Discover the methodical approach to creating building sections in architecture design. Learn how to construct sections, manipulate views, and improve graphics for a more realistic representation.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates the creation of building sections by starting on the right-hand side and then moving across, adjusting the view depth and flipping the orientation to vertical.
- Graphics can be enhanced by altering the detail level to medium, joining geometry from the floors and walls, and adding a foundation for the building, ensuring all sections are accurately displayed.
- Sections can be further refined by managing the appearance of level lines, adjusting their position outside the building, and changing the scale from an eighth inch to a quarter inch for improved visibility.
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To start this lesson, what we want to do is we're going to go ahead and create a couple of Building Sections. So I'm going to go to my View tab, select Section, and the first one I want to create is going to be going through this window here and catching part of the stairs. So I want to start on the right-hand side here, and then I'll just move it across.
And if you're having a hard time keeping it straight, don't forget that you can hold down the Shift key, and that'll allow you to keep it straight. The next thing I'm going to do with this section is I definitely don't want it to look so far like that, so I'm going to bring in the view depth, which is represented by this line here, and then I'm going to flip it so that it's looking vertical. And I'm going to bring this in a little bit further.
I do want to see both sides of the stair, but I don't necessarily want to see this back wall or the door there. And we can play with that as we get into the view a little bit. And so that's our first section.
And then what I'll do here is I'll take this one, and instead of having a line going all the way through the plan like that, which is totally fine and is acceptable to do, but if you wanted to clean up your graphics a little bit, you could make an adjustment and hit this button here in the middle, and then that'll give you the option to kind of pull this back so you don't have a line going through the plan. We'll do the same thing to create the Building Section that goes vertically through both of these doors. And so I'll go to Section again, and I'll kind of start somewhere in this area here, and then just click and move it down.
I'm holding down Shift again to make things easier for me. And I'll go ahead and make an adjustment here so it's not sitting up into this dimension. And then we can kind of clip this back just like we did with the other one.
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And again, I'll do the same thing where we can take the gap and bring it down so that we don't have to have the view with a line all the way down the center of it. And that looks pretty good. We've got our two sections set up.
Now the next thing to do is we can take a look at how we can improve the graphics of the section to make it look a little bit more realistic. So I'm going to start with our stair section here that goes through, and we can see the whole thing. So the first thing that I want to do here is I want to adjust the Detail Level.
I can see that it's a pretty good diagrammatic section showing the thickness and the depth of everything here, but it's not quite exactly where we want it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and change the Detail Level to Medium, and that'll show me all the different layers within my assemblies, and it's going to make it look a little bit more real. The next thing I'll do is when you look at the way some of these walls are intersecting through the floor, that's not so great.
So I want to go ahead and Join Geometry, and this is from the Modify tab. I want to Join Geometry from the floors and the walls that are being cut so that they all have this graphic representation, and that just looks much better and is more realistic. The next thing I'm seeing here is I don't really have a foundation for this building, and that's because we don't have the thickened ends on the floor here, and this is a process that we're already familiar with, because we've been able to do this for our sweeps and our reveals, and it's exactly the same.
If we jump over to our 3D view, we can see our floor slab here, and I'm just kind of panning into an awkward position and orbiting so that we can see beneath the building, and we can easily add the footing in so that it'll show accurately in our sections and any of the details that we create from those sections. This is done from the Architecture tab, and if we click on the bottom side of Floor, we have the option to add a floor slab edge. Thickened 24 × 12 is pretty typical for this.
The only thing we want to do is if we go to Edit Type, we can see that a material has not been assigned to this, and by default, it should always be concrete, because it's pretty much the material that's always used for that, but we can just go through and we can kind of type in Concrete—Cast-in-Place Gray, and so we want to make sure it's the same material as our floor, which that's what this is here, and then we want to make sure that it has a cut pattern assigned to it so that it shows graphically correct in our sections. I'll hit OK and OK again, and the only thing I need to do here is make sure when I place it by clicking these lines that I'm actually placing on the outside face, and so a little tip here is these short segments, they get kind of hard to add to after you've already placed it going all the way around the building, so you want to make sure you add it to those first because the order doesn't really matter. We just need to make sure we hit the same line as we go all the way around, and unlike the sweep where we had to pick a particular side, I can actually just put this on the bottom, and then now you can see we have the footing all the way around the building, and what's great about that is when I go back to my Section One here that we created, it gives us a little bit more of a realistic look.
The next thing we can do here is a little bit more Joined Geometry. I can see that I've got a heavy line going through here, and I shouldn't see a heavy line going through at those locations because that heavy line is going to represent the profile or the elements that are being cut, so we'll do some more Joined Geometry here to clean that up a bit, and you can see it makes a big difference in the graphics of our overall Building Section. The next thing we can take a look at is how the Level Lines are going to look, and so I can adjust this a bit by moving it out a little, and then I can take these Level Lines and I can actually pull them so that they just sit outside of the building like that, and this is purely a preference thing.
If you like them going all the way through, you're more than welcome to keep it that way. Lastly, we're going to change the scale from ⅛ inch to ¼ inch because we are going to have other things that are part of this that it makes it easier for us to see at ¼ inch, and plus we're using such a big sheet, we can get everything to fit on there. So I'm going to make a little adjustment to this because we did change the scale so it's easier for me to have these things a little tighter in.
Same with the sections and such, we can pull all these things in closer. Just like we did with our sections before, we can go ahead and adjust these so that they don't go all the way through the building, and now we're one step closer to having a little bit more realistic look on our Building Sections.
