Discover key steps in creating a precise building model, from adding walls to setting base and top constraints. Learn how to adjust dimensions and draw walls accurately to avoid dimensional errors in your project.
Key Insights
- The process of creating a building model begins with adding the walls and establishing a building footprint. Ensuring the model is placed relatively within the center point facilitates the use of elevation tags.
- Setting accurate constraints for walls is crucial. This includes selecting the right location line, base constraint, and top constraint. Changing the wall type, location line, and top constraint to suit the project ensures accuracy.
- Drawing walls and adjusting dimensions needs careful attention to prevent significant dimensional errors. Understanding how to draw walls correctly, creating permanent dimensions, and adjusting them as needed are essential steps towards accurate modeling.
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Our next step in creating this model is going to be to add the walls. Once we add the walls, we can go back in and add the grid lines. I'm going to go to level one, and we're going to create our building footprint in this space here.
And it wasn't as significant when we did the Habitat house because the Habitat house was so small, it only took up about that much space. Therefore, the building we're doing now is going to take up about this much here. We want to make sure we're placing it relatively within this center point, within this area here, so that we can make sure and be able to use those elevation tags without too much modification.
When we create walls, we want to remember those early lessons that we learned on project one or the Habitat house. And that's simply just making sure that we're using the right location line, that we're setting our base constraint, and that we're setting our top constraint. If I go to my Architecture tab and select Wall, you can see by default, it's going to use Wall Center Line, base constraint of Level 1, and top constraint of unconnected.
And that’s not what we want here. To set this up, I’ll go in and I’ll change my wall type from Basic Wall Generic 8-inch to Generic 6-inch. I’ll change my location line from Wall Center Line to Finish Face Exterior.
Then I’ll change my top constraint from unconnected to Top of Parapet. Once we have all those things set up correctly, we can now draw the walls. Our next step would be to determine which drawing method we want to use.
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As we've discussed previously, we have all of these options, and the best way to do this is to determine which one's going to best suit our project. In our case, the rectangle method is best, because we're going to draw a rectangle that's 40 feet by 100 feet from outside face to outside face. There is one small quirk I'd like to show you, though.
If I draw the rectangle, I’ll just draw one randomly here. If I draw a rectangle from top left to bottom right, you’ll notice that the exterior face of my wall, as determined by this toggle, will be on the outside. Okay, but if I do it the other way, from say top right to bottom left, you can see that it'll place the toggles on the inside, which means the actual exterior face of my wall is now facing on the interior of the building.
When doing this, we want to make sure that we're starting in the top left and going down to the bottom right. It may seem trivial, but it actually saves you a step later on and could prevent you from making a pretty big dimensional error as we go through this project. I’ll start in this area here and just hit that 40 × 100.
I’m not trying to hit it exactly because, if you look closely, you can see that those dimensions are from center line to center line. So they don’t really work for our project anyway. So I’ll hit somewhere in that neighborhood, 40 × 100.
Then I’ll go back, and you can see it's giving me these dimensions already that I could work with. What’s cool is this toggle allows me to create those as permanent dimensions. So I have two options here.
I could convert these temporary dimensions to permanent dimensions, or I could just forget them and draw new dimensions to give the building the proper dimensions I'm looking for. That's up to you. I think both ways work really well since we haven't covered it in class yet.
Just to reiterate, this method is pretty simple. There’s one thing that you have to be really conscious of.
And that's the fact that this dimension does not hit the outside face. We want to make sure we address that properly. So I’m going to go in and hit the dimension toggle there, and this one’s a little harder to see because it’s on the elevation tag.
When I hit it, you’ll notice those dimensions change from blue to black lines. Now they’re permanent. As I mentioned before, you can see when I zoom in that these dimensions go to the center line of the wall instead of the outside face.
It may seem like a big deal, but it's really not a major issue because we can easily fix it by either toggling the extent here, just by clicking that middle button, or sometimes it’s a little more difficult and that doesn’t always work, but you can actually click and drag. So I’m pressing the left mouse button and dragging it over. It’s always going to want to find that center.
But if you remember, we can use the Tab key. Tab will allow me to select a different option. In this case, I want the outside face. Now you can see that I have a dimension from the outside face to the outside face.
If I want to make this a 100-foot dimension, I just have to pick one of the walls, either the north or the south one, and adjust that dimension value to 100 feet. This is the temporary dimension here, and sometimes that's a little tricky, so you might want to move your permanent dimension out so they're not sitting on top of each other.
You can see temporary dimension, permanent dimension. Then I can change it to 100 feet. We’ll repeat those same steps for the 40-foot dimension down here on the bottom.
I’ll click my dimension string and press the middle button to change the toggle on both sides. Then I can adjust the dimension value. And look at that, we got lucky here.
Just to reiterate how we do this, I want to make sure we're all on the same page because this is a pretty critical concept to understand. When we want to change these dimension values, we change the object's location that's being used to reference that. I have these two walls, which are establishing this dimension line.
The only way I can change this dimension is by adjusting these two walls. I’m going to go ahead and save, because that’s a big milestone. Then we’ll continue on with modeling the walls for the project.
