Adding walls - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, I'd like to show you the basics of the Wall tool. So let's get started by going over here to the Architecture tab and clicking on the Wall tool, or you can type the keyboard shortcut W + A. Now I'll get a little message there on the cursor telling me to click to enter the wall start point. When that tool tip disappears on screen, you'll see that it still appears down in the status bar in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. So just kind of keep an eye on those little tips because it usually helps you knowing what you should do next. So before I do that, before I click that first point, let me talk about the other parts of the user interface that have changed when I went to the Wall tool. Let's start with the Modify tab itself. Notice that the Modify tab is now called Modify Place Wall and it's tinted in this bright green color. Then immediately beneath that we have a draw panel with a number of shapes. So we're going to look at several of those shapes here in a moment. Now across the screen running horizontally is the Options bar. So it has a variety of settings that we're going to look at, things like height and chain and so on. And then finally, we also have the Properties pallet which will give us information about the wall that we're about to create here as well. So there's lots of places where you need to kind of keep an eye on, but all of those can be pertinent to your work using the Wall tool. So let's go ahead and get started by just clicking a few points here. And the first thing you're going to notice is the default behavior of the Wall tool is something that Revit calls chain. So what I'm going to do is just roll the wheel to zoom in a touch here. And notice that as I'm drawing one segment of wall, the next segment begins where the previous one ended. So they're drawing in sequence end to end. That's what Revit refers to as chain. Now if you look here on the Options bar, you will see that there is a checkbox controlling that behavior. So your first instinct might be that if you didn't want chain, you would need to uncheck that. So I'll place the last segment and then notice that I'm still in the Wall command, but now I'm no longer connected to the endpoint of the other wall. And if I draw a wall now, each segment that I draw is going to be independent of the previous one, okay? So that's if chain is turned off. If I turn chain back on again then it goes back to the default behavior. Now even though it's possible to turn chain off, I actually recommend that you don't bother, because what you can do as an alternative is use your Escape key. So if I press the Escape one time, notice that that will break the chain, but it keeps me in the Wall tool and I'm able to start a new chain. Press Escape that breaks that chain and I could continue from there. So yes, it's possible to check and uncheck chain, but I personally prefer to just use my Escape key instead. So that's the chain behavior. Let me zoom back out now give ourselves a little bit more room to work and let's now direct our attention to the draw box here and look at some of the other shapes. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. For example, rectangle. All that requires is two corners. So just drag two opposite corners and you're creating a rectangular shape. There are inscribed and circumscribed polygons. They both work kind of the same way. You're essentially drawing a circle and it is fitting a multi-sided shape within that circle. Now, I could just click, that's the center of the circle, drag it out, and there's my hexagon. You can change the number of sides right here. So I could do a seven-sided polygon, drag that out and now I have a seven-sided polygon and so on. This tool would work in a similar fashion, except that you'd be drawing to the midpoint of the edge instead of to one of the vertices. Circles work much the same way, click and drag from the center. You've got a variety of different arcs. I'm not going to show everyone, but I'll just start with this first one which is actually start center radius. So you draw the first point then you click the second point, those are the end points of the arc. And now you're setting the radius or the amount of curvature. Now you can do that on screen by just kind of clicking or I can click my next point and you could actually type it in. So I could type in a value for that radius and I need to type a valid value. So that value was not valid. Let me try that again. So I'll start from there to there. So look at the radius that it's starting to draw and do a number close to that. So let me do like 20 maybe, okay. If you pay attention, you can also get it to snap. So notice that I can kind of create a smooth curve in that way if I'm paying attention. And of course, as you can see, even though I'm drawing curve segments, I'm still drawing them in chain. So a lot of these features work together. So they're not all exclusive. We've got ellipses. And the way this works is you start at the center and you draw out half of, let me try that right here. You draw half of one axis, and then you come back and you draw half of the opposite axis. Now it's a little different when you do an elliptical arc or a partial ellipse because there you're going to draw out the full axis in one direction and then half of it in the opposite direction. So just something to keep in mind is that you just want to pay attention to the way you're being prompted. And after you've drawn these a few times you'll get the hang of it. Now, even though we drew a rectangle, a polygon, a circle, an ellipse, what we actually have are separate walls. So something to keep in mind is you're getting a curved shape, you're getting a circular shape, but it's really being made up of two arcs. You're getting an elliptical shape but it's really being made up of two elliptical arcs. Okay so after those objects have been created each wall is a separate item. Okay, so that's the absolute basics of just drawing the different wall shapes. What I want to do now is get rid of all those walls and move on to the next thing. So what I'm going to do here is click an empty space and do a selection like so that selects everything that we see on screen there, okay? And then I don't want to press Delete because I'll delete too much. So first I want to click the Filter button here. We talked about this in the video on selection a little bit earlier. I'm going to check none and then check the box for walls only. So this will ensure that when I press the Delete key now, I'm only deleting walls and it kind of gets me back to where I started from. So now what I want to do is draw some new walls a little bit more carefully. So I'm going to stick with the straight line here and I'm going to draw a little horizontal wall, just of a random length there. I'm going to press Escape one time. Now for that one, I accepted the default settings. And among those default settings was a top constraint at an unconnected height of 20 feet in the imperial file, okay? It should be something around 6,000 millimeters in the metric file. So I'm going to put in 15 feet in the imperial file or you can do about 4,500 millimeters if you're working in metric. And I'll draw another segment. And I'll press Escape. Now, I could continue in that fashion but Unconnected Height is just one of the options. In addition to that, you can also click this dropdown and you will see that there are the opportunity to use the levels in the file there as the top constraint. So what I'm going to do is draw another one that goes up to L2. Then I will press Escape one time, go up to L3. Press Escape one time, and then do one more that goes up to L4. And then I'm going to do one final wall here going in the opposite direction like so. So I now have this collection of walls kind of marching across horizontally and I want to look at all of those in elevation so we can understand what we've done with the heights. To do that, I'm going to open up this south elevation that I have down here at the bottom of the screen. So if you select the little triangle and then right-click, you should see a Go to Elevation View. I'll choose that and that's going to take me to that view. And I'm looking now at all these walls directly. So let me zoom in just a touch here. And let's start with the one on the far left. This was the original one that was just using the default height. You can change the height anytime you like to any other value. So it started off at 20 feet. I'm going to change it to 18 in the metric file. Maybe try about 5,200 millimeters for that. It's not really that important what number you choose. In fact, you can even use the little grip control here at the top and just sort of drag it manually, okay? The point is, is that these two walls here and here have their own explicit height. Now contrast that to the ones that we have over on the right. Here, this one is associated to level two, level three, and level four. What does that mean? Well now if I were to take the level, and move it which I'll do just simply by dragging, notice that the effect of moving the level has an impact on the wall. Now you can even take these ones that you started with that were unconnected and you can change your mind and make them connected later. So if I make that wall go up to level three. Now if I move level three, notice that it's affecting the height of both of those walls, okay? So the advantage of that is in a project that has lots of walls, would you rather select each wall individually and have to explicitly set its height, or would you rather have those heights controlled by the level so that if you just simply move a level it could be potentially changing dozens if not hundreds of walls? I think in most cases, associating the heights to the levels is going to be the better way to go. So the last thing I want to point out to you is that we've been kind of looking at the overall properties of the walls, but there's one more property that I want to make you aware of and that is the cross-section property of the walls. So I'm going to select this one that's perpendicular to the viewing plane and come over here to the Properties pallet and scroll down. And there is a Cross-Section feature. It defaults to Vertical, but notice there are three choices. Now we'll talk about Tapered in a future video, but let's just do Slanted for now, it's pretty straightforward. If I go to Slanted, you now get an angle parameter, and you can put in any angle you like. So if I put in a positive number, it's going to tilt to the left. If I put in a negative number, it's going to tilt to the right. And you can put in whatever number you like and play around with the sloping of that wall. Now that feature like all the other features, is independent of the other settings. So that means that if you go up and start playing with the height now, you could drop it down to level three and it will still maintain the 10 degree slant. You could change it to Unconnected even and then set an explicit height at some other value and it will still maintain that slant. So each of these features works independent of the others, but when you use them in combination, you can get some pretty powerful results. So spend a little bit more time in this file just experimenting with walls in general, looking at as many of the settings you can, and just you know, getting a general overall comfort level with the Wall tool. I mean, walls are the most basic component of any building after all. So it's definitely worth your time to get comfortable with them.