From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial)

Locating walls - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2019: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial)

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Locating walls

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- [Instructor] In the last several movies we've been working with walls and doing a lot of general exercises to get you comfortable with working with walls and understanding the various properties. In this movie, we're going to actually start laying out a real project. So we're going to lay out a small two-bedroom condominium unit, and I've already provided the outline of the condo unit here for us to get started. And we'll be placing the interior walls. Now you remember the primary method that we're going to use is sketch then modify. So we're going to sort of rough out the locations of where we want the walls to be and then we'll come back and use techniques that we've already discussed to shift those walls around and reposition them to their proper locations. So let's start with the Wall command, or you can type W A, the keyboard shortcut. The Straight Line option is perfectly fine for these walls. I do want to change the type of wall that we're using, so I'm going to open up the type selector here and select one of my interior partition types. So this interior four-and-seven-eighths inch partition has a stud layer for the core, and then a layer of drywall on each side, which is pretty standard interior construction. Now I'm going to leave wall center line, 'cause I think that's the most logical choice for interior partitions. And for the height of the wall, I want it to go up to level two. So I think that makes sense as well. Now, if you move your cursor nearby an existing wall, it will highlight either the face or the center line of that wall and it will give you a small little temporary dimension to kind of indicate about how far you are off the end. So notice that it just sort of does that on its own. Now if I'm closer to this side, the dimension'll go to that way, or this side it'll go that way. Now I don't particularly care exactly where it is. I just want to kind of click a little bit more to the right, pull that wall a little bit down, and then kind of bring it over and make a little room up in the top corner. I want to divide that room in half with a second wall. And notice that as you draw each of these walls, they'll automatically clean up and cap off the intersections for you. Now I'm not really paying too much attention to exactly how big these spaces are. I'm not really that concerned with that yet. I just want to do that sketch then modify. Now if you happen to click on the edge of the wall, and the edge of the wall, it might stay connected. So you can just simply press the Escape key one time to stay in the command and allow you to disconnect and then go and draw the second one. So if you try to get it to go to the center lines, it will disconnect the chain on its own. And then I want to go ahead and rough in a closet here. So what I've got is a bedroom and a bathroom, a smaller bathroom, a walk-in closet, a small closet, and another bedroom. So I'm going to click the Modify tool and cancel out of there. And now that I've kind of roughed out those spaces, I want to now start fine-tuning them and adjusting the layout. So in previous movies, we talked about the way to do this. You select the wall that you want to move. In this case, I'll start with this wall over here, the first one we drew. And then, remember that you have these temporary dimensions that appear on screen. However, if you look carefully you'll notice that the witness line is going down the center of this wall, and the center of this wall. And it might be more convenient to actually set these dimensions from the faces of the walls. So remember that we can click the witness line grip and then click it again to move it to the inside face of that wall. And I'll click it, and click it again, to get it to the inside face of the other wall. Then I'll activate the dimension, type in the value I want, just a nice round nine feet, and press Enter. And of course whatever wall I have selected, that's the wall that's going to move. Now, at this point you might be anxious to move over to the next wall over here. And you immediately come over here and click in this dimension and type in the value you want. But of course the error in doing that is forgetting to change the selection. Notice that it just moved the same wall back again. So I'm going to do Control Z to undo that. So when you have a wall selected, it's important to remember to change selection to the next wall that you want to move before you go in and change the values. Move your witness line grips, move your witness line grips, and then change the value. Now another thing that you'll notice here is when you select the wall, and let me change my grips to the inside faces. When I move this wall, I want you to watch the connections of all four of these other walls. So I'm going to set this one to 10 feet. It's only going to move a little bit. So that one wasn't really maybe a great example. Let me do it at 12 feet so you can see it. Notice how it stretches the length of all the other walls. So that's another very powerful feature that we kind of get automatically. That's just built into Revit that walls will stay joined with one another as you move them around. I'll change selection, edit my witness line grips, and type in the value I want. So things are moving along fine. But maybe I'm getting tired of clicking those witness line grips and changing them each time. So let me just click an empty space that deselects everything. And I'm going to switch to another file. And I just want you to kind of look at this file here. I have provided this file in the exercise files, but there's really no reason for you to open it. The maroon layer is the core of this wall. And I just highlighted that maroon just to kind of really emphasize where the core of these walls is. There's a setting we can configure that controls how temporary dimensions will behave. And we have these four options. Center, Finish Face, and the Core. Furthermore, with Doors and Windows, we can set the dimensions to do the opening themselves, or the center line. Now let me show you where that command is. I'm going to go back to our plan here, go to the Manage tab, and open up Additional Settings. Down toward the bottom we have our Temporary Dimensions command. And when we edit that, we'll get this temporary dimensions properties dialogue, and there are the four options for walls that I just illustrated, and here are the two for doors and windows. So I personally like it to go to the faces of the walls, that's the finished face rather than the core. And the openings for doors and windows. And when I click Okay, now what will happen is when you select a wall, notice that the grips will automatically go to the faces of the walls without your having to click the witness line grips. Now you certainly could still click the witness line grips and move them. But you shouldn't need to do that anymore because of this new setting. The width of this closet is five. The width of this toilet room is five. The width of this one is also five. This right here is four. And the size of this closet will be two foot six. Now remember when in Imperial, you either do two foot-symbol six, or two space six. So the basic process we want to follow when doing a wall layout is to simply sketch-in the walls in roughly the locations that they need to go, and then you come back using either the temporary dimensions or modify tools and refine that layout by moving the walls into more precise locations.

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