Master the method of creating sweeps and reveals in your architectural design with this informative article. The article begins with creating 'reveals' using a profile, discussing in detail the step-by-step process involved to guide you in developing a new family framework from scratch.
Key Insights
- In creating 'reveals', the article emphasizes the importance of understanding the function of each component, such as the 'wall face' which describes the reference plane. It is crucial to draw the geometry on the right side of the vertical reference plane for it to be cut within the wall.
- Before drawing any geometry, the article suggests setting up a framework by creating a few reference planes. The dimensions of these planes can be adjusted after they are drawn. The process involves adding horizontal and vertical dimensions, setting parameters and constructing a rectangle using the outer framework.
- The article highlights the importance of saving the created reveal as a family, ensuring that there are only four lines within the space. If there are additional lines or a gap anywhere, the reveal will not work as intended.
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This next lesson, we're going to dive into learning how to do sweeps and reveals. And we're going to start with reveals. To do that, we need to have a profile that we can work with.
And so let's go ahead and create another family. I'll go to File, New, Family. And we'll jump back into that English Imperial folder.
And we're going to look for Profile Reveal. I'll click Open. And this will be the framework for our new family.
So what's important here is we're looking at it. We need to understand what all of these things mean. So first off, we have wall face, which is a description of this reference plane here, meaning this is the face of our wall.
And everything to the right side is going to be cut within the wall. If we draw geometry on this side, it's not going to do anything for us. We want to make sure it's on the right side of the vertical reference plane.
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Before we draw any geometry in here, what I'd like to do, though, is set up some framework. So to get this started, I'm going to create a couple reference planes. So I will go from the Create tab to Reference Plane.
And I'm going to draw two horizontal reference planes, so one above and one below the existing reference planes. And then I'll draw one vertical one. Notice there was zero effort put into what dimensions these are going to be because we're going to add dimensions and adjust it after the fact.
So the first thing I'll do is I'm going to add a dimension to represent the horizontals. And I intentionally hit both of them at the same time because I want to set this dimension string to equal. Then I'll draw a dimension for the vertical reference planes.
And I'll do one more that covers the overall dimension of my new horizontal ones. So first thing, we can set this one to one inch deep. So I'll select this plane and I'll set it to one inch.
And then I can set a parameter for the width for this one, just in case we wanted to adjust that later. So there aren't any parameters in here that we can use, so we'll make a new one. And I'll call this one width.
This will be a type parameter, so everything looks good here. We'll hit OK. And I'm going to change this value to half inch.
And the order that we set the equal and the dimension is what allowed us to maintain the equal constraints here and also control the overall dimension. Now that we have everything set up, we can go ahead and draw in the line work because all we have are reference planes at this point. So I'll go to create, line, and you probably already guessed it, but we're going to use the rectangle option.
And I'll just use this outer framework to create our geometry. And I'll lock all four of the padlocks. Now what we've done is we've created a half inch by one inch reveal that will be located on the face of our wall and cut this geometry out.
Just like before with the mullion profile, we're going to want to go ahead and save this. So I'll do file, save as, family, and we'll call this one control joint. Same rules apply as before.
We want to make sure that all we have are these four lines in here. If we have any other lines within this space, it's not going to work. Or if you have a gap anywhere in here, it's not going to work either.
So double check those things and then we'll be ready to go and load this into the family.
