Learn about the drafting view method, a process commonly used in architectural and design offices to create details that can be shared between projects or used as a foundation for future modifications. In this article, we also cover how to use this method to create a window head detail, using an existing detail as a foundation and making the necessary modifications.
Key Insights:
- The drafting view method is a frequently used process in design offices, allowing the creation of details for architectural projects that can be re-used or lightly modified for other projects, saving time and maintaining consistency.
- The creation of a window head detail involves starting with the foundation of an existing detail that includes the walls, then copying and pasting selected elements from that existing detail into the new one.
- Details such as a window section, joint sealant, drywall accessories, and relevant text notes are added to the window head detail. Certain elements, such as the window head section, may need graphic adjustments to fit the specific needs of the project.
Now, our third and final detail is probably going to be everybody's least favorite because it requires the most amount of work, but to be honest, it is the process that we use almost exclusively in our office. And this is because it's the best way for us to create details that can be used as either common details between projects or as the basis for future details that we might be able to just make slight modifications to and use for other projects. So this is using just the straight drafting view method, and I'll show you a few things we can do to simplify this process.
Now that we have this one already created, we can use it as the foundation for any future details that involve the walls. And to do that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first start by creating my new view. This detail is going to be a Window Head detail, and so we're going to use a lot of this wall material to generate that new detail.
So I'm going to start by going to the View tab, Drafting View, and I'm going to give it a name, so we'll call it Window Head. And the scale is going to be three-inch as well. So I'll hit OK.
And you can see all we get is a big blank space. We're going to have to add a lot of information to this. To make things easier on ourselves, since we've already done the work, there's no reason to try and create this from scratch.
So what I can do is I can go into my Brick at Slab Edge, and I can copy a lot of these elements. So I can copy the break line, my repeating detail component with the sand, and I'm just using Control to select these different elements. We want all of these notes here.
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I'm going to want the air barrier, all the lines that we created for that. I'm also going to select portions of the flashing. And then I'll grab the stud, the insulation, the drywall and the sheathing.
And so with all of those selected, and you can probably use a window as well if you need to. But with all of those selected, I can copy them to the clipboard here. And if I go to my Window Head detail, I can paste those in and you can see we're now ready to create our detail.
And so three-inch might be too much scale for this. We're going to change it back to inch-and-a-half, actually. And we're almost ready to go.
You can see I missed the sand layer, which I thought I'd grab, but that's OK. And then we can go and just go back in here and copy that and paste it in. And always got to send that back again.
And then I'll just adjust this a little bit here. All right. Now we're ready to start creating our Window Head detail.
The first thing that we'll need is going to be a window section that we'll use. And then there's also going to be a couple of other things that we need. One of them being some joint sealant.
We're going to need some drywall accessories, and then we'll also need to add a few more text notes that are relevant to this detail. So let's get started by adding in the information we know. We're going to have a window that sits somewhere in this location here.
And to do that, we're going to need to load in that particular family. And so that's a detail component. And so we're experts here already.
We've done two before so we can load in detail components, load family, and we'll want to back out until we get to our directory again. And this is going to be openings, metal windows, aluminum windows. And you can see we've got a lot to choose from here.
We can take a look at the different options and we're going to want to pick the one that's most relevant to our project. And so this one's looking pretty good here. It says Aluminum Fixed Window Head Section.
And so we'll click Open and you can see here we've got our fixed window head and we can place this anywhere we need in the view. Now when I look at this, I'm just not thrilled with how it looks. And most of that is because there's hardly any extension.
On the window itself, so our detail would be really squatty and kind of wouldn't really look right. We want to make a graphic adjustment to this piece. And so it's important to be able to know how to edit these detail components.
So I'll go to Edit Family. And you'll see that it's a very basic family. There's really not a lot going on.
Essentially, what we have here is a masking region that makes up the outline of it. And so I could take this and just adjust it as I see fit. And it doesn't matter if it's too long, because we can always put a break line in to clip it.
And so I'll go ahead and adjust it maybe longer than I might want. And then the panes of glass that we're showing here. I'm just going to bring those down to finish it out as well.
And so now I've got a detail component that's a little bit more flexible and will work a little better for our project. So I'll go ahead and load that in, overwrite the existing version. And now you can see we're ready to go to start adding in our window detail.
