From the course: Revit Architecture: Designing a House

Creating exterior walls

From the course: Revit Architecture: Designing a House

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Creating exterior walls

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- [Instructor] Now we needs to begin by drawing the outside walls of the first floor of our house. Now the reason why we're not starting with the foundation walls instead of the first floor, is that I always like to draw in my foundation walls immediately underneath where we've drawn in our first floor. Why? Because those foundation walls actually support the first floor walls up above it. So, let's go to underneath the Project Browser. Go to Floor Plans, then double click on First Floor. This will be the area where we draw in our first floor walls. Underneath the Architecture tab, click on the picture of the wall. Here, where we have Properties, click on the type selector list and if you notice we can scroll up or scroll down and see a wide variety of walls, which are part of this project environment, and what I want to do is select on Exterior dash Siding walls. Then, just so that you can see how this wall is made, click on the Edit Type button. Here in the Type Properties dialogue box, next to the word Structure, there's a big Edit button. Click on Edit. In the Edit Assembly dialogue box, we can see all the different layers of materials that make up our wall. That includes exterior siding, wood sheathing, a wood stud layer, and a gypsum wall board layer. I'll also mention that each one of these layers of materials also has a thickness associated with it. What's important to know is that things like the wood stud layer are drawn to a precise size. In the case of the wood stud layer, these are two by four walls, but during the milling process, they get reduced to 1 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. That's the reason why the thickness of this wood stud layer is 3 1/2 inches in thickness. Next, we'll click on OK button. Once again, select on OK. Now, we also want to make sure that any options associated with this wall are set correctly before we start drawing the wall in. So here in the Options bar going across the top of the screen, make sure that Height is selected. Also, instead of this Uncon, or unconnected, we want the wall to go up to the top. Top isn't really top. It's top of plate, so it's the the top plate of the wall. Then, for the Location Line, click here. Now we don't want it to be going to the finish face of the exterior of the wall. Instead, we want it to go to the core face of the exterior at the wall. Now the core face is the outside face of the structural members that hold up the wall. In this case, it's the outside, the exterior side of those structural members that hold up the wall. So, select on Core Face Exterior. Make sure the Chain is selected. That allows you to draw one wall after another. Then, underneath Properties, there's an option here for Base Offset. And for whatever reason, it's set at eight feet zero and 1/2 inches. Usually, that would be incorrect, so let's change that to be Base Offset of zero, which would be zero feet, zero inches. And then finally, there's an option here for a Base Extension. Now, a Base Extension allows you to have an offset of your materials. In this case, it means the things like the brick can be a little bit lower than the structural members, or the siding can be a little bit lower than the structural members. In order to cover up those framing materials for such things as your floor. So for the Base Extension, let's have a Base Extension be negative one foot eight. So, down one foot, eight inches from the level that we're drawing it at. As for the first place, where we want to start drawing our wall, it doesn't have to be an exact location. But put it somewhere around where I'm moving my cursor right now on the screen. Click once. Then move straight down. As you're moving that wall straight down, you'll see a dimension appear. Now, this is just a temporary dimension. And what we can do is type in dimensions at this point, so we get the exact length of wall that we want. Type in 10 foot. Then hit the Enter key on the keyboard. Now we have a wall which is 10 foot from that original point where we clicked down. Move over toward the left-hand side, and draw a wall which is 16 feet long. Come straight up. And we want a wall that goes straight up 46 feet. You can zoom in our out just by spinning the wheel on your mouse. Go over to the right 36 feet. Draw a wall straight down. And, now this wall we want to come down 33 feet, eight inches. So type in 33 feet, eight. And just hit Enter on the keyboard. Now what we'd like to do is actually have a change of materials. We still want to have to have the two by four stud wall there on the interior of the wall, but we want to have brick now on the outside, and the brick is actually thicker than the siding that's on the outside of the wall. So, just once, hit the Escape key on the keyboard. By only hitting Escape once, that means that you're still on the Wall command, but now you're free to come underneath Properties and change your wall type. We want an exterior brick wall. So select on Exterior Brick, and then spin the wheel of your mouse to zoom in. We want to start this wall right here at the end point of this line. That happens also to be the line that we've been drawing all the way around the perimeter of our structure. Now, I'm going to zoom out, so we can see a little bit better. Move down two feet, four inches. Next, we'll zoom out. Move over in this direction. Now if we've done everything correctly up to this point, we should be able to type in 20 feet, and then have these two walls connect with one another. And then if we hit the Escape key, we can have these walls actually clean up with one another, as they touch over here, here in the corner. So now we have our exterior walls in. And to review our work, we can come up to the 3D house button, which is the Default 3D View button. Click on that button. If you hold down the Shift key on the keyboard, as well as the wheel of your mouse, you can then move the mouse so that you can see inside of your building. Here we can see that we have all these interior face materials, and they're at that original height that we put it at. And then this is the wall extension that we added, which is dropping the materials down, that one foot eight inches below where we drew in the original walls, in order to cover up those structural materials that make up the floor.

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