Creating Custom Floor Patterns and Efficient Tile Layouts for Locker Rooms in Revit

So I'm gonna go ahead and use this floor that we created as a test anyway, and I'm gonna use this as kind of our entrance pattern. So everything that is gonna go from say this line here and the lobby, we'll call it, of the bathroom, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel, so I'll just grab this guy and set it within the wall like that, and then I can select it. There's two ways we can modify it.

You can double click on it, and that'll take you into the edit floor boundary like I did there, or you can click the edit boundary tool, which is what we've used previously. And so what I'll do is I'll go ahead and line this up with the wall like you see here, and then I'm just gonna cut it so that it goes into this alcove because we want our floor pattern to go into underneath the sink vanity there. So I'll just go ahead and draw this across, and that's our outline here, and then I'll do the same thing on the opposite side.

So I can select the floor, and I just hit create similar, and then I'll go ahead and draw my lines here since we didn't have that one ready to rock and roll. So I'll go ahead and just trace out the boundary that we're looking for like that, and finish the sketch. And so it's that same T2 pattern.

This one decided to rotate. That was very interesting. And so if that's what you're looking for, that's fine.

I'm gonna go ahead and rotate it, and also just so we can show you guys how to do that. So I can pick any of these lines really in here, and then I can use RO for rotate, which is the keyboard shortcut for the rotate command, or you can go from the modify tab and pick rotate. Now we have two options.

We can place to set our rotation point, or you can let it do the center of the geometry. I almost always use the place option because it just gives me more control. So I can kind of go here, and I can say rotate, and I'll pick a point, say there, and go 90 degrees, and it'll rotate the tile like that.

And if this isn't what you're looking for, you wanted something that was a little bit more irregular, instead of having it almost exactly right on the edge there, we can make adjustments to the pattern the same way I can grab it and kind of move it around to get the look that I'm going for. And the goal here, obviously, is to make life miserable for the tile installers, right? If we wanted to have, say, like an equal remainder on this side and on this side, then we can go through and find those dimensions and do that. For right now, I'm gonna kind of nudge it across till I get the look that I'm looking for here.

And if you want it a little bit more precise, you can zoom in and do that same nudge. And then I can do the same thing here. This one, it's a little harder to get that exact dimension just because these are at what looks like a 30 degree angle.

But you can see now we've got our pattern placed within these rooms here. And we'll go ahead and do the same thing and put tile in the rest of the locker room, but we need to create a new tile type. And so what I'll do is I'll just pick one of these tiles and then we use CS for create similar to make a new one.

And then I can go from here to edit type, duplicate, and I'll call that T3 and hit OK. And then we'll do the same process we've done before where I edit the material. We'll go ahead and duplicate the material and assets, call this one T3, and then change the material to the pattern that we wanted to use there, which is this guy here.

And hit OK many times to get out of this dialogue. And by now we've done this a handful of times, so we're experts at it. And then I'll go through and trace out my tile pattern.

And so I won't go over the lockers there, but I will wanna go underneath this vanity area and I'll just work my way around and say, missed one there, so I'm just gonna hit escape to restart my drawing. And then whenever I end up with something like this, I like to fix it right away so that I don't have to worry about going back and catching it later. Because as you know, if I were to finish the sketch at that point, I would have gotten an error.

So I'm just gonna jump in and kind of grab what would be the threshold for the shower base. And so in this case here, I can't really grab that perpendicular point very well, but it will wanna grab some of those end points and it'll hit what's that kind of fake intersection there. Another thing you can do is you can use your snap option.

If I hit S, P, that's snap perpendicular, it's gonna wanna find a perpendicular point and it'll do that for you as well. And I found that works out very nicely because it stays precise. And just making the loop here.

Everything looks good and I'll finish the sketch and software determined the direction of the tile, which seemed to work for me. So I'll just kind of adjust it around to my liking. Yours might be different and that's totally fine.

That looks good to me. And we'll do the same thing on this side. And these might be exactly the same.

They may not be. So what I'll do is I'll just do create similar again, that CS shortcut, and then I'll go through and do that same exact exercise that we just did. But this time on the women's locker room side.

And you can see I'm really taking advantage of that S, P option here. And you may notice every time I click on a point here, I wanna make sure it's a snap and not just some random thing here. So I like getting that endpoint every time if I can, or the perpendicular or the intersection.

And that way I know I'm not gonna end up with some weird line, cause I could easily just do this on accident and that's not what we want. So I wanna make sure we're keeping it nice and tidy as I go through. And then I'll finish the sketch and we'll do the same process where we adjust it.

It looks like I broke my own rule here and I went underneath the lockers. In this case, that won't be what we'll do. So I'll just slide that over and looks good.

Now we've got our floor tiles in there and then we'll just use the same tile in the bathroom stalls. I'll use this one here. So I'm just gonna go ahead and edit the boundary.

And then I could easily draw these with a rectangle like this. And then I can go in and adjust them to fit through the threshold. So I'll just use pick lines to kind of grab a point on the door like that.

See, we've got a alignment issue there. Not a big deal though. And then I'll use the split tool to kind of break these up.

So then I can use the trim extend a corner to create these openings. And last one here. Okay, and you can see how I just missed it right there.

You see that? Which caused a issue all the way down the edge. And so what I'll do is I'll go back in and make that correction. And now it's more work for myself because I didn't catch it the first time.

And there we go. So I've got the tile set in here. I'll finish the sketch.

That looks pretty neat. And then I can do the same thing on the other side. And this is kind of all one area.

So it makes sense to have it as one piece of tile or one tile floor. But if I had it kind of spread out through the project, like you don't want to have a chunk of tile here in the same floor as like the chunk of tile over here. Because if you try to move one of these, then you end up moving them around.

And you move this one, but you didn't realize it was connected to this guy and it's just not good. So it's better to have it in more pieces if they're not adjacent to each other. Similar to like we wouldn't use this floor and that floor together because they're in different rooms.

So same process. Another thing you can do is this pick lines tool. And the pick lines tool, I think is a good tool to use.

The problem is that it definitely creates longer lines than what most people are looking for. And so it's also very easy to double click and end up with two lines overlapping each other. And so the time you may save, I feel like gets wasted when you have to keep going back to redraw stuff because you ended up with two lines on top of each other or lines overlapping, which again just takes more time to go back and fix than it is to just do it right the first time, especially in something like this where it's really not too bad to pop in and draw these lines.

You can see I deleted one cause I got a little too anxious there. But I'll go ahead and fix it, no problem. And there we go.

And so now I've got to clean up some of these things and because I did it that way, I'm gonna hover over one and hit TAB to make sure I've got that continuous boundary and then I'll finish the sketch. Fingers crossed, I didn't have any errors. It doesn't look like it.

And so it looks good. Now we've got the tile and the flooring for both of our locker rooms. And using two custom patterns that we created.

So this isn't just for floor tiles, we could do this for wall tiles. If you had a custom pattern that you wanted to create for really anything, you could use this method to do that.