Explore the process of refining architectural details in a virtual design, with particular attention paid to areas such as roofing and wall sections. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to tackle common design issues such as gaps between the roof and exterior wall, and how to add more realism and detail to the initial model.
Key Insights
- The article delves into resolving common design issues such as a gap between the roof and exterior wall, and the absence of specific detailing in the model. This involves editing the project's roof plan to ensure proper boundaries and eliminating any gaps present.
- Modifying the roof section is discussed, paying particular attention to the thickness of the insulation layer. The article suggests adjustments to the metal decking and insulation layers to achieve a more accurate and realistic representation.
- The process of adjusting wall sections to align with roof sections is described, stressing on the importance of checking the alignment in multiple views to ensure accuracy. The article also touches upon techniques such as using 'Join Geometry' to create a cleaner and more detailed design outcome.
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As you can see, I've gone through and added the mirror and the Keynote to our restroom in the women's room, same way we did it for the men's room. And now we're going to go ahead and jump over to our A701 and A702 sheets. So I'm going to jump to A702 first.
And there's a couple of things that are weird in here that I want to fix. So first off, we ended up with a gap between our roof and exterior wall in a couple locations. And then also the way that this is modeled is still a generic type, and it hasn't been updated to the next level of detail.
So our first pass was just to get everything in there and kind of get all the elements modeled. But now we're at a point where it needs to show some detail. So the first thing we're going to do is resolve the issues with our roof.
And there's a couple of things I can see here—we're only showing insulation, and there's a weird thin layer of metal deck below. It'll look more realistic if we show the right layers on here. We'll want to make that modification.
But first, we're going to take a look at our roof plan. So I'm going to jump over to my Project Browser, and I'm going to look for my roof plan here. And what I want to see is I want to see where my boundary lies.
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And I can already see there's some issues here—there's a big gap right there. And then I can see a gap along this side that we need to fix. And this should be pretty easy because we did use the Roof Cutout to make these modifications.
If I just go to the edge here, and you can see here I'm on that line, and it's going to say Roof Opening Cut if I hold it here long enough. And you can see it down on the bottom left as well. But when I click on it, you can see here it says Roof Opening Cut—that's the one I want to modify.
If I end up where this is what my contextual tab looks like, then I'm not selected on the right thing. So I want to make sure that this is what we're seeing. And that's all we're seeing here.
And I can click Edit Sketch. And I can see that my sketch that I modified was just this big rectangle, which, you know, again, was probably fine for the previous phase of our drawing development. But for now, we need to make sure that this looks a little bit better.
So I'm going to go ahead and pick this point, which is our interior mullion. And I'm going to move this all the way down. And we're going to draw a new boundary for our cut.
And that's going to allow us to not have that weird gap anymore. And so if I just trim these guys, delete that line, and then I need to check the other side. But you can see if we've squeezed our boundary to now go from here to there.
And so I'll finish the sketch, double-check everything looks good. And you can see it's now all the way back to the face of wall. And the other one that we saw that was off was over here.
And I have a feeling this is just a matter of the wall or the roof itself not having the right boundary. And you can see, you know, this should be up through here. If I just edit the footprint, and then we can move this wall back over, that's going to move it over.
And now we don't have a break around our walls. And so we can check that by if we just go back to our A702, where we saw those two issues, you can see that they've been resolved. And so the next thing I'll do is I'm going to go ahead and modify my roof section.
And so if I look at the type here, Edit Type, Edit the Structure, you can see I've got a quarter-inch metal deck and then five inches of rigid insulation. And so I can go ahead and just make some adjustments in here to show this a little bit more accurately. Our insulation is much thicker than five inches.
And so what this is going to do is try to hold that as a minimum dimension. And it'll grow this based upon how we sloped our roof, because we set that layer to be variable. And so what I'll do is I'll set this to the dimension that I'm hoping to have here, which will be two and a half inches for that metal deck.
And then to make up for it, I'll just reduce the insulation value, which again, this is our minimum insulation value, to three inches. And our roof ended up being a quarter-inch taller, which is going to be fine for what we're doing here, since we do already have a high parapet. So I'll hit OK a couple times to get out of this.
And you can see nothing really changed here. And we now have the metal deck showing. So the next thing that I want to do is address this roof element here.
And you can see the type is set to nine inches or Generic 9". And if I look at the types that I have available, I have this Steel Truss Insulation on Metal Deck TPO. And that's the actual roofing that we want to use for this piece as well.
We'll go ahead and select that. And I'm OK that it drops down because the reality is there would be a bit of a parapet here. And we're now seeing the metal deck plus our insulation layer, which is the same type that we have here.
And we can go ahead and start making some adjustments. So this wall here, we're going to go ahead and give it a negative offset of nine inches to bring it all the way down to this point. And we can do this a couple ways.
I can go in and I can just align it and drop it down. And you can see it gave us a negative offset of nine inches. And then the only thing that we’ve got to do now is—and this is pretty important—we need to make sure we jump back to like a 3D view or other elevation and section views to make sure that all of these portions of wall, not just the ones that the section was cut through, are updated.
You can see this one's dropped down, but these other two would not be. So I'm going to select them and then give them a negative nine-inch offset so that we've got the walls coming down to the roof on all the different sides. And in the A702 section, you can see we've now filled in those gaps.
And the next thing I'll do—and this is a minor thing—this is another one of those subjective drafting things, but I can use the Join Geometry to join my roof to my wall and do the same thing for this portion. And it kind of just cleans it up to where we have this broad outline around there. This one—we could do the same thing.
The one thing where it does get weird is because this is a curtain wall panel, and it'll react in a way that we're not hoping for here. We'll go ahead and join between the roof and the wall here. And you can see we get a cleaner outcome throughout these.
And we can do the same thing with our soffit material there as well. But what I want to do is I want to look at the way this looks in our wall section. And so there's a couple ways that we can handle this.
And one of them is the quick and easy way and the other one is probably the right way to do it. We're going to take a look at both of them, and then we can start looking at the rest of our wall sections and make sure everything's looking good.
