Creating Custom Floor and Wall Tile Patterns in BIM Using Fill Pattern Settings and PAT Files

And we're gonna take a look at how floor patterns are created. And so I'm gonna recap a little bit on some of the stuff we went through earlier in the class. But if we go to our manage tab and then additional settings, you can see that we've got fill patterns here.

And this is really, you know, where all the settings are for the model, just kind of a recap of BIM 101 going back in time here. But this is where all that'd be located and we're just going for fill patterns here. And from fill patterns, what I'm gonna do is if I wanted to create a new one, I've got two options that I need to decide from either drafting or model.

And the rule of thumb here is if it's something that's gonna have actual dimensions to it, I wanna use the model option. If it's something that's gonna be more diagrammatic and not have an actual dimensional scale to it, then I'll use drafting patterns. In our case here, we're looking at doing wall patterns and tile patterns.

And so I'm gonna go ahead and click on model here. And from this point, we have the option to create a new pattern. And there's really two things that we can do here.

We can create a basic rectilinear pattern, which means we can have angled lines as just one line here. You can see a line spacing of eight inches at 45 degrees. Or we can do a crosshatch, which could be a line spacing at 45 degrees.

And then we can have it be line spacing one, line spacing two. These could be different values. So I could have say one of them at two feet and the other one at eight inches.

And so we'll have a eight inch by two foot tile at 45 degrees, or it can be at really anything you want. It could be at 15, zero, or nine, or maybe 90 is more appropriate. But essentially, I can do this with any number of combination.

And this would take care of any of your rectangular stacked bond type patterns. And this works well for quite a bit of different things. But the problem we start running into is if we need to bring in something that's more complex.

And so I'm just gonna hit cancel here because we're not gonna actually create one. But if you look at some of the ones that are already there, like let's say the block eight by eight, if I were to take a look at this, if I click edit, we can see it a little bit better. But this is a custom pattern that was brought into the software.

And to create this type of pattern, we essentially need to identify each of the rows within the pattern. The pen up and pen down for both the horizontal and the vertical spaces. And that process is agonizing and I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy.

Not that you can't figure it out or that it's something that's totally impossible to do. It's just so time-consuming that it's not even worth looking into because there are better ways to do it. And so let's say we wanted to create something like this or maybe a separate custom one.

And so what I would do is I'm just gonna hit cancel here because we're gonna take a look at an example here is I can create a new pattern, new fill pattern and I could call it whatever I want. So I'm gonna call this one a chevron patterns. This is gonna be kind of like an angled tile at a specific distance here and I'll say custom.

And this is gonna change here in a second so we're not too worried about it but we can always change it. And if I hit browse here, there's a patterns folder in your dataset that I've provided. And this has some patterns that you could use to take a look at it.

And there's a couple I've created. These are set up in metric and I can tell you right now, I did not create these from scratch. I just made some edits to simplify them a little bit.

One of them shows the grout lines and the other one does not. And we're gonna use this one. So I'm gonna go ahead and simplify the name a little bit, chevron pattern 1200 × 200.

And just to send my point home here, I'm gonna show you what this looks like. And so here's the custom pattern.jt file that I've provided for you. And I just wanted to go quickly through some of the options here.

And since this is the pattern that we're using, difference in the two is this one has a lot of different lines associated with it to kind of try to simulate the grout joints. But anytime you do something like that, I've just found it gets too muddy and you can't really see the information unless you're working at like a really large scale. We're using this one that doesn't have all of the different grout lines on it, just the single line.

And the way these things work is there's a couple of different things to keep in mind. So the first one is the 45 is gonna be the angle that's represented by the line. So it's gonna start at an origin point and project at that angle.

The next two, the X and Y origin points here, the X is zero, Y is the zero. And then you've got your destination point for that. So this is where it's gonna move itself to.

So you've got it moving from the X zero, zero to the X 200 and then the Y zero to the Y 200. And then it's gonna go for 1200 minus 1200. And so that is gonna create a line that looks kind of like this.

And so that'll create a line that looks like this here. So this is essentially that zero point. And maybe it's this one here, but essentially it's creating that line to then start at zero and go that 1200 millimeters.

And then it's gonna offset itself for 200 until it stops. And then the other line set that we were looking at was the opposite of it at 135. And so those are the ones that you're seeing going down or projecting from here, 135 degrees, which is 90 degrees from this guy here.

And then the 90 degree, which is your vertical line is doing 90 degrees, but repeating itself at this margin here of 848, which is probably this dimension if you took the 1200. And so you can see that one of them is a continuous line based upon the fact that we have the 90 degree line not having the negative number at the end here, whereas the other ones are stopping at a specific dimension of that 1200. So starting and stopping at that dimension.

And so I'm sure your head's spinning right now and I apologize for that, but it's essentially one of the methods that you can go through if you really wanted to create patterns using this method that we used to use in AutoCAD years ago. But there's other methods that we'll use for this. I just felt being comprehensive in the class, we'd show it, but it's not something that we'll use completely.

And so we'll create our own version of it. But if we take a look at this here, I'll just hit okay. That gives us the pattern.

I'll hit okay again. And so now it's a pattern that's part of our project now. And so I could use that for creating a tile floor.

If I were to go into the architecture tab and go to floor, I can do one of our tile types. We get the T1, which is what we used previously. I'm gonna do edit type and duplicate to create a T2.

And then we're gonna edit the structure and create a T2 material. So I'll just go ahead and duplicate this material, call it T2. And then I'll replace the pattern with the one we just created, which was the Chevron 1200 × 200.

Okay, and you can kind of get a better idea of what this looks like. And I'll just hit okay until we get all the way out of this dialogue. And then, because we're creating a finish, I wanna make sure I'm on the finishes work set.

And then what I will do is just for this exercise, we'll just kind of create a rectangle here in the middle. This won't be a floor we'll use right now, but we wanted to see what it looks like. And so you can see there's the pattern that we created with that tile showing itself there.

And so if I wanted to use this tile in any of the spaces within here, I could definitely do that. But I think this pattern is gonna be more suited for one of our wall tiles. And so that's one method that we could use to create patterns.

And you can find a lot of this information online. You can find different patterns and even some manufacturers are gonna have this.pat file available for you to use. But it's just not as easy to use or as reliable as some of the other methods that we're gonna go over in the next video.