Discover how to draw windows using a PDF as a reference to accurately capture measurements such as sill and head height and mullion definitions. This guide will also help you understand how to use exterior glazing as curtain wall type and make strategic use of vertical and horizontal grids for precision.
Key Insights
- In drawing accurate windows, a PDF can be used as a reference to ensure correct sill and head height and to maintain the right mullion definitions.
- Exterior glazing can be used as the curtain wall type for this process, with the vertical grid layout set to a fixed number to determine the number of vertical grids within the wall.
- Strategic use of the horizontal grid is essential, with the distance chosen carefully based on the specific requirements of the wall. An automated embed option can help embed the walls within basic walls for a seamless, accurate end result.
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Now drawing these windows is a pretty straightforward process, and what we'll do is we'll use our PDF as a reference to make sure we get the right sill and head height, and then also making sure that we're following the plan here to make sure that we have the right mullion definitions. And so you can see the dimensions on the CAD file that we're using as the basis, say five equal panels, so that we know we're going to need four, one, two, three, four mullions going vertically, but we have no idea where the sill height or the head height is. We're going to go ahead and pop open that PDF again.
I'll just bring that over here so we can look at it, and you can see here we're looking at our south elevation, so we're going to have pretty simple windows going across with a head height of eight feet, so we'll have a sill of three and a total height of eight feet, so that means this head height is going to be up at 11. Knowing that, we can go in and draw those windows, so I'm going to jump back to Revit here, and I can go ahead and I can draw in the curtain wall, so I'll go to architecture, wall, and for this one we're going to pick exterior glazing as our curtain wall type, because there's parameters in there that I want to use that will be helpful for the creation of this of this wall. So I'll pick exterior glazing, and I want to use this vertical grid and horizontal grid to my advantage here, so I'm going to go ahead and say edit type, and I'm going to change the type to have a couple of different things here, so I'm going to change the vertical grid layout to say fixed number, and what that'll do is it'll allow me to pick the number of vertical grids within the wall that I've drawn.
For the horizontal grid, I can leave it at fixed distance, but I want to be strategic about the distance I pick here, and we don't have a lot of walls, as you can see in the PDF example, that have a bunch of varying different horizontals, except for this one here, and you can see that the value is set to eight foot one and a quarter, because that's going to give us precisely an eight foot door. When we look at the other elevation page, you can see that we're going to have the same thing with the eight foot one and a quarter head height for that curtain wall that's on the north side as well. So I'm going to jump back into Revit, and we can change this value to eight foot one and a quarter, and to type that in, we do eight space one space one over four, and that gives us eight feet one and one quarter inches.
The other thing we want to do is we want these walls to be embedded within our basic walls, and so what I'll do for that is I'll make sure that this automatically embed is checked. By checking that, when I draw the wall on top of our existing EFIS wall that we drew originally, it'll actually cut it out automatically for us. So I'll hit okay, and then the next thing we want to do is make sure we have that sill height set correctly, and so this is the same window type that we have on the south side, but you can see the sill's set three feet, and the overall height is going to be to eight feet.
We can work it through that way if we wanted to as well. So I can look at it, and I can say my base constraint is level one with an offset of three feet. Okay, and you can see my unconnected height right now is set to 25 feet.
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If I were to set this to level two, which had a floor-to-floor of 14 feet, then I can see that I've got three feet, 11 feet, but I'm a little bit too high there, so I can set my top offset to negative three, and that gives me an eight foot window, and now at this point I'm ready to just draw it out. We will go in and we'll make this adjustment. You can see here the number is set to four, which works out really well for us in this case, but I will just go ahead and draw it in, and I'm just picking the center line of my wall and the intersection of that reference plane, and you can see as I draw it, it'll set it up exactly the way I want it.
Now when you look at this, the glass is on the inside face of the building. I want it to be on the outside face, so I'll hit spacebar, and then it'll draw in my window. Now one thing that's happened is it's drawn in our grids, so when I look at it in 3D, but it didn't actually give us the mullions that we're looking for, so what I could do is I could select this, I can go to edit type, and then I can set the mullions for the vertical and the horizontal types.
When we go down, you can see there's settings for vertical mullions and horizontal mullions, and we can set those to the types that we want to use. So I can go ahead and I can say interior type is going to be the rectangular two and a half by five, and that's what I'm going to set this to for all of them. Again, rectangular two and a half by five, and I'll just set that to all six of the parameters that we have here.
Looks good, so I'll go ahead and hit okay, and now we've got our window set up on level one, and this is going to really set us up so that we can create the rest of this very quickly.
