Design professionals will find value in this detailed examination of methods for creating floor plan dimensions in building designs. The article provides a step-by-step guide to ensure your designs are clear, precise, and avoid unnecessary conflicts between different elements.
Key Insights
- Placing dimensions in a building design requires careful placement to avoid creating conflicts between different elements. Adjusting the location of elements such as elevation tags can help create a clearer, more precise design.
- Dimensions can be presented as either a single string or individual elements, and can be modified from one to the other. This flexibility allows for more detailed and accurate representation of dimensions in the design.
- Copying gridline dimension strings from one level to another can be an effective way to maintain consistency across different levels of the design. However, this requires a reference point for the dimensions to hit and some adjustments may be necessary to keep the design clear.
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Our next step here is going to be to go in and create some dimensions for our floor plans. And this is a pretty basic step, but I think it's worth going over again just to make sure that we're all on the same page with the methods that we have available to us. We've already got some dimensions for our gridlines here, which is good, and that's what we want to see.
But what we can do is we can take a look at some of the ways that the dimension strings are set up here. And so the first thing I see is that my dimension for this elevation is right in the middle of where everything is set up here. So I want to go ahead and grab just this box element, and then I can go ahead and move it off to the side.
Now, when you move it that way, you can see that this elevation marker stays put, but I'm allowed to put the elevation tag in different locations. And when you're placing dimensions, you want to make sure that you're not creating unnecessary conflicts between these different elements. And if I wanted to go in and, say, adjust this element to be in a different location—that's totally fine to do here.
And then let's say I wanted to identify some of these other corners. If I wanted to point out that we have a two-foot dimension from this column line to the edge of the building, and then the same thing on this side, where we can set that, I would want to make sure that I'm putting these dimensions in similar locations. And you can see I've got this one here already.
So I probably want to take that out so I'm not showing the same thing twice. But a good one to show here might be this offset—just generally to show that the building is set back into there.
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And then these offsets here go back. This is something we could take pretty far—we could do a lot of dimensions, or we can do a little bit. This is a topic that we're going to explore a little bit further in one of our later classes and get into more of the techniques of dimensioning.
But some of the things that are important to note when you're doing that is that dimensions are either in a string, like we have here, or they can be an individual element, like we have on this one. This goes both ways: an individual dimension can be modified from a single string like this into a multi-segment dimension like this guy here, simply by selecting it, choosing Edit Witness Lines, and adding the points that I want to add to it. And this goes both ways.
I can remove points by removing these areas and even adjusting the original one by using that Edit Witness Lines tool. And adding some dimensions to the plan like I've done here is a good idea, and it's something that helps communicate our design a little bit better. And if we wanted to, we can take a look at what we have on level two, and you can see that we don't have any of the gridline dimensions on here.
And so what I can do is grab the gridline dimension strings from level one, copy those to the clipboard, and then go to my level two plan. From the Modify tab, choose Paste Aligned to Current View. I can paste those into the view, and that works as long as you have a reference point for those dimensions to hit. Since the grids are the same from level one to level two, we're able to accomplish that.
So I can go in and, like, say, if this one's far outside, I can move it to a different location so it's a little clearer, and make those kinds of adjustments. For example, here, this is another one that's bumping into the grid there.
And so that allows us to clean up our floor plans a little bit more than they were previously.
