Creating floors - Revit Tutorial

- In this video we're going to add floor elements. Now floor elements will be the first look that we take at something that Revit refers to as a sketch based element. Now, what a sketch based element is. Is it simply means that it's an object that requires more than a click or two in order to create. If you think about all of the elements that we've created so far. Walls, doors, windows, components. They've all required just a click or two. But in the case of a floor element, we're going to need more than just one or two clicks in order to indicate the shape of that floor. So for example, in this building. I want to create a floor slab that goes around the entire perimeter of the building there. And it has a custom shape. So, in order to create that shape I need to sketch it. So, Revit will take us into a sketch mode and then we'll be able to draw the shape of that floor using a variety of tools and create that shape and then execute the floor. So let's go ahead and take a look here. I'm going to go to the architecture tab and then here's the floor button right here. Now this is a split button. So you really just need to click the left-hand side of the button. But if you do click the dropdown, it's just the first item on that dropdown floor architectural. Now, when you do that, it takes you into sketch mode. Now you can tell you're in sketch mode in a couple of ways. The drawing itself grays out and becomes kind of a halftone. The ribbon tints in this greenish color. And then, if you look at the ribbon tab, it says, modify, create boundary. And then finally, the mode panel will appear on the ribbon as well. And there's two buttons there, finish and cancel. And those are the only two ways to get out of sketch mode. Now, sometimes new users get lost when they go into sketch mode. They click a tool that takes them here and then they get confused. And they're not really sure why they jumped over here and why everything changed. So they start clicking back on the other tabs looking for some sort of clue. And you'll notice that everything is grayed out here. Then you start getting a little panicky. You start pressing escape. Escape will not get you out of sketch mode. All escape would do would be to turn off the default buttons that are set here. There's only two ways out of sketch mode. Finish your sketch or cancel it. So, we want to obviously keep going with our sketch mode. So we're not going to press either of those buttons just yet. So, when you get into sketch mode just make sure that you stay on the modify tab is really the best advice that I can give you. All right. So here we are in the modified tab then, and let's look at the default draw modes that have been enabled for us. On this draw panel. There's actually three draw modes. We can do boundary lines, slope arrows or span directions. And boundary line is already chosen by default. So we're going to accept that. For the draw shapes, we have lines and rectangles and circles. But, there's an option right here called pick walls. And that's already chosen by default. Now pick walls is really handy because you can just click on an existing wall in the drawing window and it will trace over that wall with a sketch line. So that's a really quick and easy way for us to create most of our floor slab geometry. Now, when you do pick walls, there'll be an option right here called extend into walls core. Now that's checked by default. So if I zoom in here at the corner, what you can see is that the sketch line actually went to the face of the core. If I pan over slightly here, there's a small flip grip right there. And if I click that notice that it would flip the sketch to the inside face of the core. Now I think the outside face makes a little more sense here. So I'm going to flip it back, but the core can be either inside or outside face. So you have that control. Now, when I click a second wall, notice it will also see where that walls core is regardless of where you click the wall. So, when you have extend into all core that's what it's going to do. So let me zoom back out and let's keep going around the perimeter of the building here. And, in this location here there's actually two walls. Now Revit would allow you to click both of them and you could have a sketch that had two lines touching end point end point. But I typically prefer to just do one and then use trim and extend to extend this one over to this one. Now it's really up to you whether you want to pick both of them or do the extend trick. But the rule here is that you have to create an enclosed sketch. So, what that means is, if any part of this is missing. If I undid that last and I left this gap here and I try to finish. It's going to generate a warning telling me that I don't have a valid sketch. Now, if you quit sketching, it's going to cancel the whole command. Don't do that. Click continue and then just go ahead and trim it up. And now when I click finish, I'll get a valid sketch. Now, Revit it's going to ask us a question here. It's going to say what I like the walls to go up to this floors level to attach to the bottom. For now I'm going to answer no on that. And I'll show you what that question meant in just a moment. Notice that when the floor is selected, there's an edit boundary button right here. That means that if you realize there's something about the shape that you want to change, you can simply click that edit button and your back in the sketch. And now you could make whatever modifications were necessary and then finish the sketch. Now I don't actually want to go through with any of those changes that I made. So I'm going to use the X instead to cancel and it will warn me, are you sure? And I'll say yes. So, that's our first floor slab element. Now let's go up to the second floor and create another one. So I'm going to go up to level two and go back to the architecture tab, click on the floor button again and accept all the same defaults. So boundary line, pick walls, extend into core. Now, this time I'll pick the top line here. The left, the bottom and just this vertical one here. I don't want to pick these two because this area here I'm going to make a double volume space. So I want my floor to go past that. So that means I'll switch over to my trim and extend command. And I'll select this sketch line here. And then remember it matters now what side you pick. So don't pick this side that would give us the wrong sketch like so. I'm going to undo that. You want to pick this side which will create a rectangle shape over here. Let's zoom in, in this location by the stair. And if I left the sketch like that it would be a valid sketch. Revit would be happy. But, anybody walking up those stairs would not be very happy because there's no way to get to the second floor. So what you can do is actually switch to just a simple line tool here. And, I'm going to draw a line that traces along the edge of the stair and then comes back to this location here. Now once again, if I tried to finish that's not a valid sketch. Because it doesn't form an enclosed shape. So what I want to do is click continue here. Go to trim and extend. Trim this to the bottom portion and trim this across to here. And now I have a valid enclosed shape. And when I click finish, that will complete the floor. Now this time it's going to ask me that same question again about walls that go up to this floors level. This time I'm going to answer yes. And then it will zoom out and ask me a second question. And this one is a little bit easier to understand because it's highlighting all of the exterior walls of the building and asking me if I want to join the geometry there. So let's say yes on that as well. Now, to understand what those questions were asking and what effect that had on the model. Let's create a section view that cuts through this model and take a look. So you can create a section either on the view tab right here or the tool is actually up here on the quick access toolbar as well. Now, all you need to do is click two points to create a section. So I'm going to click right outside this window here. And then pull it across horizontally to the other side of this exterior wall here. And notice that the section box automatically senses where the building is. So I'll click away from it to de-select it. And then I'll double click the blue section head to open up that section. Now I'm going to zoom in over here on this bay on the left-hand side. And let's talk about what those two questions were asking. So, the first question asked on level one, whether we wanted the walls that went up to that floors level to attach to the bottom. We answered no in level one, but we answered yes on level two. So, here's the wall that we answered yes to. Now to do that manually, there are buttons right here. Attached top and base and detached top and base. Had I answered no to that question. Like I did on level one and I detach it from this floor. Notice that the wall would have gone through the floor. So when you choose attach what it does is it just drops that down and connects it to the underside of the floor. So if I had done that over here, the walls it was about were these foundation walls. And, I don't think that would have been the result we wanted. Because now you'd have this unnatural notch right there. So, I'm going to undo that. And that's why I answered no, the first time around. Now, the second question asked if we wanted to do join geometry along the perimeter. Join geometry is a command that's on the modified tab right here. And if you click the dropdown next to it, we have unjoin geometry. So if I unjoin this from this, you can see what it would've looked like had I answered no to that question. So, with joined geometry, you just select one object and then the second object and they joined together and that's a nice cleaner intersection. So, I'm going to stay in that command and perhaps that's what I'd actually want to do here and here. So even though it didn't ask me if I wanted to join geometry in that situation, you can do it manually if you want, just by cutting a section and going ahead and picking the two objects. So floor elements are our first look at a sketch based object. And that just simply means that in a plan view, we sketch out the shape of the object that we want. And when we click finish it gives us the 3D element complete with its floor slab thickness.