Master the process of drawing and adjusting ceilings and walls using a variety of tools and settings. Learn how to add elements like lighting and how to work with different view ranges to see your design from various angles.
Key Insights
- Creating a ceiling involves adjusting the phasing to get a clear picture of the space, then drawing out the ceiling using the architecture tab. Options for customization including changing material and setting the ceiling height are available.
- Viewing the ceiling can be achieved by adjusting the view range in the level one or level two ceiling plan. If the roof obscures the ceiling, it may be necessary to adjust the cut plane to optimize visibility.
- Drawing walls involve using the wall tool and setting the offset. Adjusting the wall base offset to sit above the ceiling and attaching the wall to the bottom of the roof above can help achieve the desired design.
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.
For the ceiling, what we're going to do is we're going to jump over to our Level One ceiling plan here. And you can see there are a few things going on. So the phasing is obviously pretty weird because we're seeing all of our old elements on top of our new as well.
We're going to adjust that first things first, right? We'll change this to Previous plus New. And I think we all already knew that because we know what the settings need to be for this type of thing. And now we can get a clearer picture of what space we have to work with.
And so we're going to draw a couple of different ceilings here. We've got a drywall lid that we're going to have that's going to be in the center here, which is going to be the host for many different lights that we're going to put in. And those lights are cool because they're going to do a couple of things for us.
They're going to add some interest to the ceiling that we're going to put in here. And then they're also going to help contribute to the lighting of the rendering that we're going to do later. We'll start by just laying this thing out.
So I'm going to go to the Architecture tab, Ceiling. And this is going to be a sketch ceiling that we'll create. And it's going to be a rectangle.
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And you know, you could go in and you could lay it out and draw it perfectly dimensioned the first time. But I personally like to just draw it—a big guess like that. And then I'll add dimensions to the extents from the grid lines like you see here.
And this will give me the ability to now go back in and say, OK, I want this dimension value to be different. So I want that to be 10 inches. And then I can kind of work my way up to the next one, which this will be 12 foot 10. Got pretty close there, right? And then do the same thing going from left to right.
So this one, I'm going to make two foot six. And then lastly, this dimension is going to be 25 feet. So the last thing that we want to do here that we haven't addressed is where's this thing going to sit? And what's it made of? So it's not going to be the 2x4 ACT; we're going to make it the Gypsum Wallboard on Metal Stud.
And then I'm going to set it up above Level Two, we'll say seven feet so that we don't have that weird condition here again. So it looks pretty good. Let's go and finish the sketch and take a look at it in 3D.
There it is. All right, looks good. So let's go back to our ceiling plan.
And it can be Level One or Level Two; it doesn't really matter which one we work from here. Both of them need to be adjusted. If I were to look at the Level Two ceiling plan again, same thing where we want to change that Previous plus New.
And what I'm seeing here is I don't have a clear picture of the ceiling above. And that's because on both of my ceiling plans here, if I were to look at the Level One plan or the Level Two plan, I'm not looking high enough. And so that's because the roof goes up pretty high here.
If I look at my view range, and I'm on the Level Two ceiling plan, you can see it goes up to Level Roof above. And the view depth goes to Roof. So theoretically, I should be seeing it.
But we're going to check the section and see what's going on here. So the roof is there, right? We're looking up through to the roof. And we're cutting somewhere down here.
We need to take a look at why we're not seeing that ceiling portion. And what I do typically to check that out is I'll go in directly to my view range here. And instead of messing around with these guys here, because what we're doing with the ceiling plan is you're cutting it, and then you're going up vertically.
If we're looking at the Level Two ceiling, if we have the ceiling up seven feet from Level Two, then if we're using a cut plane of seven foot six, that's not going to work. If I were to set this to, say, one foot and hit OK, then we're going to be down below that ceiling level. And then we're starting to see the ceiling that we created.
And so just to give a little refresher on that, if we're working from this Level Two line, and creating a ceiling, if I had—I'll just draw a couple of lines to help illustrate this—if I have my cut plane up at seven foot six, you can see where that line exists. It's clearly up above the ceiling we drew.
We can't see it. So I adjusted it down to one foot. And now this is where we're cutting and looking vertically to see our ceiling, which is why we can now see it.
So the next thing we'll do is we're going to draw some walls in here. And that wall is going to be offset one foot six from the edge all the way around. And so what I'll do is I'll just draw a wall.
And I'm going to pick this Soffit type. And we'll stick with that Finish Face Exterior that we've been using pretty much exclusively. But the big difference is I'm going to change this offset here to one point five or one foot six.
And if I use that rectangle method, then I can draw it in pretty quickly. Some of the things that I'll want to change here are going to be how we set the wall. So the wall base offset is going to need to be above our ceiling.
So I'll just set it to seven feet. And then I'll leave the unconnected at one foot here. And then we're going to attach it to the bottom of our roof above.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw that rectangle. And you can see it's going to the outside here; I hit spacebar, goes to the inside. And there's my ceiling.
If we were to jump over to 3D, you can see there it is going all the way around. And the last thing we need to do with it before we start messing with the graphics is we want to take all four of these walls.
I'm just using CTRL to select them. And we're going to attach them—the top to the bottom of this roof, and the base to this ceiling here. If I do attach with the top setting, then I will pick the roof here.
And if I do attach again with the base setting, then I'll pick my ceiling. And that's what we're going for here.
