Exploring Roof Slope Options in Building Design

Now I'm going to cut a section through this roof because there are a couple of options in here with the roof that we can take a look at that are actually pretty cool, and it gives us options for how the roof is sloped—whether it's the steel that's being sloped or it's the insulation that's above the deck that's being sloped to create that drainage plane. We're going to cut a section through here, and that's going to be the easiest way to see the difference. So I'm going to go to my Quick Launch bar here at the top, and you can see we have the option for a section, and I'm going to go ahead and cut a section through one of our low points so that we can see the slope in the roof here, because if I cut a section through here you wouldn't really see too much.

So I'll go pretty much along grid line two here and place that section, and I'm just going to bring it in tighter so that the view depth isn't too far, and let's double-click on that tag and take a look at the section. So you can see we have our roof sloping here, and the actual entire piece of the roof is what we see sloping, and so if I were to change my Detail Level from Coarse to Medium we could see all the different layers that make it up with this insulation layer in the middle, and these are the steel joists down at the bottom here. If I wanted to change the way that this roof slopes, what I could do is go to Edit Type, edit the structure, and if I make one of these layers variable—say the rigid insulation—then what will happen is it'll hold this elevation on the bottom flat and then it'll slope the insulation above.

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If I hit OK a couple of times here you'll see it flattens out the truss, but then it leaves the insulation so that that is the sloping member, and so in some cases that's the way to go; in other cases it's not so much, but I wanted to highlight that option because it's not always going to be the steel that's sloping. For our project I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that and hit OK, and we'll leave it sloping because what we want to show here is the relationship between the walls and the roof and the floors here, and so you can see I'm going to go ahead and turn Thin Lines off here so we can see the line weights, but you can see that there is a relationship between these two and also how maybe not all of these walls are attaching to the roof like they should be, and so there's a couple of things that we can do here. The first thing is that I want all of these walls to attach to this roof, and so I know that if I go to my floor plan that all these interior walls are the same type—it's that interior four and seven-eighths partition—and one way that I could check that is if I right-click on one of them and I say Select All Instances > In Entire Project. When I look at the walls that are selected, those are only my interior walls, and so what I'll do is I'll go back to that section I created and I can do the same thing here where I right-click, select All Instances > In Entire Project, and it'll select all of those walls. This is awesome because the next step we do here will attach all of those walls to the bottom of that roof, so if I were to go in and say Attach Top/Base I can then attach the top of those walls to this roof, so you can either go through and do them all manually or you could do it with one step like we just did there, and I'm a big fan of the one-step method. The next thing we're going to do is look at the relationship between the wall and the roof here, and you can see there's a hard line, but typically we like to see just a bold profile line there, so what I could do is actually go into my Modify tab, and there's this Join option, and I can join the geometry of the roof to the wall. If I hit Join, I could select the wall and then the roof, and you can see that the relationship changed there and now I have a bold profile. The same thing can occur on the floors, which we had already gone through and done, but our section's kind of cut at a weird location here, so that's why it's showing up differently, but if I were to join those two—which these ones are already joined—the same thing applies when we have a vertical wall going through the floor. If I were to go in and adjust my section a bit because it's sitting right through a wall, we'll be able to see that a little bit better. You can see how these are now joined together, and so I can go through and do that with all my walls that are being cut like that, and you can see it cleans up the view a bit and gives you a much nicer-looking section. The same thing applies for the floor slab and the walls above, so you can see how as I do that graphically, we just end up with a much nicer view.