Adding Tile Finishes to Restroom Walls: A Step-by-Step Guide

Enhancing Restroom Design with Custom Tile Patterns

Discover how to enhance your architectural designs with finishes and components in restrooms, focusing on tile patterns and material tagging. Learn how to effectively use split face commands, create custom patterns, and apply different types of material for varied visual representations.

Key Insights

  • The article recommends using the model to represent items in architectural designs, emphasizing the benefits of tagging the materials in the model and the ease of graphic representation in different views.
  • By utilizing the split face command, you can split a wall into multiple components, facilitating the application of different materials onto the wall. This technique enhances the 3D view of the interior, especially in restrooms where tile patterns are essential.
  • Customizing tile patterns can significantly improve the visual representation of your designs. By duplicating materials in the Manage tab and adjusting the dimensions, you can create varied tile patterns and apply them to different bands on the wall, resulting in a more detailed and textured design.

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.

For this next lesson, we're going to go ahead and jump back over to our A601 sheet, and we're going to add finishes and a few more components to our restrooms here. And you can see right now we've gone through and we've just added a few things, just the basic fixtures, but I also want to go through and take a look at options for adding finishes like a tile to our walls, and then getting some more documentation on here, a few dimensions and things like that. We're going to start with our north elevation in the men's room, and I'm just going to go ahead and double click to activate the view.

And there's a few different ways to go about doing this, and I think any time we're using the model to represent items, we're going to be better off. And in this case, we would have a wall type that represented walls with tile and without tile, but having that thickness represented doesn't necessarily bias as much as you would think, and it sometimes gets in the way of the way walls are joining. And so this is a good method for putting it together that gives you the graphics that you need, and also the ability to tag the materials within the model.

On top of all that, it shows in every view. If you were doing 3D views within your interior of your restrooms, you're going to see the tile patterns that we're going to be putting onto this view. So that being said, we are going to go ahead and use the split face command.

And what that's going to do for us, it's going to give us the option to split this wall into multiple components, and then that will give me the ability to paint onto the wall the different materials we want to do. So that's going to be this button right here from the modify tab. And what we need to do is we just need to select the wall that we want to modify, and so I'm just kind of moving my mouse down in here.

We don't have select by face set, and that's on purpose because if we have that one on, we need to make sure we turn off this press and drag. But if we have select by face on, you can just go to the middle of it, and you can kind of see when I'm over here, it highlights that blue portion up there. And that's how I know that it's on there.

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So with that picked, then I can draw in my pattern. And so let's say I want to have tile that goes all the way up to a particular dimension. And in our case, we're going to go to five foot six.

And that gives me the top band of my tile. And what I'm able to do is I can split this a number of times. If I wanted to split face like this, I can.

And then I can add another line that represents like a top band for the tile. And so I'll add this line below, and I'll set that one to have a dimension of one foot. And so now the couple of key points here is this works just like any of the other sketches that we've created throughout the class.

If I have just a rectangle, that works because it's a closed loop, and I can paint in just that specific material. But if I have an open loop or just random lines, you know, going across like this, this doesn't create a closed boundary here. So that would not work.

So anytime you're doing this or creating a custom pattern, all you need to do is make sure that you don't have the rules that we've talked about many times, the intersecting lines, the overlapping lines, and non-continuous loops. So as long as you follow those rules, you should be generally okay here. So I'll go ahead and finish the sketch.

And then now I can go ahead and apply my materials. And to do that, we use the paint tool. And paint is this option here.

And this doesn't necessarily mean the materials that you want are going to be there. But if I were to just search tile from the bar, you can see we have a few different ones. So there's a blue slate, a mosaic gray, there's a porcelain tile here.

That's a four inch porcelain tile. If I pick on that one, I can then apply it to this top band here. And you can see it gives me that four inch tile that I was just talking about.

And since this is a model pattern that we've added, I can move it around to have it say, you know, align to the different portions on the wall. If I wanted this one to be situated that way, and since I made it exactly one foot, it kind of makes sense for us to use full tiles as much as possible. And so then I can have a band across like that.

And then if I wanted to, I could paint another one here. But when we looked at it, we saw that the different tile types didn't necessarily represent the ones we wanted. So I'm going to go ahead and make that adjustment.

If I go to the Manage tab and Materials, I can see that the different ones we have. So I'll do that same search and filter it down. They're not exactly as available as we're looking for.

But we can make, let's say, an eight inch tile. And we can have that one be available here. Or we can make a different size.

We have a lot of different options here. If I were to go ahead and make a duplicate of this. And so I'll right-click on this and select Duplicate Material and Assets.

And all that's going to do is just duplicate all the information in here as well. And so I'll go ahead and rename this one to be four by eight tile. And that gives me the ability to now have a second material here.

And I'm going to rename that to include the inches here. And so now I can take this tile and I can actually create a new pattern that is four inches by eight inches instead of just four by four. If I were to hit this copy button to duplicate it, I can then go ahead and say this will be the four by eight inch tile.

And then I can change my line spacing. If I were to change one of these to be eight inches, you can see now I've got eight inches on the vertical. And if you wanted to go the other way, say eight inches on the horizontal, you could do it that way.

And so now I've got the different options for how I could create a crosshatch pattern really easily. And any dimensions or any angles that you can come up with here is what you can use for that. So I'll hit OK and hit OK again.

And now that's the material that I'm going to use to paint to this bottom area. So I'll go using the keyboard shortcut P-T for that. I can go ahead and pick my other tile pattern here and apply it to the wall.

And what I'll do is I'll make some adjustments again so that we have more full tiles. And then it'd be nice if our band and the tiles below aligned. You can do the same thing if you wanted to create a wall base.

And it's the same process where you go in and you use that split face here. And then I can just draw the line across at the six inch mark. And then I can create a six inch base here.

And it could be any of the tiles that we've picked or we can go ahead and create a whole new tile. And so now that that's split I can hit the check and you can see it creates a new band here for us. And using that same process where we went manage and materials we can create a new tile.

And so we can make it so that it is the six inches tall but then matches the eight inch module. We can just right click and duplicate material and assets for this one. And instead of the four inches we can make that six.

And we go through the same exact process where we pick the tile pattern, make a duplicate of it, and then we can adjust it to match what we're trying to do here for our project. And you can see with just these little bits of tools here we can go through and create the patterns and the things that we need that are going to work for our project. If I were to paint it I now have a third tile to use there.

Gotta pick the right one. And I can adjust the pattern to match our tile here. And just using the align tool and picking the different points along the tile you can see it kind of shifted us around a little bit which is no big deal to be expected sometimes.

And now I've got my three different tiles set up on this wall. And I can use my dimension command here to dimension those points along on this elevation. And so we can now see the different the dimensions for our different tile bands here.

And I've applied the material to our elevations. And so we can go and do that to the rest of our wet walls in the bathroom now and see if there's some graphical changes we want to make because this might be a little dark but I think it might be okay here.

photo of Michael Wilson

Michael Wilson

Revit Instructor

Bachelor of Architecture, Registered Architect

Mike is recognized by Autodesk as one of North America’s leading Revit Certified Instructors. He has significant experience integrating Revit, 3ds Max, and Rhino and uses Revit Architecture on medium and large-scale bio and nano-tech projects. Mike has been an integral member of the VDCI team for over 15 years, offering his hard-charging, “get it done right” approach and close attention to detail. In his spare time, Mike enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife, children, and dog.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI GOLD – 1 of 20 Awarded Globally)
  • Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Professional
  • Autodesk Certified Revit Professional
  • Revit
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