Enhance your construction design skills and knowledge by delving into this comprehensive walkthrough of modifying and building a pergola. Learn how to handle intricate details like modifying component axes, creating groups, adding beams, and creating decorative endings for your beams, all while maintaining correct measurements and proportions.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-by-step guide on constructing a pergola, beginning from modifying the component axes of a column to placing it at the center point of the base plate.
- It emphasizes the importance of precision in measurements for aspects such as height, width and distance, illustrating this with detailed instructions on constructing the beam, trimming and adding decorations to it.
- Further, it sheds light on creating components, components grouping and material selection, as well as painting and modification of material color, to achieve a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing finished product.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Let's continue modifying and building our pergola. So let's modify our component axes within this component of our column, and let's place our component axes right in the center point of the base plate.
And now I want to move this component to the center point of here. Let's double-check that this is centered. From here to here is 8 inches.
From here to here is 8 inches. So that's where we want our base plate to go, and we will copy from this reference point here along red to this reference point here, and then from here we'll copy from this reference point here and then do the same thing from here to here. Let's make all four of these components a group.
Right-click, Make Group. Let's double-click into this group and let's add in our beam, and this beam is going to be a 4x10, but in actual dimensions our height would be 9 and 1 quarter inches and our width would be 3.5 inches. Make sure that we draw this along the correct axes, and then let's Push/Pull this all the way across to this point right here.
That's at 24 and 11 inches. Let's Push/Pull this element out 6 inches, and then this portion out 6 inches, and then we will triple-click, right-click, Make Group. That does not need to be a component, we just make it a group, and then let's modify this material and create a new material and call this Wood Beam and select our wood grain texture.
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Hit OK, and then we will paint this. It is going in the correct orientation, so we do not need to modify that, and then we have our wood beam for a pergola. We'll hit Escape to close out of this group. One thing that I do notice is that this is actually a little bit too low for our trim.
We want this to go above our trim, so I want to quickly just move this up and see what that distance is, and that's three and five-eighths. So let's move it to be around four inches, just above that trim. We'll double-click into this group and we'll move this beam up four inches. Because I modified—I made each of these a component—if I modify one, it will modify all of them, so I'll move this up four inches and then I will make this column slightly taller to be four inches, and you can see that it made that change in all of those components. Now I want to double-click into this group, select all, hit our Move key, hit Control on my keyboard to make a copy, and copy this out 10 feet. Now let's modify this beam to create more decorative endings, so we'll double-click on this portion, we'll pull this out one foot, and we'll pull this portion out one foot. We'll add a reference line from the top, and we'll go down two inches and we'll go out the side one foot, and then from this side we'll go one foot. Let's draw a line to connect from this intersection to this intersection and from this intersection to this intersection, and Push/Pull to auto-fold, delete that portion and that portion. I feel this is a little bit too small, so I can actually select this edge right here and then, holding down Shift to also select this edge, go to my Move tool. I can actually move this down to a comfortable spot; let's move it down two inches. Now we'll go to Edit, Delete Guides, and close out. Now you can see that I have this nice kind of trim element for my pergola. Our pergola is definitely coming along, it's looking great. I will save my file.
Next, let's create our joists for above our trellis. So let's double-click into this group, and we're going to add a two by six joist. We'll start from this end right here, and we'll draw a rectangle orbiting down so we can see in the green direction. We'll type in 1.5 comma 5.5 for one and a half inches by five and a half inches. Hit ENTER. So this is going to be our joist; we are going to pull this out 12 feet, and then let's do a reference line from the top of here to go down two and then from here to go eight, and we'll draw a line here to create this little chamfered edge, and delete that. Then we will triple-click, right-click, Make Group. Now let's create our supports. Modeling in this area, let's draw a rectangle from here down; we want this to be two and a half inches down. We want this to be a little bit smaller than one and a half, so let's make it one and a quarter, so 1.25 inches comma two inches deep. Then we'll double-click this and let's move this over half of this, so one-eighth inch. Then let's extrude this portion out one quarter inch.
Then let's click this top edge, make a copy, and go down one-quarter inch. Actually, this is too thick; let's make this one-eighth inch. We'll move this in one-eighth inch and move this up one-eighth inch, and move this back. Now we will move this out in the same dimensions, two inches. Let's make this slightly rounded right here, so we can use our Arc tool. This time it doesn't have to be perfectly accurate; we could select here and then go from here to here and find where we get that magenta auto-fill. Then Push/Pull that, and hitting E on your keyboard to erase. Now I can triple-click, right-click, Make Component, and we will call this one L Bracket, Create.
Double-click into this component and let's create another bolt. This time we don't need to make these bolts as components, but let's add some reference lines from here to the center point, from here to the center point, from this point to the center point, and from here to the center point. Let's triple-click, Make Group, so we don't interfere with this geometry, and let's go into our Polygon tool. From this point here let's move this out three-eighths inch, Enter, and then double-click to do the same thing here, three-eighths inch, Enter. We'll Push/Pull this out one-eighth inch, Enter, and then one-eighth inch, Enter. So I made this now to be one-quarter inch instead of one-eighth inch. Now I can triple-click, Make Group, Edit, Delete Guides. I will select all and then click H to get this base-metal material; I can paint this the same material.
I want to select this point, this component, and this group, right-click, Make Component, and I want to call this Pergola Joist, and I'll click Create. We need to make a couple inside this component. We want to make a duplicate of this base plate or this little L Bracket, so we'll move and hit Control to toggle copy. We'll move this all the way out to here until it snaps onto that surface, and then we'll do the same thing to make a duplicate on this side along the green axis. We'll flip along the green and then move this along the green, snap right there. Now let's paint this material the same wood; I'll use my eyedropper tool to get this Wood Beam, and we'll paint this the same material.
Now let's make an array of these beams across. First let's move this four and three-fourths inches over; I've already determined what the ideal location is for each of these, so you can just copy my dimensions. Now let's make a duplicate array of all of these across, 10 and a half inches apart. We'll use our Move and hit Control to toggle copy, we'll type in 10.5 for 10 and a half inches, and hit ENTER. I'm not sure how many we need, but let's just do more than enough so we can delete extra ones. Let's type in times 30, and look at that—I got a couple more than what I need. We want this one to stop roughly in the same spot, and actually, you know what? I don't think our array was very accurate; it didn't space them evenly, so let's do something a little different.
Let's undo that. Typically you want to find a point where you know that each of these beams are the same distance apart. You see from here to here those are eight feet, from here to here eight feet, and from here to here eight feet. So let's go from a center point right here, and we'll move and hold down Shift to toggle lock in that red, and then snap right to the center point of this. Now let's do a copy from here to here, and we can see that is eight feet. So let's say we divide that by eight. Now, if I measure with a line tool, I can measure that this from here is one foot. I think that looks like a good spacing. So let's continue with that same spacing. Actually, let's make it a little bit denser. Let's undo that and let's go from this point and toggle copy to here, and we'll do divide 10 or we can divide 12. This dimension here is eight inches, and I think that looks like a good depth. We can make a duplicate from this point to here so it comes out a little bit on that side, and then let's do this from here to here, which is eight inches, and we'll do that times 25.
And there we have our completed pergola. We can do one final thing—we can modify our color. We can see that we have this wood in our model; we made this a little bit darker. We can go into this, our Wood Beam, and we can select Edit, and we can actually do Match color on screen, and select the color that we would like to match. We can do that for that color, and then we can do the same for this material, Wood Column, Match color on screen, and there we go. Now we have more of a stained wood that matches the wood we have on our clubhouse. I will Edit, Delete Guides, and now I will save my file, and I will see you in the next video.
