Creating a Foundation Layer for Your VDCI Plan Model

Let's begin working on our foundation layer. If you still have the A401 sheet file open, you can go ahead and close it, and you can see I am in my VDCI plan model.

We are going to follow a similar workflow for the structural foundation plan as we did for our roof plan. That is, we're going to start with a layer state, and then we're going to add our geometry into the model. So let's begin.

I'm going to go to my layer state, and we can see that we can toggle back and forth between floor plan and roof plan. And let's add a new layer state by going to manage layer states, and then selecting the roof plan as our base. I'll hit new.

This is going to be foundation plan. I'll hit okay. Let's edit the foundation plan, and we can see that we used our roof plan as our base.

So I'm going to select my roof layers and turn them off, and I'll select my foundation layers and turn them on. Layer 0 is our current layer, a no plot is showing, and our foundation layers. Now if you check the handout, you can actually see that we have the A wall layer on and the A fixtures layer on, but they look a little different.

We'll talk about two ways to approach that in this model, but we know that we need to turn A fixture on and A wall on. Let's hit save and close, and now we can switch between floor plan, foundation plan, and roof plan. So let's go to the foundation plan first.

Let's control S to save. We needed to keep the A wall layer on in a foundation plan so that we can see where the load bearing walls are going to land on the foundation, and the fixture layer is on because we need to know the drain locations for the shower and for the toilet. These drains are going to go through the slab, so it's very important to know where the drain locations are.

To begin, let's go to our S foundation layer and make it our current layer, and we can start by creating our rectangles. We can see that there are two rectangles. First, we trace the outside of our walls, and that is the outer edge of our concrete grade beam, which is a foundation element, and if we read the handout, we can see that it says 18 inches wide by 12 inches deep concrete grade beam.

So there's no actual dimension on this view, but we know that it is 18 inches wide, so we can offset 18 inches. I'll go offset, 18, enter, and I'll choose this line and go to the middle and click enter to say that I'm done. Now, we do not have different layers for these two lines, but if we check the handout, one is very thick and one is a dashed line.

We can update these properties per object, just like we can do it per layer, and we can change these properties up here at the top in the properties panel. So to begin, let's change this outer thickness of this rectangle, and the question is, how thick should this rectangle be? Well, we've used thicknesses before, but we had the color table file tell us how thick the line should be. For this example, just watch.

I'll show you. I'm going to go control p, open up my color table file, and this is where all of the color table thicknesses for the line types are applied. We've used color 2 before.

We can see the line weight is 0.6, and we've used color 7, and that's 0.25. So the majority of our lines are going to be 0.25, but color 2 is 0.6. If we check the handout, this is a pretty thick line, but probably just as thick as color 2, so we can use 0.6 for this line. So selecting the outer rectangle, I can go up to this line type thickness and change it from by layer to 0.6. Escape, escape, escape. Just like the yellow lines don't appear thicker in our drawing space, we won't see the line appear thicker until we plot it.

Now this inner rectangle we can see has a dashed line. Now this is not a hidden line because it is visible in our drawing, but instead this is dashed. So let's go to our drop down here and hit other.

This opens up the line type manager, and we can load the dashed line. I'll scroll down until I see dashed. There we go.

I'll load the dashed line and hit okay, and now we can pick this inner rectangle and change the property of just that line to the dashed option. I'll do rea enter to regen all and control s to save. There are only three other bits of geometry for the foundation plan, as this is a fairly simple foundation.

It is our two drain holes and our rebar hatch. Let's start with the two drain holes. The first one is fairly simple.

In fact, it looks like it might be a part of the shower already, and that's because it is. It is the location of this drain here. We can go up to circle.

I'll do a shift right click center to place the center of the circle on this circle, and then a shift right click quadrant to snap to the edge of the circle. Now we have drawn geometry on top of our shower geometry, but we need it to appear as a solid circle instead of the dashed circle, which we can see the rest of the fixtures are dashed in the handout. The second circle is right here in the middle of the wall next to the toilet.

Now, fortunately, on the handout, we see the dimensions for this location, and so we will actually place the circle using tracking. We will track from this bottom point over and up. Let's go circle T-R-A enter to lock in tracking.

Our first tracking point is here. We're going to go to the right a distance of five feet, 6.25. That's six and one quarter inch. Enter.

Then we will go up. Make sure you can get that to go up four feet, 6.5. That's six and a half inches. Enter.

Enter to lock it in. In this case, we can see that this is two inches in diameter. So D enter, two inches enter.

There we go. We now have two drain locations that penetrate through our slab. Finally, let's talk about this rebar hatch, and you can see that it is quite a large space on your handout, and it looks like a grid, and that is what rebar is.

It's a mesh or a connected grid of steel elements that reinforce the concrete. In this case, we're going to place a square hatch just like we did for our tile, but we're going to make it a little larger. To begin, we want to draw our spline like we did last time.

Now, we talked about placing the spline on the no-plot layer or deleting it after we're done. So for best practice, let's go to our no-plot layer and draw the spline there just in case. I'll draw a spline fit.

This one can have a few more points, but whatever you do, just make sure that it goes over both of these wall segments. C enter to close. Go over this wall segment and this wall segment.

My spline looks pretty good. Now we want to add our rebar hatch. Again, this is just the square hatch or net.

So let's change our current layer to S foundation one more time. I'm going to go to the hatch, and I'm going to find net. There it is.

Now, we do not want to pick our points in this case because you can see that I would need to pick in each one of these sections. Instead, what we want to do is go to select. This allows us to select objects that should be filled instead of coloring inside the lines.

So I want to fill my spline object. So I'll pick the object, and you can see it fills with the hatch. Now, this hatch is quite small.

If I zoom in, we should be able to start seeing it. So instead, I want to change my scale from a scale factor of one to 96. Enter.

This is because we remember that the tile was six inches at a scale factor of 48, and we can see the rebar is 12 × 12 typical. So that means that we needed a scale factor of 48 times 2, which is 96. The last thing I want to do with this hatch is clean up where the lines are intersecting with our walls.

What do I mean by that? Well, remember how we set the origin of the tile, and if I zoom in, I see that some of the lines of my hatch are actually on top of or right in the middle of my walls. This is kind of confusing to look at, and especially because this is a representative hatch, the rebar doesn't have to be anywhere specific. The guys who are placing the rebar in the field will know what to do.

This is just representative so they know that rebar is in the project, but not exactly where it's going to go. In this case, I'll just set origin, and I'll choose somewhere right around here. That will move the rebar up and away, and you can set origin multiple times if you're not satisfied with where you placed it.

There we go. I'll close my hatch, zoom extents, and control s to save. In the next video, we will add our multi-leaders and dimension.

See you there!