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 in to 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 gonna pick a rectangle and I'll start from this point. And 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. And so I'll draw a couple dimensions from the grid to here, and a grid to this point. And that gives us kind of a 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. And then I want to make sure that I have the right dimensions here.
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So I'm going to go with four feet for this one. So I'll click this line and change it to four feet. And then I'll click this one, and we'll make that one six feet.
And that's how we're going to create the footprint. So that gives us just the outline of the roof. Now we need to worry about how high it's going to sit.
And so the base level is set to roof right now, but I'm going to work everything off top of parapet. And so we'll go negative seven, and see how that looks. And we might want to change it later.
We're going to start there. And we're just going to 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. And 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's a couple ways we can do that. One way is we can edit the footprint again. And we can go in and we can actually define slope either here, or here.
And that'll give us a slope on the roof. And so if I were to say define slope here, then I can add slope to this line. And I can give it a value like one and a half to 12, or something like that.
What always ends up happening to me, though, is I get it wrong. So it's either going to slope down, which I don't want, or slope up, which is what I want. And I tend to always try to enter in like a negative number to anticipate what it's going to do.
And this one is correct. It's what we're looking for here. But maybe it's not exactly what I want.
And so that's one method we could do. But that does limit you on what your options are, you have to keep going back in. So I'd have to, in this case, I undid with CTRL Z, and then I can go back in and just tell it to not define the slope.
And then I'll finish the sketch again, and it goes back to flat. Which means what I could do, alternatively, is if I said, well, you know, I just want this side to be two feet higher than this one. And I could just do the modify sub elements.
And then I can shape edit this thing to say just be two feet higher. And then I can be done with it. And 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. And I can attach them to the roof, which means they're either going to go up or down to match the profile of the roof here.
And then I can modify the boundary of this wall by editing the profile. And what I'll do here is I'm going to look for how I want this wall to terminate. And so we have this guy here, which was relatively arbitrary, but that's okay.
And we can go in and we can actually hit that as my vertical. And 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.
And now what's going to happen is our stairs going to come up into here. And so 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 our this is high enough for our stair. And 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. Looks like I missed a line. So anytime you're creating a sketch and you don't have that continuous boundary, you can see here, it'll give you a warning.
It's pretty simple. You just hit continue, use that trim extended corner tool again, trim to that corner and finish the sketch. And now we have the opening that we were talking about before.
And this essentially gives us the outline of our new lobby. And now we can start working on embellishing a bit by doing a little bit more work on the curtain wall.
