Interested in learning how to add detailing to your architectural plan using Autodesk Revit? Discover a step-by-step guide on how to add and adjust windows to your design, ensuring the placement and dimensioning is consistent throughout your model.
Key Insights
- The process includes adjusting parameters in the architecture tab to match the desired window type, specifically 72x72 fixed windows, and setting a default sill height for consistency across the project.
- Proper placement of the windows requires the use of temporary dimensions to ensure each window is centered within the offices. The 'mirror pick axis' tool is then used to duplicate the placement in each office.
- To address differences in levels, windows can be copied to the second floor by selecting all instances visible in view and using the copy command. This ensures that all windows are correctly placed in the 3D model.
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Now that we placed the doors, let's go ahead and add some windows. To do this, I'm going to jump over to my level one plan. And similar to how we use the middle bay here to create that dividing wall, we're going to do the same thing for adding our windows.
So I'm going to go in to the architecture tab and then window. And we're looking for this fixed window type. And we're going to use a window type that's 72 × 72.
And if you look at the types here, you can see that we definitely don't have that loaded in. So I'm going to go to the 36 × 72, because that's the closest one we have. And I'm going to say edit type and duplicate.
But you guys all already knew that's what I was going to do, because anytime we want a new type, we're always going to go edit type, duplicate. So I'm going to rename it to 72 × 72. And then we're going to go ahead and adjust the parameters themselves to match that.
We have the height at six feet, which is 72 inches, and the width at three feet, which is only 36 inches. We need to adjust this to be 72 inches. And then the default sill height, I would like to set at two foot eight inches, so that we can use that for all of our windows that we place.
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Once we have all this double checked and good to go, so 72 × 72, height at six feet, default sill height, two foot eight, width at six feet, we're going to hit OK. And then we'll place our first window. And so I'll do that here.
And what I want to do is I'm going to use the temporary dimensions and see how they're showing both at six foot with three quarter inches remaining. Well, that means they're both equal. And that's where I want to put this window is centered within each of the offices.
If I were to place that window there, then what I could do is I could use that mirror pick axis tool again to place this window in each of the offices. Notice every time I just have to go back up and hit that mirror pick axis tool and place the window. And so I've got the four on the north side done.
I'll just go ahead and do the other two here. The keyboard shortcut for this is MM, by the way. And if you really get the hang of this, you can run through and add these windows pretty quickly.
The next thing we'll do here is put them on the second floor. So to do that, I'm going to go to this elevation view so I can double click on the triangle or right click. Go to elevation view.
And so what I can do is I can then select all of these windows and copy them up to level two. So it's a similar process to what we did before, but just a little bit different way of going about it. There's a lot of tendency for people to just kind of select like this on an elevation view.
But you do have to understand that this is a three-dimensional model at all times. And so even though I can't see those doors in the background, when I do a selection like this, you notice I did select all those doors. To avoid that, what I'll do is I'll right click on one of my windows and then I can say select all instances visible in view.
And then it'll select all the windows that are visible in this view. Instead of using copy to clipboard this time, we're going to use just regular copy because we're copying it within the same view. So I could say copy, and then I'll just pick level one as my base point.
Copy to level two. And now I have all my windows placed. So I'll hit escape a couple of times to get out of that copy command.
And then we'll go to 3D view and take a look at our windows. It's exactly what we're looking for. It looks pretty good.
The other windows we're going to do, we're going to use a curtain wall type to establish those ribbon type windows on the west side of the building.
