Achieve a perfected layout for your stairs and doors using simple and easy methods. Discover how to align, create and adjust grids and mullions to accurately design and measure your space in 3D with no guesswork involved.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the process of creating a layout for stairs and doors, which begins with identifying where a mullion should hit for optimal alignment with the location of the wall.
- Creating a new grid at a specific spot allows for an accurate measurement of mullions and clear space, with the dimension set to accommodate both factors.
- The article also highlights the importance of adjusting the setup in 3D or elevation view, and making necessary changes such as moving grids and mullions to ensure a smooth and straight alignment.
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To get this layout to work for our stairs and the door that we want to locate here, the first thing I'm going to do is identify where I would like a mullion to hit. And in this case, I want to make sure this mullion here is further back, kind of in the same location as this wall. And so I can make that move right now.
And I can say, okay, this I can unpin, and then I can align it so that it's back here. And so this wall is going to hit into that pane. And then I know that I want to have a three foot opening at this location.
And so what I could do is I can create a new grid at that spot. And then I know that this is a two and a half inch mullion. So that means if I wanted to get a three foot clear space in here, then I need to make sure that I have this dimension set correctly, which is going to be the three feet plus another two and a half inches.
And you can see how that's going to add up for us here. If I take this new one, and I move it, then I'll have a perfect three foot door. So you can see that three foot two and a half is what gives us that three foot door for the stairs.
And so that's easy to do and get set up here. But it doesn't mean that we've resolved it completely in 3D or in our elevation view. And so when we look at it now, you can see it's a little different.
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And there might be a couple of things that we want to adjust on here. So first things first, I don't want to have a weird step here to here. So I want to have this guy sitting at 10 feet.
So I'll select that one. And then I'll uncheck that. And then I can change this value from 12 to 10 so that we have a continuous mullion here.
And it looks like we're off by just a smidge. And that's because the thickness of the mullion is not factored in there. And so I need to move it down one and a quarter inches to get those to be lined up straight across.
And then I can look at where this next mullion is sitting here, and the relationship with this pop out. And so if I wanted to have another line created here, which seems to make sense, because it'll help me hide everything above the roof. So it kind of gives me a spandrel point at the roof there, then I can go in and I can adjust this mullion or this grid rather.
And notice how I'm using tab quite a bit to cycle through my selection to find the grid. That's a pretty common thing that you'll have to do here. But then we can move it.
And I'm going to show you a trick here that actually might work out better. If I go to my West elevation, what we can do is we can do the same operation. But instead, I can actually grab my grid, which is unpinned now, remember, it's got to be unpinned since it's the type of wall we use.
But this is the elevation that I want to hit with the bottom of my mullion. And so what I could do is I can grab this point as my reference for moving. And then I can move it up and have it hit at that point there.
And there's no guesswork in it. So I know that I've hit it exactly where I wanted to. Now we've got some really tall pieces of glass here.
We've got our kind of our side light, this is our door. This is what ended up being kind of the weird width of the piece right there. And then we've got the rest of our window here.
And we can look at how it all translates going through at this point. And then we can see if we can get it to spread out a little bit better so that we don't have such a tight space here next to where we'd have a door. So first thing I want to do is I'm going to add another grid across here.
And I can do that by going to architecture, curtain grid, and I'll place that one in. And I can set this guy so that I have an equal distance here. So this nine one and a quarter and the nine one and a quarter.
And that gives me five feet above my level line. If you didn't get it in the middle right away, then you know that five feet above level two is where you want that to sit. Now we can look at our spacing going across between these two walls here.
And this is where it gets really tricky. Because if you added a grid, a vertical one like we did here, and let's say you go back in like we are now and you're thinking, well, I could probably take one of these out and then space these equally to get the spacing that I want on this wall. And then we can kind of adjust this one accordingly.
Well, what would happen is if I tried to go in and say remove one of these, the wall starts to kind of freak out. So you can hear I'm aggressively hitting the delete key. And it won't let me remove that one because we told it that we wanted to have a certain number of vertical grids here.
And this is grayed out now because I've gone in and I've unpinned a few of these. So the better way would be to come back in here, delete the one that I created. And then unpin this next one and change this value to the three foot two and a half.
And then now I have the ability to adjust this dimension to get the layout that I want for this wall. And that's where a lot of times you've heard me say that sometimes it's just easier to try and set this up with just the curtain wall one and then do your own custom layout. I think you start to see the disadvantage on walls that are like this that don't have a lot of variation.
But when you start to try and add in doors and adjusting it to a custom pattern, it's just not worth the time. And so what I'll do here is I want this one in the center of our wall here. So I want this to be spaced equally.
So I'll just draw a dimension and then space those equally. And then what I can do is since it didn't do exactly what I was hoping for there. So with this curtain wall in the right location now, what I'll do is I'll adjust this location and I'll go ahead and unpin this guy and then we'll change this value to let's call it six foot five.
And let's go ahead and move that over just a little bit more so that they're closer to even. The difference here is there's an extra two inches on that side because it's going to the edge of the wall, not the center. Now we'll have our door and then some larger panes of glass for where we have the stair winding up here.
And this is pretty tall for a door. So what we want to do is we want to add another curtain grid, but this time instead of adding a full segment, we'll just do one segment. And then I'll set this so that I can have an eight foot door exactly, which means this dimension here is going to be eight plus the half of a mullion width.
So eight, one and a quarter. And I can check that by going in and selecting this panel. And then I can see the size and I have to get rid of this guy first, the sill mullion there, and then I can check to see that I have an eight foot door.
And that gets us set up on this side. Here, we've got an extra mullion there. I can delete that after I unpin it.
And then now we've got it looking exactly the way we want here. We'll go in and we're going to repeat a lot of those same steps on the other side. It's a little easier because it's not a full height wall, but that'll be our next video.
