Learn how to manipulate the architectural facets of building modeling using Revit. This step-by-step guide will take you through the process of creating a curtain wall, making necessary adjustments, and finishing with the insertion of a door.
Key Insights
- The guide emphasizes the importance of selecting the workflow that aligns with your project needs. There are different methods to draw a curtain wall: using the already existing type or creating one from scratch.
- A detailed process of drawing a curtain wall using the curtain wall exterior glazing tool is provided. The method involves drawing the wall, setting up the vertical divisions, and making necessary adjustments to match existing plans.
- The guide also provides insights on how to insert a door into the curtain wall, including loading the necessary door family from the Revit library and adding it to the panel. The inserted door completes the curtain wall elements for the building model.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Now we're going to draw that entrance piece. We're still in wireframe, so that's important to know because if we use this as a basis for copying this view to create another one, we're going to want to make sure that we are setting that back to hidden lines so we don't have see-through plans. Essentially, what we'll do here is we can use the same type or we can create a curtain wall from scratch. We've done both of those processes in the class so far, and it's one of those things where you really just have to determine which workflow is best for you. I think they both have their advantages and disadvantages, but in this case since it's more complicated, oddly, since it's more complicated I'm going to use the one that is the most automatic, and the reason it's more complicated is because we're not just letting it do its thing.
When you have ribbon windows like you see here, right, where there's not a lot of variation going on and you're going to keep it with just a pretty simple mullion layout, then this is really the way to go. But when you start getting a little bit more complicated and you need to move things around I've found that it's easier to just use the curtain wall one type and draw everything manually. But we're going to take a look at how we can modify this to suit our needs.
We're going to use the wall tool again, curtain wall exterior glazing, and we'll just draw this in just like all the other ones from the center across and making sure that the glass is on the outside face which it is. And now we have our wall drawn in and this one needs to go all the way down to the ground obviously because it's going to have a door in it. And so there's the wall and when we compare this to our pdf which I'll pull up here you can see we've got a division of one two three four different panels.
When I count the verticals it's got one two three and four but it's not divided up at all like that right you can you can clearly tell that there's different breaks in here. But we did add extra verticals for the sidelights and so we can do this one of two ways. We can create a window that has three verticals and then we can remove the one we don't want and add two new ones.
The thing that's going to be important is if you needed to delete one for whatever reason it has to be one of the ones that you're adding and not one of the ones that are automatically created. And so that can get a little crazy. So let's take a look at it and so I'm going to change this from four to two because it's going to give us that three bay that we're looking for which matches the window that's going to be above.
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And since it's the low hanging fruit here we might as well just copy it and paste it to level two just so we don't forget about that window and then make those adjustments that we have been on all the other ones. Setting it to three feet for the base offset and setting the top constraint to roof and the top offset to negative two. And so we have that ribbon window all the way around here.
Now we can get back to this guy here which has some parameters that we want to follow. And so the first thing I'm going to do is I need to get rid of this mullion because we're going to have mullions on the sides to create the sidelights. But to do that I need to make sure I unpin the ones I'm going to delete.
If I'm going to pick it, it's pinned to the constraints of this curtain wall right now. So I need to unpin it before I delete it or else it'll tell me you can't do that. And then I'll go in and I don't want this section of the grid so I can select it and you guessed it, unpin it.
And then I can do add remove to remove this segment. And now I've got one big segment that I can work with. Everything else is going to stay the same.
To fix that, I'm going to go to level one, and I'm going to add these grids in here. And so we have a two foot offset again and it's just really helpful. I know a lot of people don't like these so much but I find them to be very helpful to draw the reference planes.
And I'm just simply copying these ones up and I have the values here that I can work with. And what's great about the CAD files is they're referenceable objects. You can see you know it's hitting with a snap so I can go from CAD line to CAD line and that'll give me the breakdown that I'm looking for.
And so with this set for my mullion dimensions I can easily go in now and I can go to architecture, curtain grid, and I can add these curtain grids. It's set currently to all segments. I really only want it to be one segment so that it only draws in that bottom segment there.
So I'll draw in this curtain grid here and here and then we'll go to 3D and take a look at what we've created. And even though I told it one segment it decided to do the whole thing but that's fine because we can fix that. So what we'll do now is we'll go ahead and clean this up.
Again, any mullions that we create based on curtain grids are all going to be pinned, so we have to unpin them before we make any changes. And then now I can do the add and remove. These are not pinned because these ones we created they weren't automatically created. So I'll use the add remove again and one more time and now you can see we have the appropriate framework for our door.
We take a look at it here and then we'll jump back to our reference file to double check. The only thing we're missing is the actual door type. So everything looks good.
We don't need the trip hazard of the sill for this one here so I'm going to unpin and delete those two mullions and then I'll select the curtain panel that we're going to use for the door type and I can change that to the storefront door and you can see we don't have that actually loaded in. So what I'll do is I'll go to insert load family and it takes me to our Revit families file, which is the one that we use for our BIM 301, but we want to go to our Imperial Library. By default, you'll have a shortcut for Imperial Library, and then we can go through to doors and then we want door curtain wall double storefront and we'll load that into the project and then we can add it to this panel here by swapping it out and that gives us all of our curtain wall elements that we need for this project. And so we've almost finished modeling the existing building.
The next step is going to be to finish off the stairs and then double check to make sure we've got everything completed.
