Develop an understanding of the process involved in integrating a roof system into a house elevation model. Gain insights into the steps of using the trim, extend, mirror, and copy commands in the architectural software to incorporate the roof system into the house model.
Key Insights
- The article provides a comprehensive walkthrough of incorporating a roof system into an elevation model of a house. This involves the usage of multiple commands such as trim, extend, mirror, and copy in the architectural software.
- The roof system was built using a truss system typically manufactured offsite and brought onto the project. The vertical stud, two horizontal top plates, and the truss were the main components used in the construction of the roof system.
- The article also explained the process of vertically centering the house within the drawing, providing a detailed account of how to use the ‘move’ command to achieve the desired placement of the house in the model.
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We have spent the past few minutes bringing our elevation model file into our A3.1 sheet file. What I would like to do in a couple of minutes is to go back into the elevation model itself and to start putting our roof system on, but I'd like to explain the roof system to you. This is a different house.
This is a house that we've used similar to the ones that we used in CAD 101 and 201, but it's conventional wood framing where we have our studs that are going vertically. We have two top plates, which are two by fours that are laid flat, and then our truss system is typically manufactured offsite and brought onto the project. What you can see, though, is I have the vertical stud, I have the two horizontal top plates, and here I have the truss.
Where my green axis is, my Y axis, you can see that the truss is sitting right on top of the top plate. This is where the finished floor line segment that we are using in our elevation is coming from. What is the red finished floor line in our building elevation file is this top of top plate that's right there.
You can see that I have a two by four whose base is sitting right at the corner of the outside of the building and the top of the top plate. I will now go over to my elevation model file, and I will continue being on my heavy layer. I'm going to draw a line from the end of here at 12 feet comma 5 feet.
That line right now is representing the bottom of the truss. I'm going to offset that by three and a half inches to represent the thickness of the truss, control S to save. I'm not going to worry about putting the plywood on top of the roof.
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We know that it would be there. I'm going to let this represent the top of the roof. I can now erase out this lower line and control S to save.
I'm now showing where the top of the roof is, but I need to find out how far the roof will be extending beyond the house. I'm going to go into layers, and I'm going to go into my plan model X ref, and I will turn on my roof layer. What I'm going to do in this file is to map it to being white so the roof layer is white so that it will show up more clearly for us.
You can see there's the roof. If I now draw a line from the end of here straight down, and then if I extend to that line, this line segment here, I'm now showing how far the truss system will extend beyond the edge of the house. I can now erase out the guideline.
We're going to be using a two by six, so I'm just going to offset by five and a half inches this line and go down, control S to save. I now am showing the fascia component of the house. I can now draw a line from the end straight down, and I can extend to this line, the lower segment of the roof, and I can trim.
I'm going to use the extend command just to show you. I'm going to say extend. I will choose this because that's my bounding edge, enter, and I'm going to hold down shift and select here.
When I'm in the extend command, if I want to trim something, I can select down shift to trim it away. I'm just going to show you something. Here's a line, here's a line, and here's a line.
If I were to say trim, and if this is my cutting edge, enter to say I'm done, if I hold down shift and pick up here, it will extend to that entity. If I now move this line from here to here, and again I'm in trim, I say this is my cutting edge, enter to say I'm done, and I hold down shift, I'm actually using the extend command. If I go to the extend command, and I use this as my cutting edge, and I hold down shift, and I pick that, that will trim it away.
It's just a little quickie shortcut that sometimes you don't have to go back and forth between trim and extend. You can just use the shift key to make it work for you. I'm now going to draw a line, because I want to work on the fascia, from here straight over, and draw a line from here straight over.
I'm not worried about the length right now, because I'm going to clean that up. I just used this line here as a guideline for knowing where the edge of my eave is going to be. I can now erase out this lower line, and I'm going to begin multiple copying.
You need to pay attention to some of this stuff, but right in through here is the front bedroom that pops out. What I'm going to do is I'm going to say copy the angled line from the extension of the wall and the plate line over to here. Then I have my garage doors, and it's extending over to there.
I'm then going to copy this segment from the end to the end to the end over here at the garage, and I'm going to do some mirroring. I'm going to draw a line from boundary, I'm going to draw it from here to here, which are the outside perimeters of the bedroom pop out. I will now say mirror.
I will select this segment and this, enter to say I'm done, from the mid of that angled line straight up. I'm now going to trim. I'll do it the conventional way, trim crossing, pick that off.
I can also say trim, and I can choose these line segments, because they will be concealed behind the fascia. Then I'm going to erase out this line here, control S to save. Going to do a similar thing at the garage.
I will draw a line from the plate at the top to the plate at the bottom, and I will mirror a window and this entity from the mid of the angled line straight up. Fill it, F enter for fill it. I look at my radius at zero.
I go pick, pick, enter. I'm going to go in and choose trim, select this, and make these entities go away. Once again, come into trim, and I will select these entities right there, and erase out, E space bar for erase, and erase out that geometry.
We've gotten the basics for the elevation done. I now need to continue working on the roof. You can see that I have a hip going on right through here, and the peak of the hip is right here.
So I'm going to draw a line from the peak of here straight down, and I will extend. Let's do it the new way. I'll use the trim command, enter, and then I will hold down shift and pick up to there.
Now, this part of the roof here is going straight across, and it's going to be rising again up here. So I'm going to draw a line from where it's rising, pull that down, and I will draw a line from here perpendicular. I will trim.
Here's my cutting edge. Get rid of that. I can now erase out these two lines, and I'm going to copy the angle from there up to there, because again, if you look at the roof, you can see that it's still going up, and it's going to go up to this point.
It will go horizontal and begin going down over here. So I'm going to draw a line at the top of the roof, and I will draw a line from the intersection straight over, trim, cutting edges, trim. Here's the cutting edge.
I can now erase out those segments. Control-S to save. What I'd like to do now is you can see how the roof is at its highest point here.
It's going to be going down along the slope to here. So I'm going to draw a line from here straight down. I will mirror the angled line from the mid straight up.
I will extend. Let's just play with the trim the new way. Trim here, enter to say I'm done.
Hold down shift, which throws it into extend mode. Now what I have going on, though, is that my roof peaks up here, but it actually goes down to reach that area there, which is why we see this drop in the elevation right there. So everything, in fact, is perfect.
I'm going to erase this segment. Control-S to save. Let's just zoom in and make sure our elevation looks clean.
Control-S to save. Now what I'm noticing, though, is that this is the box area I have available for the roof, but the house is not really vertically centered correctly, because when I first placed the ground line in, I have to admit I just chose an arbitrary distance. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a line from the end of here to the end over here and a line from the mid of the top perpendicular to, I'm going to say, the ground line.
And then I'm going to move my house, enter, from the mid of this vertical line to the mid of the angled line. So I've dropped the house down, so now the residence is centered vertically within the drawing. I will go erase and erase my construction lines.
Control-S to save. I'd like to do a little bit more cleanup before we wrap up this video. So here's trim.
Here's the cutting edge. Enter to say I'm done selecting. Trim that away.
Trim. This is the cutting edge. Select that.
Zoom extents. Pan. Control-S and save.
Let's go back to our A301 drawing. Let's reload the XRef. You can see the house moved itself down.
It is now appropriately centered in the space we have made available for it. So enjoy working on this, and I will see you in a few more minutes.
