Creating a realistic roof in architecture design involves a number of key components including understanding the difference between floor and ceiling plans, working in the correct view, and ensuring the roof has a defined slope. This article explains the step-by-step process, from drawing the roof boundary to identifying drain locations, to help you create a more realistic roof detail for your floor plans.
Key Insights
- One crucial consideration for creating a more realistic roof is to understand the difference between ceiling and floor plans. Ceiling plans look up and show only the grids, while floor plans look down and display the walls.
- Keeping your workspace organized is important. Using the 'close hidden windows' option can prevent confusion and the wasting of computer resources on inactive views.
- Creating a realistic roof involves defining its slope. After drawing the roof boundary, it's necessary to deactivate 'define slope' for each line, which enables access to the tools needed for the next step in the process.
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Now we're going to move on to doing the roof, and there's a couple of useful things that we're going to do here to make the roof look pretty good and make it look slightly more realistic than just having a basic flat roof in here. So as we go through, we want to make sure that we're using the right type of floor plans. We've been working on ceiling plans here, but now we're going to switch back to our floor plans.
The big difference is that ceiling plans are cut and look up, whereas floor plans are cut and look down. And this is really easy to see when I go into, say, my roof plan here in the ceiling plans, and you'll notice that all you see are the grids because there is nothing above the roof plan to view. Whereas when I switch to the floor plan roof plan, we can see the walls that extend around here because those are within the cut plane, and we are visually looking down at them.
So keep in mind that we want to be working in the roof under the floor plans category here. Now that we're in the correct view, this is a good time to use the 'Close Hidden Windows' option that we've talked about before, because when you look through, we've opened several views, which could get confusing, especially since we have multiple level ones and roofs open. So it's a good idea to click that every now and then, so you are not wasting computer resources on inactive views here.
So with the roof, it's really, again, it's the same process that we used before when drawing the ceilings, except for we have to draw the boundary ourselves, and then we're going to go through an exercise where we actually go through and add the slope to the roof to identify our drain locations. So the first step here is going to be to activate that roof command. So from the architecture tab, we're going to go to roof, and we'll pick a roof type from here.
If I select on the type selector, we've got one that kind of works, so we'll use that, the steel truss with insulation on metal deck, and this is a single-ply roofing type, and so we'll select that one. And we're going to use the rectangle draw method here, and the best way is just to draw the rectangle from the inside face of the wall, going all the way through, like that. And this roof is going to be designed as a low slope, or sometimes identified as a flat roof, and it's not actually flat, but we will be sloping it.
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If I go through here and review the lines we drew, you can see that we actually have slope on all of these. We need to select all the lines we just drew and uncheck 'Define Slope' in the options bar, because if 'Define Slope' is checked, we won't have access to the tools needed to complete the next step in the process. Once the roof is created, I'll finish the sketch, and there we go.
We've created our roof.
