Discover the intricacies of creating and placing nested family workstations in a virtual architectural design. Learn the tools and strategies for precise placement and mirroring of components, managing dimensions, and maintaining a space that is open and flowing for office layouts.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the process of loading a nested family workstation into an architectural design, positioning it for optimal space utilization and aesthetics.
- The strategy involves using the mirror pick axis tool for duplicating workstations, creating reference planes for precision, and making adjustments to maintain ample space between workstations and walls.
- The author underscores the importance of exactness in dimensioning and the effective use of tools like the spacebar and control keys for easy selection and placement of components.
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Now that we've created that nested family workstation family, we're going to go ahead and load it in. If I were to go to my Architecture tab and Component, you can see it's ready to go. And we can use the same tools we used before.
So using spacebar to move it around, we can place it however we'd like. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start with one here, and then I'm going to create kind of a bank, and then we'll locate it within this space how we see fit. The first thing before we get too carried away here is I want to move this tag outside of the space so it's not in the way.
So something kind of like that. And then what I'll do is I will use the Mirror Pick Axis tool and just mirror this around. And then I'll grab these two.
So I've got both of these selected using Control here. And then using that Mirror Pick Axis—I used the keyboard shortcut last time, which is MM, another one that I recommend learning how to use. And then we'll go ahead and mirror it.
And then I'll mirror it one more time. And you can see I've now got this handy bank of cubicles that we can use. And then I'll go ahead, and I want to use this as a basis point, you know, roughly; we're not going to be super exact.
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But what I could do is, if I wanted a guide, I could just draw a detail line. And that's from Annotate, Detail Line. So you can either use a detail line or a reference plane.
If you're worried that you're probably not going to go back and delete it later, then I would recommend using a reference plane, because the detail line will be part of your drawing and it will print. And so the next thing I'll do is I'll draw another reference plane; this will just give me a guide on where I can place this down the middle. And when we do this with the layout, if I move this to the center, which seems like it'll work, I want to double-check some of these dimensions. It seems like I might be getting too close here, but it might be better if we had it closer to this side.
If I take a dimension from here to the face of the wall, you know, three-foot-three, and then to here, you know, it's a little short. So I will want to just move that over. And what's nice is because we created this family with all of these components put into one, it's a really easy thing to select, because now I'm not having to manage, you know, each one of these would be six or seven different components.
So what I'll do is I'll move it over the three inches here so that I have the three feet roughly from the window and then about three feet from this side. And if you really wanted to do it, if it's bothering you, you can definitely move it that 7/32". And when I say if it's bothering you, what I really mean is it's bothering me that it's not exact because I like these things to be pretty precise.
We'll set that there. And then I'm going to delete these dimensions because we don't need them. And I definitely don't need that reference plane.
So I'll delete that. And then we can move it up vertically so that we're pretty close to the edge. And the reason, what we'll be looking for, is we really want to maintain some space between the edge of our next bank of cubicles and the edge of the next bank for our wall.
If I were to take, say, this bank of cubicles right here, that four-pack, and mirror it, then what I could do is I can move that down three feet so that I have a small walkway there. And you can see that's just not going to be close enough for us or that's too close. If somebody wanted to walk around, we wouldn't want to force all the traffic this way.
The idea is to have a nice open and flowing office. So I'll select all of them now. And then I'll just move this up so that it's pretty close to aligning with the edge of the window.
And that gives us a nice flowing space from the open office into what will be the break room. And we'll eventually be modeling a demising wall for that location. And so that's how we'll set up the open office on level one.
And on level two, we'll do a similar situation. We could potentially get lucky and have it all work out perfectly. So what I'll do is I'll copy it by selecting it all first.
So I'll copy, and then we'll jump up to level two. And then we'll cross our fingers and we'll do Paste Aligned to Current View. And it seems like it works out pretty well.
This is more open because it's the hallway, so I can move this down so that it actually hits the wall there. And then people can kind of come in from any direction into those spaces, and it looks like I moved it a little too far. We'll just get it pretty close.
You know, since this is systems furniture, it won't be exactly on the wall like that. And now we've got another open office set up for level two as well as level one. So to finish this off, what I'll do is I'll go ahead and, using that leader option, we'll move that open office for level two out.
And then it looks like I've got a little bit of space here to where I can put, you know, like a cabinet with an upper for just general storage in the office space, because there's always a need for that. We'll add our generic cabinet to this location. And we'll be looking again for that casework generic.
And now that we're getting tons of families in here, it's kind of hard to navigate a little bit. So what I'll do is I'll just start typing it into that search field. You see that I just typed "ca" and it found it. And then I can just grab that with the upper.
And I'll put one here. And I'm just going to stretch it across so that it kind of hits this wall. And then across over here.
So it's just off the wall on the edge like that. Now we've got a nice office space with a little bit of storage on the end. And we should be good to go.
We'll start our next, and our last family is going to be an annotation family, which we're going to create from scratch. And that's going to be our door tags that we'll create.
