Adding walls - Revit Tutorial

- [Lecturer] Walls are your most basic element and just by any building. So in this video, we going to explore the wall tool and several of its most common options. So to get started, I'll go over to the architecture tab here and click the wall tool or you can type wa the keyboard shortcut for wall. Now, the first thing that'll happen is several things on the screen will change when you run the command. The first thing that happens is it takes us over to the modify tab and it adds place wall to the end of the modified tab. And it tints that tab in green. So directly beneath that we have several draw shapes that we can use. And we'll look at those momentarily beneath the ribbon the options bar activates, and there are several choices across there, and we'll explore a few of those as well. And then on the properties palette we'll also get access to several of the walls options. And then finally down at the status bar at the bottom of the screen, it says click to enter wall start point. So I will do that by just clicking anywhere on screen. Now, before you move your mouse the message changes to enter wall endpoint. And that just simply means move your mouse in the direction that you want to draw and click again to create this wall. Now notice that you can move in any direction that you like but it will snap to logical directions like horizontal or vertical, or even a 45 degree but you can also draw it randomly at any direction that you choose. Now that stays in the wall command. And it's trying to create a second wall that's connected back to the end point of the first one, level refers to this as chain. So a chain is just simply a series of lines or walls touching end point to end point. So if I start clicking additional points here I'm creating a chain of walls. Now you might be tempted to think that to break that chain you have to come up here and uncheck the box and that certainly would work. And as you can see now, if I draw walls they are not going to be created in chain. They going to be freestanding walls, but it turns out you don't actually have to uncheck that box ever. So what I recommend is leave the box checked. Let's draw another chain of walls here. And if you want to break that chain all you have to do is press the escape key one time. Now it's important that you press it only once. If you press it more than once it'll take you all the way out of the wall command. But notice that if I press it a single time I'm still in the wall command. It broke the chain and now I could draw a new chain, press escape again, it breaks that chain I could continue or if I press escape a second time that will take me all the way out of the command. All right? So that's the basic picks and clicks. Let's go back to the wall command and explore some of the shapes now we've got some obvious ones up at the top here. You can draw rectangles that's just two opposite corners. You can draw polygons from a center out to the edge and you can control the number of sides so I've drawn an eight sided one. I could change that to six and draw another one. So you can put in any quantity of sides you like there, we can draw circles and we've got several different types of arcs that are available as well. Now I'm not going to demonstrate every one of the arcs but I will look at this one start in radius arc because there's a tendency to make the wrong assumptions when you first use this. So a lot of folks think they're drawing along the curve with their three points, but it's actually the first point is one end of the arc. The second point is the other end, and it looks like you're drawing a straight line until you click it. Then you'll see that it turns it into a curve. And your final point here is actually designating the radius of this curve. Now you could do it by eye or you could just simply type in a number. So I'm going to type in 17 right there and press enter. And it will create an arc shaped wall with a 17 foot radius. Now this also supports chain. So I could click my second point and then draw another arc. And I'll just eyeball the radius that time or if you pay close attention on screen there's often these little onscreen indicators telling you about different relationships and in this case, if I click right here I'll be creating a tangent arc. So now I have a nice smooth curve flowing through those two arcs. And again, if I want to break the chain I can just simply press escape to get out of that chain and stay in the command. Now, the last tool that I'll show you with the ellipse tools. So we can draw an elliptical wall by clicking a center point and then drawing half of one of the axis and then half of the other axis. So it takes three clicks to do that. We also have the partially ellipse or an elliptical arc. This one is slightly different because you draw the full axis first in one direction and then you come back and draw just half of the axis in the other direction. If I cancel all the way out of this command either with double escape or the modified tool, come back and select that elliptical arc, I can use these end points at the end to customize how much of that arc I want to draw. So initially it does a full happy ellipse but then you can drag those grips to change that. Now with both the ellipse and the circle I want to point out that what it actually does is create two arcs touching end to end. So we've got two elliptical arcs here and two circular arcs right there. All right. So I'm going to start here in the lower corner drag a crossing selection through all of these walls and I want to delete them all but the trouble is if I press delete right now I've actually selected more than just walls. So you can see I've selected my elevation symbols out here. And so it's warning me that I'm about to delete all of my elevations. So let me cancel that. Click the filter button here on the ribbon and you want to uncheck everything except walls. So I'll leave walls checked, click, OK. And now press delete. And I've only deleted the walls and preserved my elevation. So it's always important to pay attention to warnings like that so that you don't inadvertently delete the wrong thing. So the next thing I want to do is talk about the heights of walls. So let's go back to the wall tool again and you can configure the height in two places either on the options bar or on the properties palette. All right. So you can see that currently the height is defaulting to 20 feet and that's an unconnected height. So let me just do a small segment of wall at that height, press escape one time to stay in the command and break the chain. I could click right in this field here and change that height to any value I like so maybe 15 feet and then draw a second wall right next to it, press escape one time. Now the other option is instead of typing in manual heights is we can use this dropdown here and change from an unconnected height to a connected height. Now, what that means is I'm going to let level two determine the height of this wall, press escape and you can do it here or you can also do it right here on the properties palette. So it's just phrased slightly differently. So here it says top constraint and it will say up to level three instead of just level three, like it did on the options bar. So it's really a matter of preference which place you do it you going to get the same result either way. So this last one, I'll go up to the roof and then I'll double escape to cancel the command. Now there's no way looking at this here in plan view to tell what height any of these walls are. So I'll switch to a South elevation here on the project browser, double click that to open it up. And now you can see the result of the walls that we created. Now, this one right here, we started with first and we set it to an unconnected height of 20 feet. So if I want to change that height, I can simply put in a new value here such as 18 and notice that it will change the height of just that selected wall. Now, if I select one, that's going up to a level it'll still report the height right here, 20 feet but I can't edit it, it's great out. And the reason for that is because we've attached the top constraint up to a level. So the way I would change the height of this wall is to actually move this level. So I'll just do that on screen by dragging it and notice that that takes the height of that wall along with it. So if I came back and selected one of these unconnected walls and connect it up to that same level notice that it inherits that height automatically. But more importantly, if we move the level later we're now changing the height of multiple walls with a single modification. So in a lot of your projects it will be advantageous to set the wall heights to the levels, because then you can just simply modify that level height instead of having to select what could be several different walls. So I encourage you to explore further here in this file with both the height settings of walls and with just getting comfortable with the different wall shapes and options on the options bar, the more comfortable you are with the wall tool, the easier it will be for you to do your first actual building layout.