Discover step-by-step instructions on setting the foundation for a building project in Revit, including creating walls, setting dimensions, and understanding the significance of datum points. This article delves into the complexities of the process, emphasizing the importance of strategic decisions early on to facilitate project progress.
Key Insights
- The article explains the importance of making early decisions while creating walls in Revit to facilitate the project progress. Walls should not just be thrown on the page; determining base points early on aids in maintaining dimensions throughout even when wall types change.
- The importance of setting datums (reference points) correctly is underscored. The article provides a detailed walkthrough on how to adjust datums according to the project, using the example of a small house.
- Lastly, the piece highlights the importance of using the correct location line when drawing walls. An incorrect location line can lead to dimension changes when the thickness of the wall is altered, which can impact the overall dimensions of the building project.
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The first thing that we're going to want to do for this project is we're going to want to create the walls. And a lot of you might look at that like, oh, that's pretty simple. We'll just go to the wall tool and start drawing the walls and go to town and get it all get it all drawn correctly.
But it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. And the reason is because we can do that. We can go in and we can just throw the walls on the page and then go ahead and start editing them as we go.
But if we make a few decisions early on, it'll be a lot easier for us as we go through the project. And so I'm going to jump back to our example here. And you can see that we have a couple of datum points here, we have level one, and then we have roof.
And then when you look at the way this is dimensioned, that the overalls here, the 20 foot and the 25 foot, those go to the outside face of the exterior walls. And so we're going to want to make sure that we use those as base points so that we can make sure and have the same dimensions maintained no matter what we choose for these wall types. If we change to a much thicker wall type or a thinner wall type, then we won't have any issues.
So first things first, we want to make sure that our datums are set in a way that work with our project. And so this is just a small house, so we can go ahead and adjust them accordingly. So I'll go to one of my elevation views, it doesn't really matter which one, but I tend to always go to the south elevation view.
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So just by double clicking on that elevation tag or right clicking and going to go to view, or you can simply just go to your project browser and double click on south to navigate to that view. The next thing I'll do is I'll zoom in here on my datums. And you can see you have one that says level one and the other one that says level two.
So the first thing I'll do is I will change this level two one to say roof. And when I do that, I get a pop up, it's asking me, would you like to rename the corresponding views? What they're saying there is we have corresponding views to this level here, you can see it was level two before. If you look at your project browser, floor plans level two, ceiling plans level two.
If I were to say no here, those would remain level two, and then I'd have to go in and rename them eventually. But if I say yes, those are going to automatically change to be roof, which is awesome, because then it's one less thing that I have to do, right? The next thing we'll do is we saw that that height here, which is really the top plate of our walls here, is going to be instead of 10 feet, we're going to change that to eight feet. So remember, all of our units are in feet.
If I were to just type in here, eight, and hit ENTER, then eight feet is what I get. Now I've got the foundation work to create my walls. So I can go back to level one.
And we can actually create some walls here. So the goal is to create the exterior of the building and some of those interior walls as well before we move on to really refining those dimensions. Because I find that if you try to draw it exactly the same way that you want it to be right off the bat, you tend to get hung up on what the dimensions are.
So it's best to sort of rough it in and then go in and adjust it. We'll start off with the exterior shell of the building being modeled at the dimensions we're looking for. And then we can kind of use our dimensions that we place to refine the interior.
So the first thing we want to do is draw that exterior portion. And to do that, we need to understand a couple of things about walls. So first off, when we draw walls, we can use this wall tool here from the architecture tab.
And you can see next to it, it says wall. And then in parentheses, it says WA. Well, WA happens to be the keyboard shortcut.
So with Revit, when we enter in keyboard shortcuts, we just type it in. So WA. And it activates the wall command.
When it's a two digit shortcut like that, you don't have to enter or spacebar or anything like that. You just type in the command. The next thing you want to do is you want to check your wall type.
When we look at our example, we can see that those walls were six inches. And so when I look here, I've got generic eight inch, and that's not what we're looking for. We want generic six inch.
As we go down through these parameters, you can see the base constraint is level one. That sounds good to me. With no offset.
We do have the option of drawing walls either above or below that base constraint. So above would be a positive number here. Below would be a negative.
Then we have our top constraint. And there's very little cases where you're going to want to have this say unconnected, even though that's the default. So in our case, we're going to go ahead and change that to roof.
And the same with the base offset, the top offset can be above or below that datum point. So the one thing I skipped over here was location line. Now, if you remember from my earlier description, we want to make sure that we have that wall set to the exterior face.
And so you can see Autodesk has provided a pretty good description of what each one of these things are going to do. And it's important to use the correct one, because what will happen here is if I were to say, stick with option one, which is wall center line, and I went from a generic six inch wall to a generic eight inch or 12 inch wall, well, then my outside dimension is no longer going to be 20 feet by 25 feet, because that wall is going to grow based on that location line. If I were to show you an example of that, I'll draw what's called a reference plane here.
And then I'll draw my wall to be sitting along that. And so this is a wall with finished face or with wall center line. And then I'll just copy these down.
And if I change this one to say finished face exterior, and I'm just going to line these up really quickly here. But if I were to change the thickness of this wall, so it's generic six inches, if I were to change it to generic eight inches, you can see it grows two inches down. Well, this one here, if it's wall center line, and I change that one to the same thing, generic eight inches, it's going to grow an inch on either side, which is now going to change the dimensions of my building.
So it's important to use the appropriate location line, so that you can make sure that your dimensions that you work so hard to maintain, stay maintained.
