Learn how to meticulously design and create the roof of a building using architectural software in this comprehensive guide. The article explains the step-by-step process, from drawing the initial roof boundary to adjusting wall heights and attaching them to the roof, providing insightful tips along the way.
Key Insights
- The article walks us through the process of drafting a roof, emphasizing the importance of being at the correct floor plan roof level, not the ceiling plan roof level. It also highlights the use of the 'pick walls' option to define an overhang and draw the roof boundary.
- Defining the slope of the roof is a crucial step in the process. The article explains how each boundary line, marked by a small triangle, defines the roof's slope. Varying the slope on different sides of the roof can significantly change the roof's final look.
- After the roof is drawn, the walls must be attached to it. This is done by selecting the walls and using the 'attach' option. Importantly, once attached, the walls will adjust automatically if the roof's size changes, reducing the need for constant edits.
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Our next step would be to put a roof on this building, and so to do that, I'm going to jump over to my roof level, and you can see a lot of stuff is going to be grayed out because that's actually down below. The roof level is the bottom of our view range. What we're seeing is the floor and the walls beyond. A couple of things to make sure of before you jump into this: you want to ensure you went to the floor plan roof level and not the ceiling plan roof level. If you go to the ceiling plan roof level, it's just blank, so you want to make sure you're in the correct one.
Next thing we're going to do here is we're actually going to draw a roof, and so roofs and floors are drawn very similarly. There's just a couple of things that are different that make it unique. So I will go to a roof command here from architecture, and what we could do is use the pick walls option here, which will give us the option to define an overhang. This means I can set the overhang to one foot six or 1.5 feet, and from there, what I'll do is pick these different walls. You see the blue line that's highlighted—that's actually the preview of where the roof line is going to be. So to do this, I can just pick each one of the walls, and you can see as I go around, it's going to close the loop for me, and then I'll hit escape twice to get out of the pick walls command.
It's important to get out of the pick walls command as soon as you're done using it because what will happen is that you'll stay active in that command, and you'll accidentally pick other walls. Then you'll just have many boundary lines that you don't need, and you'll have to remove them before you finish the sketch. So, a couple of things to pay attention to here first. Number one: we have these little triangles at each one of our boundary lines.
So what that means is that each one of these lines is going to define the slope of the roof. When I say define the slope of the roof, what I'm referring to is the fact that you'll have this sketch line we'll call that zero, and then at the defined slope, which in this case is nine and twelve, the roof is going to slope up until it hits something. So that could be a hip or a valley created because this one is sloping same here, or it could be a ridge line that gets hit here because this guy is sloping into the other one, or maybe there isn't any of those, and it's just going to slope until the edge of the sketch.
And so what I'll do is I'm going to change the slope because nine and twelve is pretty steep here. So I'm going to set that to two, and then just so we can see a few examples of what this looks like or how turning on or off one of these slopes looks, I'm going to go ahead and finish the sketch here, and we'll jump into 3D view, and we can see the type of roof that we receive.
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So I'm going to select the roof again because I want to modify it. I'll go to edit footprint, and you can see here all four of those lines are showing to slope. When I finish the sketch, there's slope on all four sides.
Now, if I were to edit the footprint and select the two short ends and uncheck define slope, then what will happen is that I'll end up with a ridge down the middle and get a more gable-end look to the building. If I were to do that again and turn off one of these other ones, then I'll end up with a shed roof that starts at the low point here, high point here. So you can see how defining that different type is going to change exactly how the roof is going to look.
Now that we have the roof defined, we can look at it and decide if we're using the correct type. So generic 12 inches is probably a little thick for a building this size, so we'll go ahead and change it to generic 9. And you can see it dropped down because it's defined by the base of the extrusion or this piece of roof here. And you may look at this and think, well, it's kind of crazy looking because we have all of these walls that are sitting way down below, and that's not a big deal because what we can do is select those walls and then tell them to attach it to this roof.
And what's cool about that is they'll always stay attached. If the roof grows or shrinks, the walls will move with it. So, for example, if I were to select, say, this wall here, and if you remember the tab key, it has a lot of different functions for us. Well, one of them is it'll select a chain. So you can see when I hover over the wall and hit TAB, it'll select the chain of the exterior walls.
So I'll go ahead and click to select it, and the option I have in the modify walls contextual tab would be to attach or detach the walls. If I attach the walls, then I can click the roof, and it'll attach them to the roof. And like I said before, what's cool about that is if I went in and I decided, well, you know, I want to have slope on this one as well, I could do that, and the walls are going to adjust with it.
So no more having to go back and constantly edit these things. The computer will take care of a lot of those operations for us, and so you can clearly see when I edit the sketch the profile that we got for those walls. And now we end up with the shed roof, which is what we're looking for here.
To edit the walls on the interior, we could do that a couple of ways. You can see some of them can easily be selected here, and so I could just use the attach and pick the roof, and now that wall is going to go all the way up. And I can do the same thing here through the window and hit TAB, and it'll select those.
Or we can go with an easier visual method, which is one we kind of touched on a bit in some of our early lessons, but I can use the section box, and I can pull this in to where I can actually see those walls a little bit better, right? And I can select them, and so if you want to select multiple objects, what you'll do here is select an object like a wall in this case, and then control will add to that selection. Whereas if you hit something you don't want, holding down shift and clicking will remove it. And so we have two more walls here, and I'll just use control to select those, and I can actually attach all those walls to the roof at the same time.
And now I'm going to turn off the section box, and we can take a look at our building here, and it looks pretty good. The tiny shoebox house here. So I'm going to go ahead and save, and our next few videos we're going to focus on adding in some elements to the interior like some of the plumbing fixtures and kitchen equipment, and then we're going to look at how we can annotate and put all of these different views on sheets.
