Discover how to create a detailed 3D model of a building's slab edge and add elements such as the correct concrete material, elevator pit slab, and masonry walls in this insightful guide. Learn how to navigate the 3D model, use temporary hide for better visibility, and ensure all elements align perfectly in different views.
Key Insights
- Creating the slab edge around a building involves going into the 3D view and using the floor slab edge option from the Architecture tab. Navigating the slab can be tricky due to its size and the number of elements in the project, hence a paced and methodical approach is recommended.
- Elements such as the correct concrete material and the elevator pit slab can be added to enhance the details of the 3D view. The pit slab is made by adding a pad element which drops the topo in the location of the elevator.
- Masonry walls can be added and set to the correct constraints to further refine the 3D model. Ensuring the walls align perfectly with other elements, such as the pad, is crucial for accurate representation.
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To do the slab edge all the way around the building, I'm actually going to go into my 3D view. And I can add this from underneath. And if you're having a hard time seeing the edge of your slab, then you can select your toposurface.
And you can go in, and you can actually use your sunglasses here to do a temporary hide. And so I can hide the element. And now it's gone here.
And I can go ahead, and I can use, from the Architecture tab and the Bottom side of Floor here, this Floor Slab Edge option. And I can go ahead, and I can add that to the bottom side of my floor slab all the way around the building. And so this is just a lot of clicking the one edge and 3D orbiting.
And this is kind of tricky as you go through when we have this many elements in the project. And then also the size of this slab kind of makes it a little cumbersome to orbit around. But if you just take your time and work your way around the building, it shouldn't be too bad.
And so you can see here, I've got all of the floor slab elements here. And the last thing we'll do is we'll edit the type to actually have the right concrete material so it looks correct in section. So I'll go ahead and select the slab here.
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And then I'll add to this thickened 24 × 12, the concrete material. When I hit Edit Type, you can see that we have the option to add a material. And for whatever reason, this isn't set as a default to concrete, but that's not a big deal because we can go ahead and add it.
And I'll use the concrete cast in place gray type, and then just hit okay until I get out of the dialog box. And now when I look at it in one of my section views, you can see that we have the concrete at the edge of our slab here. Sticking with the floor theme, the next thing we're going to take a look at is our elevator.
And so if I were to go to my level one plan, I can actually add a pad element which will drop the topo in this location. And I can use that as my pit slab for the elevator. If I go to my Massing and Site tab, I can do building pad.
And if I just draw it along the outside edge of my elevator here, and then I can give it the elevation that we're looking for. So in this case, it is going to be negative four, and then finish the sketch. When we look at our section again, you can see that there's a pad element here.
And now that we've divorced this from the scope box, I can actually drop this down a little bit further if I want. And so now I have this pit element that is representative of the pit slab based on the building pad. And so this doesn't have a material associated with it, but we can look at the type.
And we can see that it's a 12-inch-thick type without a material. So I could give it that same concrete cast in place gray material. And then the next thing we would do here is we would just add walls that go from this face down.
And we can do that from our level one plan as well. And we just want to be creative with how we pick our base and our top constraint here, and then it should draw it exactly the way we want. And so what I'm referring to is if I start my wall command using the keyboard shortcut W-A, and then I pick the type that I'm trying to use.
And so we'll use this generic eight inch masonry, and we'll change it to concrete when we're ready. If I set my location line to finish face interior, my base constraint would be level one to negative four, because we want it to start at negative four. And then my top constraint would be level one with zero as the base offset.
Now with these settings here, it is going to draw everything outside of this view. We're going to get a warning saying it's not visible here. But that's okay, or we might get it.
Sometimes it doesn't do that. But if I draw the walls from the top left like that to the bottom right, and you can see we've got the warning saying our walls are not visible in view. And that's no big deal, because we can go ahead and look at it in 3D or our section view as well.
And then we can see that we have our walls drawn in. And if I look at it in section, I can double check to make sure that they were drawn in correctly, which you can see here, that they were placed correctly with the face. And now I just need to update the extent of my pad here to go to the outside face of these walls.
And so I'll go back to my 3D view, and I can update this pad. And you can see it is going to do topography and the pad. So you want to make sure you select the pad, and you can tell you have the pad element here when it's selected.
And then I'll edit the boundary and align it all the way across on each side here. And it's a small change, so you won't see a huge adjustment in these lines, but it is definitely something that you want to pay attention to for sure. Because once you see how it finishes the sketch here, it's all nicely lined up.
And then when we look at it in our section views, you can see that we have it all nicely lined up here as well. So the next thing we can do is we can take these walls, these masonry walls, and we can set them so their top constraint only goes to the bottom of the slab, so they won't have a weird connection there. And so what I'll do is I will right-click on the masonry wall here, and then I can say Select All Instances in Entire Project, because those are the only four masonry walls we have in the project.
And then I can set the top offset to negative five, because that's the thickness of our slab. And then you can see it cleans up that joint pretty good there. And so when we look at our two sections, we now have everything for our floor set up the way we want.
Next, we just need to take a look at our ceiling soffits here at this location.
