between these columns. We can see how the door is almost centered in between these two columns, and we can see how these windows are just a little bit off centered in this case from these columns here. If we wanted to make an adjustment at this point so that everything was centered there in the view, we could actually do that at this point. To make those adjustments, you could in this case click on one of the windows, hold down the Control key, and then select on these two windows, then you could either use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge them over, or you can use the Move command, click at about the middle of one of these windows, and then let's start by just trying to move it over six inches and see what it does. See how it started to move it over so it's a little bit better centered in between these? Let's once again do the same thing, click, try to move it over six more inches, see if that helps at all. That's getting very close. I just want to move it over just a tiny bit more, maybe four more inches over into that direction, so I'm just going to click, use the Move command, type in four inches, hit Enter, and now we can see that these windows are basically centered in between these two columns. As far as the front door itself is concerned, it looks like that it's not quite centered in between these columns, so what I'll do is I'll just type in two feet two inches. That should get us pretty close to being centered. I'll click right here. And now we can see how the door is now centered in between these columns. By going through these steps, we can now see that all these architectural elements are now in the proper locations. It's really the proper way to go about doing architecture, trying to center your windows and your doors so that you have the proper view, that proper aesthetic, as you're looking at the front of your building from the street.