Delve into the process of creating a floor slab for your architectural model, using the building outline as a baseline guide. Learn to pick a five-inch concrete slab type, modify its thickness, change its material, and draw the floor using the line tool.
Key Insights
- The article starts with creating a floor slab before drawing walls for an architectural model, serving as a guide for the rest of the model's creation.
- Going to the architecture tab, floor, a slab type is selected, in this case, a five-inch concrete slab, and the thickness and material are adjusted according to requirements.
- Drawing the floor is done with the line tool, which is recommended over pick lines for simplicity. However, if confident in the CAD file's line work, pick lines can be used to draw the line work.
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To start this next lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to create our floor slab first. And so what we've been doing in the past is we would just draw the walls and then go in and draw the floor. And for this one, since we have a baseline for where we know the building outline is going to be, we're going to go ahead and draw that floor in first so that we can use that as a guide for the rest of our model creation.
So to do this, I'm going to go to the architecture tab, floor, and we're going to pick our slab type, which in this case is going to be a five-inch concrete slab. And you can see we do not have that type. So what I do is I'll just pick one that's similar, and it's just one element.
So these generic ones work fine. If we say edit type, duplicate, then we give it the name we're looking for, which in this case will be concrete five inch. And we'll hit okay.
And then we'll apply the materials and the thickness within the structure here. So I say edit, change the thickness to five inches. And I always do that one first because it's easy to forget.
And then I'll go back and change the material. So I'll just type concrete in on the filter here at the top. And then I'll find the concrete cast in place gray.
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And as you know, I'm not a huge fan of these surface patterns because they just get in the way. We're going to want to turn that off. We'll scroll all the way to the top and find no pattern and hit okay.
Hit okay again until we get all the way out of these dialog boxes. And now we're ready to draw the floor. And so I'll use the line tool.
You can use pick lines, but I do find that a lot of time when people do this, they end up clicking more than they need to. And so I just always recommend using the draw line if it's not too complicated. If you're confident in the line work that you have from the CAD file here, what you could do is you can use tab over that chain and you can just carefully click once to draw that line work and it'll draw it all for you.
What's important here is when you use this pick lines option, you want to make sure you hit escape a few times to get out of that mode because you can easily go in and click a bunch of times. Now, not knowing exactly how that CAD was created, I could end up with a situation where we don't have a closed loop, but there's only one way to find out, right? We'll just go ahead and do finish edit mode. And it seems like it worked out.
And so when we look at 3D now, you can see here we've got our new floor slab sitting in on our site plan that has our existing building all set up and ready to go. In our next video, we're going to go ahead and establish all of our datum elements.
