Learn the process of creating a curtain wall from scratch in 3D design using curtain panels, grids, and mullions. Discover how to change wall types, add vertical and horizontal grids, and manipulate the curtain grid to create specific features like a door.
Key Insights
- The creation of curtain walls involves changing standard walls into curtain walls, establishing the basic structure with curtain panels, and then dividing those panels with curtain grids and mullions.
- There are three ways to create a curtain grid, with the 'all segments' option being used to create regular grid divisions, and the 'one segment' option being used to create features such as a door header.
- The 'add/remove segments' tool is used to remove or add grid divisions to the curtain wall, providing flexibility in the design process and allowing for unique features such as doors within the curtain wall.
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 it's time to draw our entry curtain wall. So I'm going to go to our default 3D view here and these are the two walls that we're going to change to be our curtain wall. So what I'll do is I'll select them both and then I'll change the type.
So the other curtain wall that we had previously created was the curtain wall exterior glazing and that had some parameters already set up but we're going to go ahead and create this one from scratch so that we have an understanding of how these things work. So I'm going to change it from the basic wall generic six inch to curtain wall one. Every time you do that when we change family types on walls we get a little warning because it's just going to tell you hey like those dimensions that you had previously they're now deleted and so you just want to keep that in mind as you go through and create these types of walls.
So essentially what we have now here are two curtain panels which is what you see right there but this one's been divided up with curtain grids and mullions which is why it looks like more of a complete window and so that'll be our goal for this wall here. The first step is going to be to add our vertical grids and then our horizontal grids and so we'll start with the verticals. If I go to architecture we have these tools here curtain grid and mullion and that's how we will create all the different parts on our curtain wall.
So curtain grid will be our first option and there's three different ways to create it. We're going to focus on the all segments for right now and then we'll take a look at these other two and see how they can help us out for our arrangement of the curtain wall. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to set my first one and notice we do have temporary dimensions here so if I set this first one I can then go in and I can change this value to six foot two which is what we're looking for and then I can add the next one and add in the same dimension here six foot two.
We'll go ahead and turn the corner and we're just going to keep going with that six foot two dimension and that's all of our vertical grids there. So for the horizontal ones it's pretty much the same process except for what we're going to do is instead of favoring the bottom side like I was doing with the verticals I just need to favor one of the vertical sides here. But it's the exact same process where we'll go ahead and we'll place the grid by clicking and then changing the dimension value.
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
So this one's going to be four foot one and one half inch and then what's great about that is this next wall wants to line up so you can see it's almost locking in at that four foot one and one half dimension. For our next horizontal we're going to make that one ten foot six above our previous one so I'll do ten space six and then do the same thing going across and that gives us the bulk of our curtain wall. As a reminder you know this pops up frequently so it doesn't hurt just hit save every now and then and you won't lose any of your work which is always better than having to redo stuff multiple times although the practice isn't bad right.
So this bay right here we're going to use that as a door and before we use it as a door we kind of need to add in the different elements to to make that work and so we'll use the curtain grid option but this time we're going to go ahead and use the one segment because we're going to place the header for our door here. Now I don't know exactly what that dimension needs to be from say this guy without doing a bunch of math but what I do know is that I want it to be eight foot eight above the floor line and so I can use this temporary dimension here by grabbing the dot and hitting it down at the bottom there and then I can change the value to eight foot eight. Now you might be looking at this and think that's not much of a door because we have the grid in the middle there but what's cool is we can go in and we can select this grid and we can say add remove segments and we can either add or remove segments from a curtain wall.
If I click on add remove segments I can then select the segment I want to remove and then hit escape. It's important to understand why that tool exists and that's because even though we added say a curtain wall here as just one segment that grid goes all the way across. If you wanted to add this grid back in you wouldn't draw another curtain grid you would use add remove segments to put it back in and that's the framework for our curtain wall.
Next we need to go ahead and add any panels that are different and then all of the mullions that go in this location.
