Adding walls - Revit Architecture Tutorial

of any building, and the Wall tool has many options that we can look at. So, in this video, we'll just take some time to draw some walls and explore some of those most common options of the Wall tool. So, on the Architecture tab, we've got our Wall button right here. You can see the keyboard shortcut is WA, so the first thing is that we leave the Architecture tab and go over to the Modify tab. And then the word Place Wall has been added to the end of that tab and it's been tinted in this greenish color. Now directly beneath that, you'll see the Draw toolbox and you'll see all the different shapes that we can draw walls in and we'll look at several of those in just a few moments. Now beneath the ribbon, we have the Options Bar that goes completely across the screen, and we'll explore a few of those options here momentarily. And then beneath that, we have the Properties Palette, which also exposes some of the Walls' options. And then finally, at the bottom of the screen, on the status bar, it says to click to enter the wall start point. So, I'll go ahead and click my start point. Now, if you look again at that message, it now says enter the wall end point. So, you just simply move your mouse to wherever you want the wall to end and you click again. Now, before I do that, I just want to point out that you can go in any direction you like. It will automatically snap to standard angles like horizontal or vertical or 45, but you can also draw at any random angle you like and simply click. Now, the next thing you'll notice when you do that is that it's created the first wall but it's still in the Wall command and it's trying to create a second wall. Now, that second wall starts where the first one left off and when I click again, it reuses that end point as a start point. Revit refers to this as Chain. So, Chain means just multiple linear elements touching end to end, and so, I can create a chain of walls by simply clicking multiple points. Now, if you wanted to break the chain, you might be thinking that you have to uncheck the box, and you certainly could, and then you'll see that with the box unchecked, I'm drawing independent walls that are not in chain. But I actually recommend that you leave Chain turned on all the time because as it turns out, I can start drawing a chain and then if I want to break the chain and stay in the command, all I need to do is press the Escape key one time. Now, it's very important that you press it one time because if you press more than once, it will get all the way out of the command, but if you press it just one time, it stays in the command and it broke the chain. And now, I could start a new chain. Press Escape one time, it breaks the chain, and I could draw another one or I could press Escape a second time and get all the way out. So, that's just a really easy way to manage the Chain behavior without having to check and uncheck the box. All right, let's go back to the Wall tool and now, let's look at some of the other shapes that we have available. So there's some obvious ones here like rectangle. It just draw two points. Or polygons where you see the number of sides there on the Options Bar. That's also two points where it's the center and then the edge of a circle where the polygon is either inscribed or circumscribed, and there's actually two buttons to control that behavior. And then you have the number of sides here that you can configure. And you can create polygons of any quantity of sides that you like. We can draw circles. And we can draw a number of different kinds of arcs. Now let me demonstrate this one, Start-End-Radius, simply because sometimes the first time folks use this, they make the wrong assumptions about it. A lot of times folks think they're drawing along the curve, but in fact, what it is is start point, end point, and it looks a lot like a straight line until you click that end point and then you'll see that the final click So, Ellipse is three clicks, the center of the ellipse, and then a second click for the two axes. There's also an elliptical arc or a partial ellipse. So, this one is a little different. You're drawing along the axis first and then coming back and specifying half of the other axis. When I cancel out of there, it does half of an ellipse, but if you select it and use the grip at the end, you can actually shorten that or lengthen it to create a partial ellipse of variable length. Now, in both the Ellipse and the Circle, what it actually creates is two arcs. So here, we get two partial ellipses or two partial elliptical arcs, and here, we get two circular arcs. All right, so that's the different Draw shapes and you're certainly welcome to experiment with those more but what I'm going to do is make a crossing selection from right to left and select all of those walls and delete them. However, if I delete, you'll notice that I've actually selected some of my elevation symbols too, so it's warning me here that I'm about to delete some views. So I'll cancel that, and what you probably want to do is go to Filter first and then uncheck anything that's not a wall, so Elevations and Views in this case, click OK, and now, when I press Delete, it will only delete the walls and not accidentally delete things that I didn't want to remove. So let's go back to the Wall command one more time and what I want to talk about this time is the height options. So you can control the height from one of two places. You can do it either from the Options Bar or from the Properties Palette. So, you can see that currently, it's defaulting to an Unconnected height and therefore, there's a setting right there that we can type in, and the default is this 8,000 millimeters and I'll accept that, draw a single wall segment, and press Escape once to break the chain. I can change that height either here or on Properties. So I'll put in 7,000 this time and draw a second segment, press Escape one time. So you certainly could type in the height manually for each wall that you draw, but another option is to use this dropdown here and associate the height of this wall to one of your levels in your project. So, if I said the first wall that I want to do that way is going up to Level 2, press Escape one time, then I'll set the next one to Level 3, and I could do it in the same place in the Options Bar or I could do it right here on the Properties Palette. It's just phrased slightly differently. Now it says Top Constraint Up to Level 3. But otherwise, it's setting it the same way. And then let's do one more, Up to Level 4. And then I'll double Escape to get out of the command. Now of course here in Floor Plan, I can't see any of that height information, so the best way to see what we've done is to actually come down over here to the Project Browser, scroll down, and under Elevations, I'll double-click the South elevation. And so now, you can see those five walls that I've drawn and they're all these different height. Now, these first two here are the Unconnected ones that are set to either 8,000 or 7,000. If you click in the Unconnected height field on the Properties Palette, you can type in a new value and apply that and it will change the height of that wall. Now, to change the height of these walls, this one is associated to Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4, and you can see that if I select it, Level 3 is at 6,000 and it says over here that the Unconnected height is 6,000 but it's grayed out, I can't change it now. So the way that we change it is not by typing in a new number. The way you change it is by selecting that level and moving it. So, I'm going to do that just by dragging it by eye, but you can see that if I move Level 3, but you can see that if I move Level 3, that it will actually impact the height that it will actually impact the height of that associated wall. of that associated wall. Now, the advantage of that is I can take multiple walls, Now, the advantage of that is I can take multiple walls, associate them to the same level, associate them to the same level, and now, with a single modification of one level height, and now, with a single modification of one level height, I could be potentially editing the height I could be potentially editing the height of several different pieces of wall geometry. of several different pieces of wall geometry. So, often in projects, it's going to be more convenient So, often in projects, it's going to be more convenient to associate the heights of the walls to the levels to associate the heights of the walls to the levels 'cause then you get this more global control over them. 'cause then you get this more global control over them. So, take some time playing around with the Wall tool So, take some time playing around with the Wall tool and getting comfortable with the various shapes and getting comfortable with the various shapes and tools that are available and tools that are available and also explore some of the heights here in Elevation view. and also explore some of the heights here in Elevation view. The more comfortable you feel with the Wall tool, The more comfortable you feel with the Wall tool, the easier it will be for you to create the easier it will be for you to create an actual building layout when you're ready. an actual building layout when you're ready.