Refining Gutter and Downspout Details in Elevation Drawings Using Line Weights and Layer Strategies

Let's start to work on the gutters and the downspouts. I'm going to zoom in on this side of the building because I see on the handout that there's a gutter here that feeds into a downspout on the left side of the house and if we go to our elevation blocks palette we can see we have a downspout that's the front view we won't use on this elevation and we have the gutter downspout which is from the side. So I'm going to click this block let's see where the insertion point is.

It looks like it is at the bottom of the fascia so I can come up and click the bottom of that yellow line and you can see that in this case the downspout has been set to be exactly two feet like our two foot overhang. Now one thing I want to do is make a copy of this so I'm going to hit copy and bring it to the left because we don't have a block that's just the shape of our gutter. So I'm going to grab this block and burst b-u-r-s-t and remember that burst is a good way to explode a block and leave the geometry on the layer you're on instead of the layer it was drawn on and so now I can grab all of the geometry for the downspout and hit delete and I'm left with just the profile of the gutter.

We're going to use this profile but I'm not going to make it back into a block. For now I'll just select it all and hit j enter to join it so it's a polyline and it's a little bit easier to work with. Now we have a block which is the downspout and a polyline which represents the shape of the gutter.

If we go across the roof looking at each one of these turn downs for the roof and the fascia board we can see if there's a downspout or a gutter. There's a gutter here, a gutter here, and then a downspout and a downspout. So let's start with our gutter.

I'll grab this polyline copy from the bottom right corner to here and click enter to say I'm done. M-I for mirror picking my gutter polyline. I'll pick the top of the roof and go across and enter and then I don't need this polyline anymore.

I can zoom in and delete it and then I'll place another one of these blocks from my blocks palette right here. That's going to be at the end point and then we're going to mirror this across M-I enter from this polyline this block across the top enter to say that I'm done. Now if we check the handout it looks like we moved our lights far down so I'm going to pick the lights move enter and I'm going to come back up six enter and we're doing that to show how to fix this condition a little bit later in the video.

For now let's come back up into this roof and talk about how to clean up the gutters. I'm going to close the blocks palette and if we look at the handout we see that there's a number of horizontal lines. Anytime there's a distinct corner or fold or break we want a line running across our drawing.

I'm going to grab this polyline and this polyline X enter to explode so that I don't have all of these pieces of geometry connected because I want just this outer profile. It's a vertical line an arc and a second vertical line. I'm going to grab these three lines and hit delete and come over and do the same here these three lines and hit delete.

If we were drawing the gutter in section we would have used this left line and the bottom line as well but in this case all we need are these three lines. Now I'm going to go L enter and draw a line from the top of the gutter to the top of the gutter enter to say I'm done enter to go back in from the bottom of the gutter across to the bottom of the gutter enter to say I'm done and now we can take a look at the handout and see what is represented by the thick line and what is represented by the thin line in this case the medium line. We can see that there's a thick line running across the bottom to the edge of the gutter up around and back to this point.

In fact this line needs to be stretched up or trimmed out so that it only goes this far it's hidden behind the gutter so let's start with that trim tr enter here and here and I'll just quickly go across and trim out this side as well here and here enter to say I'm done and we need to either trace or convert some of these lines into the a heavy layer. So let's talk about why I would do one over the other. If we take a look at this line it represents the bottom of the fascia board on the front of the roof.

This right here represents the bottom of the fascia board on the back of the roof or further back I mean to say and this geometry all represents the gutter. In this case I'm going to grab the edge of the gutter only and convert it to a heavy and then I'm going to draw two new lines on the a heavy layer so I'm going to change my current layer to a heavy l enter and I am going to trace over enter to say I'm done enter to go back in these two portions of the line. This bit of geometry this line is important because it is the full width of the fascia board and this line is important because it's the full width of the top of the gutter.

I'm going to regen by re enter and it's going to show those two yellow lines on because I drew them more recently. This is the outline of the roof which in the AutoCAD terms just simply helps us recognize what's closer to us and further away. When you take a look at the handout you'll see that these lines are plotted in a darker shade.

This is going to these lines are plotted with a thicker line. This helps us differentiate what's further back and what's closer to us. You'll see this outline around the shape of the roof and in front of the two pop outs the garage and this window section.

I'm going to move over here and do the same grabbing these lines migrating them to a heavy and then l enter to draw two new lines from here to here and here to here. Re enter to regen and now I'll put this right in the middle of the screen. Even though these aren't plotting to the thickness we would expect on our handout we can still see the yellow line differentiating itself from those green lines.

Control s to save and let's see what we can do over here with the rest of our gutter. In this case I'm going to have to burst enter this block because I need to delete this line and trim tr enter this line enter to say I'm done. Now I can grab all of this geometry at the top of my gutter.

I don't want to grab these two little line segments for the downspout. Migrate those to a heavy and again I'm going to trace over this line so on the a heavy layer I'll go l enter from this end point to this end point and so you can see I've got a continuous profile a continuous shape of the yellow line. Let's migrate our layer back to let's set our layer back to a medium l enter this one's going to go from this point to the top of the gutter here enter to say I'm done enter go back in from this point to the gutter here.

These lines are not as important as the rest of the lines on our model they are definitely less important than the edge of the roof here so I'm actually going to grab these two lines and migrate them to the a light layer a l i t e that's going to plot those two lines as a lighter color and so you can see here this is yellow and the medium and this is green and the light. Of course there's the profile around the shape of the roof but I'm more interested in how these two behave compared to these two. All right so I'm going to make a light my current layer and come over here we're going to draw those two lines across l enter here to here enter to say I'm done enter to go back in here to here same thing here we need to burst this burst delete this line trim tr enter this line and I'm going to grab this gutter shape again migrate it to a heavy this line needs to be traced l enter click I accidentally traced it on the a light layer that's okay I'll just migrate that line to a heavy and let's switch back to a medium for the two gutter lines going across the garage l enter here all the way across to here enter to say I'm done enter to go back in this end point all the way across to this end point I'm getting the intersection I'll do ship right click end point just to override it ENTER to say I'm done finally we need to burst this one and clean it up as well burst deleting this line and trimming tr enter here to here I'm going to grab all of these with the selection window migrate them to a heavy and this line needs to be traced again with a heavy so I'll set it to my current layer l enter across to here enter to say I'm done let's zoom out on the full elevation and CTRL S to save what is important to understand with these profile outlines on our a heavy layer is that they're differentiating the distance between what's closest and if there's a significant space behind it again we can see that full shape here going up around the gutter to the top of the roof and back down and that's because this roof is in front of this roof the same thing happens here where this roof is in front of space the air behind and there are going to be some debate in your office or you have a specific office standard which says that there should be a profile line that goes around these vents or simply continues the shape of the roof in this case what's more important for us is continuing the shape of the roof and setting that as our a heavy line over here we have a slightly interesting condition where the roof is blocked by the vent so we don't see this continuation of the heavy line so I am going to add that line back in l enter from the end point shift right click end point to the end point here enter to say I'm done and now we see that it just does that little turn back and still shows us the distance behind with the airspace certain offices would suggest that the only a heavy lines should be this garage shape and this shape and that this line should be a slightly thinner maybe even on a medium with these being on a light I like how these look we're going to keep them as is just understand what we're doing is playing with our line thicknesses in plotting to set the distance showing the foreground and the background I'm going to center this control us to save I'll see you in the next video