Discover how to create a detailed slab edge detail at a brick wall using both detail items and actual Revit model elements. This article guides you through the process, showing how to change scales, rename details, add filled regions, and create layers of earth and sand to make your model more realistic.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to create a slab edge detail at a brick wall, using both detail items and actual Revit model elements. The process begins by changing the scale and renaming the detail to make it more identifiable.
- Next, filled regions are added to the model to depict the earth around the footing and the sand below the foundation. This is done by drawing the desired outline and changing the filled region type to either earth or sand.
- Lastly, the importance of masking settings is highlighted. Masking, a white region below the pattern, can be unchecked to make line weights transparent and to allow anything behind the filled region to show through, enhancing the overall realism and details of the model.
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Next, we're going to go ahead and create a detail from one of our wall sections. And so this detail is going to be composed of both detail items and actual Revit model elements. So I'm going to jump over to our wall section view.
And one of the things I want to do here before we move on is I want to make sure I close out the temporary project that we're using, because that is only going to get in the way of everything else we're doing. And since we have a view that looks identical in our own project, we want to make sure we don't get those mixed up. And so now we've got just our project open, and we're ready to create our next detail, which is going to be a slab edge detail at our brick wall here.
And so we're going to go and create this almost the same way we created the wall section. So I'll go to the view tab, call out, and instead of wall section or building section, like we've previously used, we're going to use detail. And this will give us a detail view that we can use to create another detail.
And so I'm just going to set this in here. And then I'll move the call out tag a little bit so it's not sitting over the level line. And what we've done by creating this call out here is we've actually created a detail view different from a drafting view.
Drafting view doesn't have any relationship to the model, that's something we'll have to create. But this detail view has all of the elements that were already part of our model. This view, we're going to do a couple of things to first.
Number one, we're going to go ahead and change the scale to inch and a half equals a foot. And then we're going to go ahead and rename it. I'm going to rename this detail to be brick at slab edge.
And I'll just move these extents around a little bit to suit the needs of our detail. Our goal here is going to be to add elements to embellish the detail so that it looks a little bit more realistic and conveys our ideas for the entire thing. The first thing we'll do is we're going to add some filled regions to show the earth around the footing here, the sand below the foundation, and then some line work to represent our finished floor, our vapor barrier, flashing, and the air vapor barrier that goes down the wall here.
Let's get started with the filled regions. From the annotate tab, we're going to go to filled region, and we're going to look for either earth or sand. Let's see if we have either one of those.
And neither one of those are available. We're going to go to edit type, duplicate, and we're going to create one called earth. Just like we did before, we're going to go ahead and change this from solid fill to earth because that's the pattern we want to use.
And then we can go ahead and do it again since we know we want to use the sand one. We'll say duplicate, and we'll call it sand. And since we don't really use the regular sand pattern because it's hardly visible most of the time, we're going to go ahead and use sand dense.
Since we want to create one for earth, we're going to go ahead and select that as our type, and we'll hit okay. And then I'm going to go through and I'm going to draw the outline that I want to use for this. And so I'll start in this location here, which is halfway down our slab.
And then we'll go ahead and draw the outline. And what we could do is we can actually draw a line like you see here, and then I'll just bring it across a little bit. But I can actually change to an arc at this point to give me that rounded look below.
And so I can bring it across say to here, and then you can see I've got the round down below here. And then I'll take it say somewhere in that location. And I like to make sure that they're tangent so that it's a nice smooth arc that goes across.
And then I'll bring it vertical and then just trace along the outside of the footing. One thing you may have noticed as we created that is we did not make any adjustments to what type of line we use there. And so I'll show you what that means in a second here.
So I'm going to finish the sketch and all the lines are going to be the exact same line weight, but typically we'd want to have a wide line to represent the finished grade. And so what I could do is I can edit this and I can change these line types. Another thing we don't like to see is necessarily having a hard line to be the break.
We'd rather it just kind of fade off. And so what I could do is I could select it, edit boundary, and I can change this one to wide lines. So that's a thicker line weight.
And then I can change all of the other ones here that don't represent an object line like these do here. I can change those to invisible lines. And what it'll do is these invisible lines, these actually won't show up outside of our sketch.
And now you can see we just have that faded away look that we're looking for. Now we can do the sand and we want to make sure this is four inches away. So I'm going to go ahead and double check that to make sure we got relatively close.
And we did. Look at that. But we'll make it exactly four inches because that'll just make our job a little easier for this next step.
So go ahead and make a filled region again. And we'll pick sand. And you may notice that one got through.
And this is what I was talking about before with that door threshold. If I hadn't gone through and made all those edits, we'd probably have a dozen of these. And if you imagine if you had imported in maybe 15 details, well, you'd end up 15 times however many hatch patterns in your filled region library here.
And it's just it's a really difficult thing to get rid of. And so you want to make sure you're always cleaning those up as you go through. Anyhow, we're going to go to sand here and I'll just trace that outline.
And you'll notice as I get past the crop region, I'm not too worried about where that ends. So I'm just going to trim to close that off. This guy will stay with the thin lines.
I'm not worried about that too much. But then we'll go ahead and finish the sketch. And now we have the sand layer.
One thing you may notice is the line weights for the foundation have been cut. And that's because both the earth filled region and the sand filled region have a setting in the type that is called masking. And essentially it's just a white region below the pattern.
And so if I uncheck that, it'll allow the line weights to be transparent. And so again, selecting the sand region, I'll go to edit type and uncheck masking. And that allows the line weights to show through.
It also allows anything that's behind here to show through as well. So you have to weigh that out if that's the right way to go with your project or not. And that's how we can add filled regions to embellish a detail.