Learn how to design a roof plan using grids as guides, set the right dimensions and establish the footprint of your design. This article also explains how to adjust the height and slope of the roof, modify sub elements, and harmonize the design with other elements like curtain walls.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on constructing a roof plan using grids as guides, including how to define the footprint and set dimensions.
- It details techniques for modifying the height and slope of the roof, offering two methods for more control over your design, either by defining the slope or by shaping to edit.
- The content also discusses how to work with other design elements, such as curtain walls, and attach them to the roof to ensure the overall design is well-coordinated.
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For the roof, we're going to go ahead and jump to our new roof plan here. And you can't really see too much here, but we're going to use the grids as our guides anyway. So, I'm going to draw a rectangle for the roof when we draw that footprint.
And then we're going to use these grids as our guide. If I go into Architecture, Roof, we're going to use that Roof by Footprint option. And we're not going to use this one; we're going to change it to a different one.
We'll go with a generic nine-inch for now. And I'm going to pick a rectangle, and I'll start from this point. Then, I'll go ahead and adjust it out here.
And I don't know exactly how far out I want it to go at this point, but we will get there. So, I'll draw a couple of dimensions from the grid to here, and a grid to this point. That gives us the opportunity to adjust these a little.
And so, first off, we want to make sure this thing's flat. So, I want to uncheck 'Define Slope' on all of these. Then, I want to make sure that I have the right dimensions here.
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So, I'm going with four feet for this one. I'll click this line and change it to four feet. Then, I'll click this one, and we'll make that one six feet.
That's how we're going to create the footprint. That gives us just the outline of the roof. Now, we need to worry about how high it's going to sit.
The base level is set to Roof right now, but I'm going to work everything off the top of Parapet. So, we'll go negative seven and see how that looks. We might want to change it later.
We’re going to start there. And we’ll just work from that point. So, I’ll finish the sketch. This is going to give us just a flat roof.
If I go to 3D, you can see I’ve got a flat roof. We had a little bit of different dimensions with the curtain wall, which is why it looks like that. But if you remember from the sample, this was actually a sloped roof.
And so there are a couple of ways we can do that. One way is we can edit the footprint again. We can go in and actually define the slope either here or here.
That'll give us a slope on the roof. If I were to say define slope here, I can add slope to this line and give it a value like one and a half to twelve, or something like that.
What always ends up happening to me, though, is I get it wrong. It either slopes down, which I don’t want, or slopes up, which is what I want. I tend to always try to enter in a negative number to anticipate what it’s going to do.
This one is correct. It's what we're looking for here, but maybe it’s not exactly what I want.
That’s one method we could use, but it limits your options because you have to keep going back in. In this case, I undid with CTRL+Z, and then I can go back in and just tell it to not define the slope.
Then, I’ll finish the sketch again, and it goes back to flat. Which means, what I could do alternatively is say, ‘I just want this side to be two feet higher than this one.’
And then, I can be done with it. That’s my preferred method, because I feel like it gives me more control over the design without having to do the math to figure out exactly where everything is.
And so once I've got that set up, then I have the ability to have my curtain walls conform to that. If I select both of these using CTRL, I can actually use the Attach tool. I can attach them to the roof, which means they’ll either go up or down to match the profile of the roof here.
Then, I can modify the boundary of this wall by editing the profile. What I’ll do here is look for how I want this wall to terminate.
We have this part here, which was relatively arbitrary, but that’s okay. We can go in and actually hit that as my vertical. Then, what's cool is I can pick the bottom side of that roof to be my horizontal piece. And now you can see the shape of this wall to create that opening is going to be more like this.
Now, what’s going to happen is our stairs are going to come up into here. Something we’ll have to take a look at to make sure we're not nailing our heads on this, because it does look kind of low, is making sure that this is high enough for our stairs. That's something we'll look at as we get to that point, because it’s easy enough to change.
So, I’ll finish the sketch. It looks like I missed a line. Anytime you're creating a sketch and don't have that continuous boundary, you’ll see a warning.
It’s pretty simple. You just hit 'Continue', use the Trim/Extend Corner tool again, trim to that corner, and finish the sketch. Now, we have the opening that we were talking about before.
This essentially gives us the outline of our new lobby. Now, we can start working on embellishing a bit by doing a little more work on the curtain wall.
