Working with floors

The theme of the movies in this chapter will be sketch-based objects. What I mean by sketch-based objects is any object in Revit that you have to create a two-dimensional sketch in order to indicate the shape or overall form of the object. There are certain objects that Revit can't automatically assume the shape or the form for you. When you draw walls or doors or windows, you only really need a click a two, and Revit can do the rest. But when you want to draw, elements like floors or roofs or, stairs and railings, these objects require a little bit more, input from you in terms of what the shape and the form of the overall is.

So in this movie, we're going to look at floors as our first example of a sketch-based object. And I'm in a file here called, Adding Floors, so in the Architecture tab, we'll find the Floor Tool over here, I'm going to simply click on that. If you use the drop down portion, make sure you're choosing Floor, Architectural, for this example. I'm just going to click the button here, that's actually the Default Floor button. And, this takes me into, Sketch Mode, this mode that I am, talking about here. Now, I know I'm in Sketch Mode because, a few things happen on screen. The drawing window grays out, and kind of becomes like an underlay.

The Ribbon tab tints in this greenish color and. Right here on the ribbon we get this Mode panel with these two big buttons, we've got the big red x and the big green check box. Those buttons are important because those are the only ways out of, Sketch Mode. So if you change your mind about being in Sketch Mode you use the big red x and that cancels the command. If you, want to complete your sketch, you use the big, green check box and that finishes your command. There's no other way to get out of here, you can't press Escape, you can't click the Modify Tool.

Those are the two tools you use. So as a general rule of thumb, stay on the Modify tab when you're working in Sketch Mode, because if you click on one of the other tabs here, you'll see that those buttons aren't available. And you kind of get lost and you're not really sure what to do next, so make sure you stay over here on the Modify tab. Every thing you need to do in a sketch, is going to be right here on this tab. Now usually it starts with, the Draw panel over here, and the various tools that are available to us. With the Floor Object we can draw Boundary Lines, slope arrows, or we can change the span direction.

Boundary Line is the default that's already chosen for us. So, I'm going to keep that, selected. Over here, we can draw any shape we like. Lines, rectangles, circles. There's a default, selection here. Pick Walls. We're going to stick with that. This is a really handy tool because it allows us to just click on, the underlying walls in the background drawing area, and it will create sketch lines that match the shape of those walls. Can be really helpful. Now on the options bar we have one other really helpful setting. Extend Into Wall Core.

Now that's only available if you choose, Pick Walls. If we had Line, or Rectangle or any of the other shapes that check box goes away. But when I have Pick Walls, this Extend Into Cores here, and here's how that works. If I click on the wall you'll see that I get a sketch line. That sketch line matches the overall extent of the wall. Let me zoom in, and take a look at where that sketch line occurred. Now I'm going to click my Modify Tool here to cancel. Out of the command so I can actually select this sketch line.

You see that that sketch line is right there on the, edge of, the interior line in the wall. That interior line is the, face of the core. Now, if I slide this over just a little bit, I'm holding in my wheel, and dragging. There's a flip grip right here. If I click that, that'll actually flip to other side of the core, but if I, zoom in just a touch more, you can see that it's actually the other side of the core. The, Drywall Line, which is this grey line here, still occurs a little bit further, away from that.

So when you've got the, extend into wall core, that's what you're doing is you're either on the inside face, or the outside face of the core. Now I'm going to zoom back out, and, continue adding sketch lines here. So I'll go back to the, Pick Walls option. And I'm going to make sure I'm clicking, Exterior Walls. I mean, you can click Interior Walls too, but in this case that's not what I want. Keep going around, like so. This front wall is actually in two pieces. So I'm only going to pick one of those, pieces there.

I don't need to click both. You could click both, but my preference is to have a cleaner sketch where I have a single line going across. So I'm going to use my Trimming Extent To Corner, command. We looked at that when we were drawing walls in an earlier movie. And I'm going to click these two, sketch lines here and clean them up to a corner. One of the rules of a sketch is, the sketch has to be, enclosed. You won't get a, valid floor object if the sketch is not enclosed. So, I'm come up here and I'll click my, green check box, my finish edit mode.

And that will, complete the, floor object. Now, I'm getting a message here from Revit, it says would you like, the walls that go up to these floors, level, to attach to the bottom. We're going to cut a section here in a few minutes to take a look at what it's really talking about here. But what it's saying is the walls underneath this floor, do I want those to come up and attach to this floor. Now, in this case, I'm actually going to go ahead and answer No, here, because the walls that it's talking about. Are around the perimeter of the building, they're foundation walls. And, that's not really the result that I want. But we'll, say, Yes, to that question in the next floor that we draw, and you'll see, we'll be able to contrast the two behaviors.

Okay, now the floor remains selected. And of course, if I wanted to, I could make modifications to it. Now, to do a modification, you could actually use this Edit Boundary button right here. That would take you back into the sketch and then you could make any changes that you wanted to. If I changed my mind about the shape of this floor, and I want to make it some other shape. In this case I'm just going to cancel though, and discard those changes, so let's go up to, level two and let's add a second floor object, here on the second floor. So I'm going to go back to, the Architecture tab, click the Floor button again All the same defaults, apply, so I'm going to accept all of those.

And I'm going to pick, these exterior walls, right there, but then I'm going to stop and go to my Trim Tool, because in this area here I have a double volume space, so that's open to below, so I'm just going to trim this. To this, to make it a nice corner, and so I'll get an edge over here. However, if we zoom in in this little area here, that would make it a little difficult for the stair to take us up to that floor area. So, we need to, create a little extension over here. And I'm going to do that by just drawing, the shape that I want.

So, here's an example where, Pick Walls wouldn't really help me. So, I'll just, draw a line here. Draw another line there. And then I'll just trim it up. This one to this one. Remember to pick the lines you want to keep. If I undo that, and I do this, I don't get the results I want. So you, pick here and then this is the side I want to keep. So remember to do that, and then this one to this one. That makes a nice corner there and there. I click Finish. I'm going to get that same question again, and this time I'm going to say Yes.

And then it asks me a second question. And here you can see it's highlighting the, exterior walls here. So I'm going to say, Yes, again, and now I'm going to cut a section and I'm going to show you what all of that did. So, I'm going to zoom out here a little bit. And, up here on my Quick Access tool bar I have my Section button, so I'll go ahead and click that. And I'll just draw a section through this area right here. Now you can see that when you draw a section it's just two clicks. This dash box is telling me which part of, the building will be included in the section.

We're going to be, standing here at this line looking this way. And, if I, deselect it and just double click on there it will open up that section. Now, let's go ahead and, zoom in. On these two floors that we just created. The first question said, do you want the walls that go up to this floors level to attach to the bottom. They were talking about these walls right here. So you can see that, this wall is attached to the underside of this floor. Over here, the second question asked, do we want the floor object to, join geometry and connect to exterior walls.

Now, we said, No, to the question when we did the first floor slab. Because, what it would've done is, like here where it cut these walls down to attach to this floor, it would've done the same thing with these foundation walls, and we'd have a funny little notch here. Now, if I don't like that condition right there, I can manually clean that up, by going to Modify, clicking, Join Geometry, and I go, this object should join to that object, and it will clean that up for me. So, to create floor slabs in your model, it's a sketch-based object. Sketch-based objects are generated from two-dimensional sketches.

In this case drawing in a floor plan. You can generate that sketch from the surrounding wall, or you can dry it line by line. When you create the sketch, Revit will create the 3D, geometry that's needed for your floor slab.