Explore the process of creating a professional, presentable roof plan using architectural design software. This article delves into the intricacies of editing the view range, adjusting visual styles, annotating with dimensions, and using the spot slope tool to call out the slope of the roof.
Key Insights
- The article outlines a method to create and fine-tune the roof plan, through adjusting the view range to get a clear view of the roof and floor plan simultaneously. This involves some trial and error to determine the appropriate values.
- It discusses the use of visual styles and the line work tool to make the roof plan look more professional. Temporarily setting the visual style to wireframe can help visualize the walls, which can then be adjusted to a hidden line.
- The article also emphasizes the importance of proper annotations, especially when it comes to dimensions. Furthermore, it introduces the spot slope tool to effectively denote the slope of the roof, enhancing the clarity of the roof plan.
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The next view we want to focus on is our roof plan. We only used it briefly just to create the roof, but we're going to take a look at it and see if we can make it look a little bit more presentable. When I jump over to that roof plan, it's pretty crazy looking, and that's because when we look at the plan here, the base constraint is at this level line here, and then four feet above that, it's going to cut the plane.
And so that's why when you look at it, you've got something that looks like this. We're essentially looking at our roof that's being sliced, and then portions of our building below. To clean this up a bit, the first thing that we'll do is go into our view range, and then we're going to edit both the top and cut planes to match a little bit more of what we're looking for.
So I'll set this to 10 feet because I honestly don't know what the value needs to be, and that's just part of it. We have to guess a little bit, so we'll change this to 8 feet, and that should take us up above that roof so that we can see the entire roof itself in here. So I'll hit OK, and now what we're seeing here is the actual roof with the floor plan below showing through.
The reason we're seeing these elements but can't actually select them or do anything is because when we look at the other setting that we're dealing with here called underlay, what we're seeing is that the base level is Level 1, and the top level is our roof, and we're looking down. So that's why we're seeing these elements. If I were to change this to “None, ” then all that goes away and literally all we see here is our roof outline.
But our end goal is to have a roof plan that shows the outline of the building and a couple of dimensions on here. To do that, we can temporarily set our visual style from Hidden Line to Wireframe, and you can see we can now see the walls below because those are all attached up to the roof. I can use what’s called the Linework tool to adjust the linework of these walls to be a hidden line.
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If I were to go to my Modify tab, the Linework tool is this button here. It's probably one of the smallest ones in the program. What’s great is I can change the line style from By Category, which if you remember from our earlier lesson is determined based on the object style settings.
So I'll change it from By Category to Hidden Lines. When I hover over the wall here, it'll change it to a hidden line. What’s unique is when we use this Hidden Line style, it's going to change it to green.
If we use something like Hidden, it's going to be black. That's just a function of the settings that were loaded into the program. You will notice that we do have a lot of different options here that can be used.
I'm going to stick with Hidden. I'm just going to work my way all the way around the building until I have a dashed line for my building outline. Now, if I were to change my visual style back to Hidden Line, you can see we now have a representation of the building outline on our roof plan.
The next step is going to be to annotate. The first thing we'll do is add some dimensions. It's good to have overall dimensions here.
So I'll add overalls for both sides. Another thing I want you to pay attention to is the size of the text here compared to the size of the text on our Level 1 plan. That's because the scale of the roof plan is set to eighth inch.
We don't need it set to eighth inch. We're going to go ahead and change it to 1/4" to match. I'll go ahead and set a couple of dimensions here for our overhang.
These appear to be a little too far off because we need to get it to fit on our 11×17 sheet that we'll create. But essentially, here we can do the same thing we did before, where we change the text to kind of identify what we're dimensioning. This is for the roof overhang.
So I'll just use “0.8” to represent overhang. Since it's the same all the way around, we can do that over here as well. If you remember, we just click it twice, and pick where we want to put the text, and type it in.
Okay, and so I'll just go in and adjust this dimension until it locks in. The last thing we want to do to make this view ready is use a Spot Slope. What this will do is it will call out the slope of our roof with just a simple arrow.
Just by using that Spot Slope tool, you can see I can actually define the slope of the different edges of the roof or the plane of the roof itself. I just hit Escape a couple of times, and then it's ready to go. This view is essentially ready to be put on a drawing sheet.
