Understanding dimensions is crucial in ensuring accuracy in architectural designs. This article explains how to correctly add dimensions to walls, specifically, using an example of a plan for a bedroom and bathroom.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed guide on how to add dimensions to architectural designs, using specific measurements for the walls of a bedroom and bathroom as an example.
- Understanding where dimensions are drawn from and how to modify them as needed is crucial for accuracy. For example, the exact position of a wall can be adjusted in the plan by modifying the dimension value.
- Using keyboard shortcuts, such as DI for line dimensions, can significantly speed up the process of adding dimensions, especially when dealing with intricate plans.
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Let's add some dimensions so that we can make sure that we have all the walls in the right location. So first thing I'll do is I'll pop open our plan so we can refer back to that. And you can see here that if we're looking at the walls that we put in the closet area here, that we have 11' 6", 2', and 11' 6".
And so when I look at where those dimensions are being drawn from, you can see it's to the outside face of the wall and then to the interior face, relative to this side, of both of these walls inside the bedroom. And then we have a 2' difference there. The center wall is 4' 5 1/2" from that face, so we'll go ahead and make sure we match that as well.
So I'll go in and I'm going to draw my dimension. So making sure this is still 25', which it is, I'll go in and I will draw to this face here. And notice how the dimension string is still active.
So what I can do, and using that Tab key again to find the correct face, we can set this guy. And then we can go all the way over to the end and then click into white space to place the dimension. When we look back at the plan, we should have 11' 6", 2', and 11' 6".
Now when we look at our dimensions, we've got 11' 1", 3' 4", and 10' 7". So this first one is not correct. If I wanted to change the value of this dimension, I would need to either pick this wall or this wall.
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If I were to pick this wall, what it would do is it would change this dimension value of 11' 1", and it would also change the 25' value, because you can see it's associated with this wall. But if I pick this one, which is the wall I actually want to move, I can change that to 11' 6", so 11' 6", and hit ENTER. And since this wants to be 2', I don't want to change the location of this wall.
If I were to just change this to 2', you can see it's just going to keep adjusting that dimension, because that's the object selected. So it's going to move based on how these dimensions change. Essentially, what I want to do is I want to jump over to this guy here, select that wall, and then I can change this one to 2'.
And if we've done everything correctly, we should have the same dimensions, the 11' 6", 2', 11' 6". Now for the wall down the middle, this horizontal piece, we can draw the dimension from the inside face of the exterior wall to the nearest or inside face of the horizontal wall. And I'll do that just again by using the DI shortcut for an aligned dimension.
And that dimension was 4' 5 1/2". So 4', space, 5". And then to do the half dimension, do another space, and then 1/2. And so now we have all the walls on the top of the plan all set up. Our next focus is going to be these two here.
When we look back at the plan again, you can see that we have a dimension from the outside face of the wall to the outside face of our 6' wall of 5' 11". And then we also have a 6' 2" clear or inside face dimension. So this is the outside face of the wall to the inside face of the interior wall that'll give us those dimensions.
We'll set those two first, and then we'll work on how we're going to get that 1' 4" extension there. So I'll draw these two dimensions again using Tab and using that Aligned Dimensions tool. And if you're not a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, then it's always going to be Annotate, Aligned Dimension.
But you use this so much that I highly recommend just dialing in that DI keyboard shortcut. So the first dimension here, and again I'm using that Tab key to make sure I get to the correct face. And then we'll have the other dimension going this way.
Oh, we got pretty close there. So I'll change this one to 6' 2", and then the other one was going to be 5' 11". And remember that's from the outside face to the outside face.
So 5' 11". Okay, and so that gives us the rough dimensions of our bathroom layout here. And because we know that we set this wall to be in the middle, and I can add that dimension just to make sure everything's good to go here.
But you can see that those are actually set at 10' because I went from outside face to the center to outside face, which is exactly what this shows in the plan here to outside face. And then that shows us that we have the right relationship between the centerline of the wall and now from these two as well. So the last part we have to do here is to get that 1' 4" dimension in, and then we'll have all of our interior walls set correctly.
So to do that, what we'll want to do is we'll want to draw a dimension from the face of the wall to the endpoint. And you can see I got lucky there, that doesn't always happen. So what I could do is I can always pick the wall dimension, and I'll just change it just for the sake of this exercise.
But I'll pick the wall here, and then I can change this value to 1' 4", and it'll adjust the length of the wall. And so now we've got all of our dimensions set up for the interior wall. Since this is a relatively big milestone, we'll want to go ahead and save.
And now we're ready to go on to the next step.
