Discover an in-depth look at modeling a break room in an open office space using room separation lines and Autodesk cloud. Learn about the process of loading in content, drawing room separators, placing furniture, and overcoming common challenges.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide to designing a break room in an open office space using software tools, including the creation of room separation lines and the placement of objects from the Autodesk cloud library.
- The author emphasizes the importance of understanding the quirks of the Autodesk cloud library for efficient usage, such as knowing that the search function can sometimes only search within a very limited scope unless you return to the root directory.
- The article also offers tips for efficient design, such as using the filter function for easier item finding, using instance parameters that allow for adjustments in object size, and using the spacebar for quick object rotation.
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Now we're going to work on this Break Room area here, and part of that is going to be to draw Room Separation lines that are going to designate where this is because there aren't really going to be hard walls that separate it, since it's just a big Open Office space. So I'm going to take a Room Separator from the Architecture tab, and I'm going to go ahead and draw it from the face of this column down, and I want 12 feet. Then I'll bring it across to this wall here. We're looking for 12 feet from the face of the column to the Room Separator. Just double-checking to make sure I got that in correctly. And so this space here is going to be designated as our Break Room, and then the rest of it is going to be Open Office.
So to fill this out so it actually looks like a Break Room, we're going to take advantage of our ability to load in content from the Autodesk Cloud. There are some weird, finicky things with this that I just want to go over so that we're all on the same page and can easily and effectively use this in the future. If I go to Insert and then Load Autodesk Family, the first thing I'm going to do is bring in a table that we could use, then a banquette, and then some casework. The weird part about it is right now I'm stuck in Doors here, and you’d think that if you went up and searched, it would search the entire library—but that's not the case. Unfortunately, it’ll search upon a search upon a search, so it will only search the 54 results for Doors here.
If I were to search for “table” within here, it's going to tell me that there are no results found—which we know is not true. If I click the Home button, it takes me back to the root directory and allows me to search the entire directory. So I could go in and just search "table, " and it'll show many different tables. Then on the left, it shows the different types of categories that we have. If I filter it down even further by Furniture and then Tables, then it'll show me the different items we have. I'm going to grab this one here, which is the Table Dining Round with Chairs.
I'm going to go ahead and grab the Table Rectangular as well. And because I know we're going to use it later, I'm going to grab this Conference Table. All we're doing here is just picking the families that we're going to load into the project—that's all. So I'll go ahead and click Load. It downloads them and loads them in. It's going to give us this warning here because that chair is already used within one of the families—this one here—so I'll go ahead and say Overwrite the Shared Component (the top option there).
Now I can go ahead and start laying this out. The goal that I want to have is to create a long banquette across here, a few tables around, and then some casework with an island and bar seating on this edge. We'll start from right and work our way to the left. The first thing I want to do is put the banquette in. We can do that by again loading our Autodesk Family. I'm going to take it back to All Results here, and this is kind of an odd location for this one, but if we go to Specialty Equipment and then Food Service, it’ll have a Double Banquette or a Single Banquette.
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So I'm going to go ahead and click on this one here and load it in. These are all located within Architecture and then Component. So I'll go to that one, and since this is the last one we loaded in, you can see it located here as the first one to pop in. This is a cool family because it has an instance parameter that allows me to make it longer or shorter just by grabbing these grips, which is really nice. I'm going to go ahead and select it, and then we'll just put it into this corner here. I'll go ahead and align it to the back of the column, and then we can just drag it up to the edge here. I'm going to set the length—I'm going to guess here that it's 14 feet 1 inch because of that space there. That was a very lucky guess.
We've got the Banquette in, and then I'm going to keep adding these things. We're going to put two of these square tables. Once you get further into a project, you'll start to notice that there's just a lot of stuff, and it's hard to find things. So I really do take advantage of this filter here at the top just so it's easier for me to find things. I'm going to use the 72 × 30, and I'm just going to put two of these along the Banquette here. Nothing too particular about the location, just that there's two of them and a little bit of space in between so people can kind of shimmy in or out. Then we'll put three chairs per table, and that's going to be the Brewer Chair.
What I'll do to put three is place one in the middle, and then one off to the side here. Then, just to make it mirrored with the same spacing, I can just mirror it. Then I'll copy it down to the next one. Now we've got our Banquette. The next tables that we're going to place here are the simple ones, and those are going to be the Round Table. We'll find that Round Table here, and we're going to use the smaller one—the 36" diameter. I believe this is one we used in a previous class as well. I'll just place these so that there are two of them lined up, and then I'm going to put a Rectangular Table.
Just like this one here—but I'm going to put that one in the middle. So I'll just copy this over and kind of set it somewhere around here, but I want chairs on all sides. So I'll go ahead and mirror those chairs across and then put one on each end. You might be able to hear this, but I'm hitting the spacebar, which allows me to rotate these things around—and that works when you have them selected. You can see it gives you a nice rotation that's really good for placing things quickly. So I'm just going to kind of nudge this around a little bit since it is furniture, and everybody's going to move it around anyway, right?
This will be our setup for our seating, and then we're going to go ahead and dive into some casework in here for the next video.
