Placing Roof Gutters, Downspouts, and Vents with Layering and Block Insertion Techniques

Now that our A roof geometry is drawn, we need one more bit of real geometry to draw. And in that, this case, it's the roof gutter. And then we can start bringing in our blocks, both for our real-world geometry and for our symbols.

So to start, we can either migrate to the A roof gutter layer, and then do an offset to that layer. But it might just be easier to start with a simple offset. We can see that it's a three inch typical gutter offset three, enter, pick the outline of my roof, go outside and click, and just say, I'm done.

And then pick that outer line and simply migrate it to the A roof gutter layer. Now this layer could have been potentially on a roof, but depending on who's using this drawing, especially a framer, they will definitely want to differentiate between what is the actual roof geometry and what is things that are tacked onto the side. So in this case, we put the A roof gutter on a different layer.

Now that that's done, we can start bringing in some of our geometry. To start, let's do the downspouts, the A roof downspouts. So I'm going to make sure that I'm using a scale factor of one, because this is a real-world geometry.

I don't need repeat placement because I'm going to show you how we're going to use this block. So I'll browse, jump out, go do my plan blocks again. This is going to be the roof downspout and the roof downspout with this splash block.

Let's start with the roof downspout itself and hit open. And I'm simply going to place one out here in space. Let's examine this block.

You can see that it has a center point grip on the back, and this is the insertion point, which is zero. And when we click that block, it's very easy to right click the hot grip and choose rotate. This is a great way to place it and then rotate it.

You don't always need to do your rotation after or on screen. We can do this in multiple steps. So I'm going to move this block by clicking the grip and making it hot.

I'll place it over in this space and looking at the handout, I can see that it's roughly six inches in on this wall. So I'll click the grip to make it hot shift, right click temporary track point. From this end point, I'll go up six, enter.

And that downspout seems to be in the right location. Now I need one more downspout without the splash block up here. And in this case I can copy it, or in this case I can also use mirror.

So I'll select the downspout block, mirror, starting from this end point, going to this end point. Do I want to erase the source object? No, and enter. And now I have both of my downspout blocks.

Let's browse again and bring in the downspout with the splash block. I'll hit open. In this case, I'm going to place the first block in a location where it's already in the right orientation.

So I'm going to go either shift right click temporary track point or TRA for tracking from here. And again, I'm going to go over six enter and that lines it up right with the corner that works for me. And now I can continue placing that block, which is here, the roof downspout splash block or you can choose to copy this around to different parts of your project.

This is completely up to you. I'm going to be using the blocks palette to bring it in, but you can choose to use copy and rotate if that's an easier workflow for you. In this case, I actually will be able to set my rotation angle.

This is a rotation angle of 90. I'll click my splash block downspout, shift right click temporary track point, down six inches, enter. Once again, I can see that I can mirror this one across this midpoint, midpoint to midpoint and enter to keep both objects.

And it looks like we have three more to go. I'm going to set my rotation angle to 180, shift right click tracking from here over six, enter. Then I'm going to set my rotation and go back to 90 temporary track point going up six, enter.

And then finally, there's one in this area over here. Now this is tricky. We don't want our downspout to be covering one of our windows.

So I'm going to temporarily turn on my A wall there. And I can see that now that the wall geometry is on, if I had placed it here, I'm going to set this rotation angle to 270. If I had placed it at the midpoint, it would have been exactly in the middle of a window.

And of course, we might not have caught that unless we were doing a comparison between the floor plan and the roof plan. So instead I'll delete this one. I'm going to place it tracked six inches above this window edge.

So click shift, right click temporary track point, this end point up six enter. And then once again, I'll go L A Y off, lay off, pick my wall there, enter to say I'm done. Go ahead and check your handout and check your drawing to make sure that you have all of these downspouts with and without the splash blocks.

I have two here without the splash block and then 1,2, 3,4, 5,6 around the plan. When you have that control S to save. And the last bit of real-world geometry we need to bring in is the roof vents, the attic vents.

So I'm going to change my layer to A roof vent, insert my roof vent plan. I'll hit open. Now we still have this set to 270, but that's okay.

We're going to examine this block. So for now I'm going to place this in this area because it's the same orientation as the block that is eventually going to go right here. Now what's interesting about this block is we see that the grip is to the front edge, but our dimension on the floor plan is two feet typical from the back edge.

So in this case, I'm going to use a line, come out two feet, enter, enter to say I'm done. And then I want to move this block by the midpoint because this is not a circle. This is an arc to that end point.