Placing Architectural Blocks in Elevation Views Using Block Libraries and Layer Management

Now we want to start placing the blocks we have in our model. If we take a look at our handout, we see that going left to right, we have the major blocks, which are windows, shutters, and the front door and the garage doors, and then some minor blocks. We have the downspouts and the gutters, we have the lights at the front entry, we have a little sign for our house number, and we have on the top of the roof the vents.

And in this elevation, we actually only have vents that are facing to the left and to the right. We don't have any vents facing straight at us. So let's start with the major blocks for this model.

In order to place the windows and the shutters, we actually need to offset the head height, which we can see is six foot eight from the finish floor. So let's go O, enter for offset, six feet eight, enter. I'll grab that finish floor line, not the ground line, it's the finish floor line, and go up and click, escape, escape.

And just so that I can understand it's the line we're looking for, I'm going to migrate it to medium. We can see that this intersection and this intersection will be where our window meets at the top left and top right. So I'll hit I, enter, and we can see that we don't have anything in our current drawing except for that mill plot view.

In this case, I want to add the elevation blocks as a library. I'll go to the libraries tab, browse, and see we already have our plan blocks open in our last library. I'm going to select the elevation blocks folder and hit open.

Now we have in our drop down the plan blocks library and the elevation blocks library. If you don't have these libraries or you want to reload them, just remember at any time you can hit the browse button here and select the folder where your blocks are hosted. I'll hit cancel.

And here we see all of the blocks we're going to need to be placed on our elevation. Now all of these blocks are going to be placed on the A medium layer, which is our current layer. And we can see that they are white, which implies to me that these are all on layer zero.

We're going to start with this window over here. And I don't know the size of this window, but what I can do is scroll down to my windows. I see that I have a two feet six inch window, which is five feet tall, and a three feet zero inch window, which is five feet tall.

Let's use quick measure. I'll check the space between. I see that this is a five foot window wide, which means that it is two, two and a half feet windows side by side.

So I know that this window is going to be this one, 2650. Before I click this window to place, we need to change the scale factor. Right now it's set to 48.

We need to change that back to a scale factor of one. And now we can click and bring this block into our model. I can see that the insertion point is set to the top left.

We have that snap right here, but I'm going to go to my running object snaps and turn on intersection. And now I'll be able to choose the intersection here. Click to place, and we can continue placing our doors and windows.

Let's use quick measure again. This opening is six feet wide for the window. So I'll choose this block instead, three feet and three feet is six feet.

I'll place at the intersection. Excellent. We'll come back and do the shutters at the end.

Let's continue with our major elements. Here's my front door, which is the three feet by six feet eight. And again, this is two doors, so it's six feet wide.

I'll click. I can again see this is going to be set at head height. Excellent.

The garage doors are a little different. They need to go down all the way to the ground line. There can't be a big curb at the front of the garage or the cars couldn't get in.

When I click the door 80 70, I'll see that this is also at head height. Let's click up the head height and see if it fits. In this case, it did because we knew we had a six inch difference, but you might have to grab this block and move it up and down if you were working on a different project.

I can copy this block or click here to bring in a new option. I'll do that. Click to place, and I'll zoom out.

Control S to save. We don't need our construction geometry anymore. We can actually remove it before we place the shutters.

So I'm going to select this horizontal line and then go across, making sure I get two lines at every block, and then I'm going to delete them. All right. I'll just zoom out to make sure I see two lines at every block.

I'll hit the delete key and control S to save. Now we can go in and do our next round of blocks. In this case, I'm going to start with the window shutters, and then I'm going to move on to the gutter and the roof elements.

So let's zoom in over here. If I scroll down, I see I have a window shutter. And of course, the objects we've given here are the exact objects you'll need for this drawing.

If you're working in an office, you might have many shutters to choose from, but hopefully you have a blocks library like this where you can choose one or more options that fit your project. If they don't fit your project, you might need to create a new block, which we've done before in our earlier courses, and add to your blocks library. In this case, we've given the blocks, so we're going to keep going forward.

But I encourage you to understand that these are not complicated blocks. You could be making them or downloading them from websites like BIMobject.com in case you need to insert specific geometry. All right.