From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

Creating floors - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

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Creating floors

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- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to add some floor elements to a building model here. So floor elements are just simply the horizontal planes in the building. They represent the actual floor slabs, and to create them, we go into a special mode called sketch mode. So let's go ahead and get started. On the architecture tab, we're going to use the floor button. Now you really only need to click the top half of this button, but if you prefer to use the dropdown, just make sure you're choosing the floor architectural option. It's the same button as the one at the top there. That brings us into sketch mode. Now what is sketch mode? Well, it's got some pretty noticeable characteristics. The first is that the drawing window grays out and becomes kind of half tone, okay? So that's one clue that we're in sketch mode. The next is that the modify tab of the ribbon is now tinted in this greenish color. And then perhaps the most noticeable feature of sketch mode is the presence of the cancel and finish buttons right here, and those buttons are used to get you in and out of sketch mode. So the only way that we can leave this mode is to either cancel it with the red X or to finish it with the green checkbox, and we'll see those in just a few moments. But before we do that, let's talk about the other default settings that are in place here. Notice that this boundary line tool is already active. We're going to leave that. Notice that here in the draw toolbox, there's lots of shapes, but the pick walls tool is already active. We're going to keep that. Now, when pick walls is active, here on the options bar, you will also have this check box for extend into wall core. We're going to leave that checked, okay? So it should already be checked, but we're going to make sure that it is and leave it that way. Finally, the default type that we're using here in this file is generic 12 inch if you're working in Imperial or generic 300 if you're working in metric. So if any of those settings weren't in place, then go ahead and configure those now to match my screen, and then let's get started by selecting our first wall. So I get a little tooltip there that says pick walls to create lines. I'm going to pick this top wall here, and when I do, it's going to trace over it with this magenta-colored line. Now you'll see that there's this little flip control on that line, and if you zoom in a little bit more closely, you can kind of see what's going on here. Now we're working in the L1 working plan in this file, so you can see down here, and I previously set this to medium level of detail, and with medium level of detail, you can see that the layers of the internal structure of the wall assembly are showing, and that magenta line is on the face of the inside of the core. Now if you were to click the flip grip, it will move that magenta line out to the outside face of the core, but notice it doesn't go all the way out to the exterior of the wall, and that's because there's a small layer of drywall there that accounts for a little bit of additional thickness. So when you do extend into core, you're tracing either the inside or outside face of the core of the wall. Let's make sure it's the outermost face, and then I'm going to zoom back out and continue here. So just verify that all your settings are still in place, boundary line and pick walls, and then I'm going to continue around like so, and stop right there. I'll do this short wall here and the horizontal here and there, and I'm skipping this one at the front. Notice that at the front, this is in two pieces here, okay? So I'm not going to pick the long lateral one off to the right there. Now in order for us to be able to click the finish checkbox, we must have a valid sketch. A valid sketch is an enclosed loop or an enclosed ring. If you tried to click finish, it will generate a warning down in the lower right hand corner. Now it will highlight the offending area in orange on screen, and of course, that's the area where we didn't draw a sketch line, and of course, you're seeing that the error is telling us that we must have a closed loop. Now if you click quit sketching, it's going to cancel all the way out of the command, so don't do that. What we want to do is continue and just fix that problem. So there are two easy solutions. You can either touch this wall and add another sketch line. I don't personally like having two sketch lines touching endpoint to endpoint like that, so what I prefer to do instead is go to trim and extend a corner, and I'm going to take this small line here and trim it up to this one, and that will achieve the same result but it will make this one continuous line across the front there. Honestly, you can do it either way, though. It really doesn't matter, and now you should be able to click the green finish checkbox to complete the sketch. Now when you do, you'll get this message asking what you want to do with the overlapping walls. Now we don't see those overlapping walls in this view. I'm going to show them to you a little bit later. But for now, what I'd like you to do is just say don't attach, and I'll come back and discuss that topic a little bit more later on. So in the meantime, you can see the floor shape has been created and it's still selected, and if you notice that there's something wrong with it and you want to make a correction, notice that there's an edit boundary button right here. You can click that and go right back into the sketch. You could select something that you want to change. You could modify it. And then as long as you still have a valid shape, you could click finish and complete that sketch and it would modify it based on your changes. If you change your mind and you want to go back to the original, that's when the cancel edit mode would come in. So if I click cancel, it will warn me, are you sure I'm going to discard your edits? I'm going to say yes here, and it goes back to the original shape, which is what I wanted in this case. So that's the basic workflow for creating a floor. It's a pretty straightforward process. So let's repeat that process on the second floor. So I'm going to double click L2 Working, and that opens up that floor plan, and now let's just go through the whole process again. So I'm going to go to the floor button. That puts me in sketch mode. I'm going to accept all the defaults again, and I'm going to pick the top edge, this one over here. I got the wrong one there, so let me do a control-Z to undo that and try again. This one over here, this one at the bottom, and this one right here. Now in this case, I want a double volume space here next to the stairwell looking down over a balcony, so I don't want to continue around that opening. So what I'm going to do instead is go to my trim and extend to corner, pick the vertical line right here, and then it matters now which side you click on the horizontal line. Don't click this side, because it will give you the wrong sketch. You want to click the side you want to keep, so I want to keep to the left, and that will enclose that shape there over on the left. Now I'm going to click the modify tool to finish and zoom in here at the stairs. This is a valid sketch and I could click finish edit mode. The trouble is, somebody coming up the stairs here wouldn't be able to get across to this landing, so we need to adjust the shape of this just a little bit more. So what I'm going to do for this is, here in the toolbox, I'll scroll up and I'm going to just use the straight line tool. I'm going to trace right along the front edge of the stair, pull it laterally across in a horizontal direction here, and I'm going to go one-foot-six if you're working in Imperial, or 450 millimeters if you're working in metric. And then I'm going to pull it down at a 45 degree, and I'll just sort of stop right about there. I'm going to click the modified tool to finish, go to trim and extend a corner, take this horizontal line at the top, and extend it to this vertical one that I drew here. Take this diagonal line and trim it down to this vertical one here. Again, remembering to pick the lower portion, 'cause that's the piece that you want to keep. So now that floor shape makes a little bit more sense and allows folks to get up the stairs properly, so let's click finish, and this time, we're going to get two questions. So we're getting that same question we saw earlier about the walls that go up to this floor. Now last time, we clicked don't attach. This time, I want you to click attach, and again, I'm going to show you what that did in just a moment. That zooms us out and takes us to this message. This one is a little bit more visually confirming here, because it's highlighting all of the exterior walls and asking us if we want to do a joint geometry operation on those situations, and I'm going to answer yes here. Now to really understand what both of those questions did, and to understand why we didn't answer yes the first time, let's cut a section through the model and take a look. So to create a section is easy. You just come up here on the quick access toolbar and click the section tool, so I'm going to do that, and then I'm going to start just outside of this window, click and drag to the right a little bit

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