Discover an efficient and effective approach to designing architectural plans using reference planes. This tutorial illustrates how to create the framework for windows, ensuring correct dimensions and placements for more accurate and precise designs.
Key Insights
- Using reference planes can facilitate accurate design as you can draw them along lines and extend them beyond to double-check dimensions. This is particularly helpful in creating consistent offsets from grid lines.
- One must always verify measurements, even if they appear correct since small fractions can make a significant difference in the overall design. You can do this by selecting the reference plane and checking the dimension value.
- Reference planes are versatile tools but should be removed after use to prevent cluttering the design. They provide an excellent framework for adding components such as windows, helping achieve precision in architectural plans.
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Now we're going to go ahead and create the windows and so I'm going to start with level one again back to this existing level one and we do have the opening shown here and it's kind of hard to tell sometimes but that's where they are because we are looking at a hidden view so that means it's not going to show through the walls that we created. If we wanted to see the CAD file below we could change this from hidden line to wireframe and it'll show us the CAD file below. What I like to do here in this case is because we have a pretty consistent two foot offset from the grid lines here is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to draw some reference planes and this is going to be very helpful because we'll be able to see it on multiple views and it essentially is going to help us eliminate the need for having the CAD background in our file still.
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So I'm going to go ahead and just grab that point and if I were to draw that reference plane again this is from architecture reference plane what I could do is I could draw it like you see here and just kind of extend it beyond and then now I can double check to make sure that that's actually two feet because we shouldn't take for granted what the CAD file says because you just never know if that's correct or not and then I can mirror it about the grid line and now I've got this setup here that I could use at each one of my grid lines and so I'll just go through that process one more time since it's a pretty critical workflow and it's something that'll definitely help you with setting things up in the future. So from the architecture tab we're going to go to reference plane and then I'm going to draw my reference plane pretty much along this line here and then just because we want to make sure everything's correct we're going to double check that dimension make sure it says two feet it may say two feet here but what you'll notice is that if something's off by like 1 28th or something of a ridiculously small fraction it'll still show two feet here but when you click on it might show a different value so you want to always double check that. Now that I have it set here I'm going to use the mirror pick axis tool which is this one and I'm a big fan of the keyboard shortcuts and so I'll use mm for that and then I'll pick the grid line as my axis and so now I have a two foot offset reference plane here and here that I can use to create the framework for my windows and so I can say copy this one over from grid line to grid line here and now I have that two foot offset which gives me this entire bay and I can do the same thing with these two selecting them both and copying it across and so now if I do the same thing by grabbing this one and copying it from grid line to grid line I've now got the framework for all of my bays on the south side of the building and so you could you could do the copy method or you can simply go through and draw the reference planes and reference planes are something that can be a very good tool that you can use for your projects but they can also be a bit of a nuisance so it's one of those things where we'll draw these in but we definitely want to make sure that when you're done using them that you get rid of them after that after that point so I'll just draw the rest of these reference planes in so that we have a good framework for adding our windows in on level one and level two and b looks like it's right in the middle of the building and so I could simply take these guys here because they look like they're gonna hit exactly where we want and mirror it across and then draw the last two reference planes in and again we know we want 15 feet here and so I'll draw the reference plane and again double checking that even though we are tracing it but we want to just double check that we are getting that 15 foot value and to triple check it you can select the reference plane and then pick on that dimension value to make sure it does say precisely 15 feet because those fractional dimensions will come into play alternatively you could select the reference plane and you can copy it over a value of 15 feet and that's going to give you the same result and so now we've got the framework for our windows on level one it looks like I missed one here so we want to draw this guy in again using the same process double checking that two foot value and we're ready to go so this one's going to go and butt up right against this wall here which you've already got in place so we're good on that one so if I were to take a look again just double checking make sure we got everything looks good so I'm going to go ahead and save and then we can go ahead and draw those windows
