Discover how to shift gears and construct an upper cabinet that complements your base cabinet. Learn to use the reference plane command, establish dimensions, associate parameters, and how to create a framework for your upper cabinet.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to draw a reference plane that represents the upper cabinet depth using the keyboard shortcut RP.
- The author guides on how to draw a dimension to define the parameter and use the tab key to select the back reference plane for proper dimensioning.
- The article also provides step-by-step instructions on how to associate a parameter with the dimension, create new parameters for the upper cabinet depth, and draw new reference planes for constructing the upper cabinet framework.
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Now that we've finished our base cabinet, we're going to go ahead and shift gears and create our upper cabinet that goes along with this piece. So the first thing that I want to do is I want to draw a reference plane that'll represent the upper cabinet depth. So using that keyboard shortcut R P, I'll activate the reference plane command, and then I'll draw one just kind of going across horizontally here.
And again, that is at a very arbitrary location. The next thing we want to do is we want to draw a dimension to define that parameter. And Revit didn't do us any favors with the reference planes that we want to hit here, because that back reference plane is buried within this wall.
So what we'll do is we'll draw our dimension and going from the one we just created into this area here. And you'll notice that I'm not getting much to grab onto. But what I can do is I can use my tab key.
And if you look on the bottom left of your screen, down in this area here, it'll tell you kind of a play by play of what's happening. And if you look down there as I hit TAB, what I'm looking for is I want it to say reference planes, reference plane back reference. And that tells me that I'm on the back reference plane, which lets me know that I'm dimensioning to the proper location, which is going to be that reference planes that I'm not hitting the wall or the back of my geometry, which will give me a greater chance of success for flexing this model later.
The next step is going to be to associate a parameter with this dimension. And since we don't have a depth for our upper cabinet, you can see we just have one for our base cabinet. What we could do is we can go in and we can create another parameter.
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I'll call this one upper cab depth. Again, it's a name that makes a lot of sense for us because you'll know exactly what it is. You're like, oh, OK, that's the upper cabinet.
We'll hit OK. And then I can change the value of this to one foot two. And now I have the depth for my upper cabinet.
If we were to do the same thing that we did before by going to our right elevation, you can see that we now have a new reference plane to work with. But we don't have any horizontals to create that framework that we were looking for before. So what I want to do is I'll draw two new reference planes.
I'll draw one going across here horizontally and then another one at the top. And then we'll just set dimensions for each of those. These won't be flexible or parametric.
They're just going to be static. So I'll just draw the first dimension from the reference level to the top reference plane and then the second one as well. And I'm going to make the bottom one.
This is going to be four foot six. So I'll select the reference plane, change this to four foot six, and then the top one is going to be eight feet. And so I'll change that one to eight feet.
Now I have the perfect box here to draw in my upper cabinet. We'll go through that exact same process. So create, extrusion, and I want to go through and I want to hit the intersection using that rectangle tool and hit the other intersection.
And then we should have four padlocks that we want to make sure and lock. Once you've got them all locked, then you can go ahead and finish the sketch and just like with the the base cabinet, we need to make sure both extents are locked to a reference plane. The one difference is since we're up at four foot six, our plan view is going to be cutting at four feet, so we won't be able to see this piece.
So in order to modify the width of this guy here, we need to go into our placement side elevation. And you can see here we have the same setup. But I can go in and I can just use that grip tool and just drag that across.
Hit that reference plane and lock the constraint. So before we move on, we just want to do a quick check. So I'll go to our 3D view again.
And I'll just make an adjustment to the length parameter. Make sure everything moves together, which it did. So I'll just hit control Z to undo that.
And then just to make sure the upper cabinet depth is working, I'll change this one to two feet. And looks like everything is moving the way that we want it to. So I'll go ahead and save.
And we'll take a look at some symbolic line options in the next video.
