Working with slanted walls

- [Instructor] In this video, I want to continue exploring wall modeling techniques and we're going to focus on the slanted wall feature. Now I'm working in a reflected ceiling plan here for the second floor, I've got a double volume space and you can see these four skylight elements right here. And there's a hole in the ceiling there for a lightwell. And I've got some section views for this area as well, to help you understand this. So, here's an overall section view, and you can see there that I created a call out. So I'm going to actually close that overall and open the call out instead, which is called, section at skylight enlarged. And now you can see here's one of the skylights and there's the hole in the ceiling, here's the ceiling element right there. Surrounding that area, I've created several reference planes just to help us with drawing the geometry. So, this one is called skylight W for West, skylight E for East, I've got the skylight high and low here to help us locating it vertically. And if we go back to the level two reflected ceiling plan, there's also North and South right here. To make sure that I'm snapping to the correct thing, what I'm going to do is temporarily hide the ceiling element here. So I'm going to select it, go to the sunglasses and choose hide element. That puts me in temporary hide isolate mode. And then it will be easy to ensure that I'm actually snapping to the reference planes. So now I'm going to go to the wall command or you can type W-A, and there's several settings that we want to configure. So the first thing I want to do is use the rectangle draw option here. So I'll click that and then I'll direct my attention to the properties palette. I don't want to use the generic six-inch type. So I'm going to scroll down here and there's a couple soffit wall types in this file. Let's use the skylight soffit wall type, which is just a little bit thicker than the other option that's there. Next for the location line, I'm going to choose Core Face: Interior, and I'll explain why a little bit later, so for now, let's just go ahead and choose that. And here's the most important setting. It's currently drawing from level two, because that's the floor plan that we're in. But I want to draw actually much higher than level two, because in the section view, level two is way below where we need to be. So I'm going to change this to high roof here and then if you were to try and apply those settings right now it would fail because it's trying to go from the high roof down to the low roof and that wouldn't work, so let's change this to unconnected and then you can put in any height that you like here. Now, I'm just going to put in two, 'cause I don't really need these walls to be very tall. We're going to adjust the heights in another way, in a few moments. So just to summarize, we've got rectangle on the draw panel, skylight soffit, Core Face: Interior, and we're going from high roof at an unconnected height of two. So move your mouse into the drawing window here and then just simply snap from the intersection to intersection of the reference planes that are already there. So if you didn't hide the ceiling, it might be difficult to snap to those reference planes, you might have to use your tab key. So that's why I hid the ceiling before we started. All right, so now I'm going to click the modify tool to cancel out of there, and then let's tile these two windows next to each other so we can see what we've got in section at the same time as the reflected ceiling plan here. So I'll go to the view tab, click tile views, and then just adjust these windows here using my wheel mouse to kind of pan and zoom. So you can see that high roof is what was passing through here and that's where the walls are placed. Had we done level two, it wouldn't have even shown in this section 'cause they would have been too low. Alright, so these walls on the right, this one, this one and this one, if I select them, you can see them highlight there in the section. Those are all kind of above the ceiling. But this one at the moment is passing through the ceiling and that's the one that I want to make slanted. So, let's focus our attention on that one right now. What I want you to do is, if we look at the reference plane right here, that reference plane high, I've given you a dimension here and it's currently at 143. So that's where I want the base of this wall to be. So, we come over here to the properties palette, I'll change the base offset to 143. And when you apply that, that single wall will pop up to that new location. With it in that location, I'm now going to scroll down here on the properties palette and go to the cross section feature here. And this setting can be either vertical or slanted. I'll change it to slanted and that makes the angle from vertical available, and you can put in any angle you like here, positive or negative. Now in this case, the inside face of this wall is to the right, the outside is to the left. So if I put in a positive number, it'll slant to the right and a negative would slant to the left, but of course you could always reverse it, if it turns out that it goes to the opposite way that you want. So go ahead and try any number, Let's try 20 degrees. Not bad, but it's probably not slanted enough. Well, 30 gets you really close to the angle of the roof, but I want to go a little bit more than that to let more light into the space. So I'm going to go with 45. So you can see that it's not only sloped the wall at 45 degrees, but look what's happening to the two end walls, we can see only one of them here in the section, but notice that they are following the taper of that wall as well. So that's pretty nice, these walls are still connected to one another. Now, it did shift away from the point where we wanted it. So that's easy to fix, just keep that wall selected, go to your move tool, pick an end point right there and then just move it back over to this intersection right there. Okay, so that gets our wall sloped the way we want it and in the correct relative position. Now what we need to do, is clean up all the geometry. Okay, it's a little bit of a mess right now. All right, so what we're going to use is the attach top and base tool. So, come back over here into the floor plan, highlight one of these walls, it can be the sloped wall, doesn't matter, press the tab key. It should go and find the whole chain and then click. And it should say walls four over here on the properties palette. Click over on the section tab to make that the active view and maintain the selection. It should still say walls four. There's an attached top and base button right here. We're going to click that and then you can either attach the top or the base. So we're going to choose the top and click right on the roof element here, and you're going to see all four walls, will go up to an attached to the underside of the roof and cut to the same angle. Now, here's the thing, you could keep those objects selected and repeat that and choose base this time and then click the ceiling. And it works kind of okay for the stuff on the right, but notice that our sloped wall, not so much, right? We get this really weird little kink in there, that would be a little bit difficult to work with. And then you start to see now why I chose, Core Face: Interior for the location line, because notice that the reference plane is actually the face of the core geometry and the dry wall is going to the opposite side of that. The drywall is stopping short here so again, that doesn't quite look right.. So what I'm going to do, is just undo that last modification there, but don't undo both of them, you want to keep the top edge attached, but undo the bottom edge and let's do something else instead. Unfortunately, you can't tell the attach command to attach to the underside of the ceiling, but that's actually what we want here. So what we'll do instead is, just add a reference plane. So I'll go to the architecture tab, click the reference plane tool or type R-P. I'll use the pick-lines option and I'll pick the underside of the ceiling. Now I'm going to pan slightly and it went right to the end there, but there's a little open circle grip point there. And I'm just going to kind of stretch that a little bit longer to make it easier to select this thing. And then I'm going to give it a name, click to name and I'll say underside of sloped ceiling, okay? So I always like to give these a descriptive name, it's definitely helpful when you're working with these. So I want to zoom and pan in such a way that I can see the reference plane, but see all the geometry that I need to attach here. So I'm going to click the modify tool to de-select everything. Go back to my reflected ceiling plan, highlight tab and click again, to select those four walls. Should say walls four, reactivate the section, attach top and base, choose base this time, and it turns out that reference planes are eligible as an attachment point. So you just simply click that reference plane and that will get us almost there, okay? So now the walls connect down to the bottom edge of the ceiling in a much more natural way. The only thing that we need to deal with now is, it doesn't quite look so nice here graphically. Well, all we have to do with that, is just some simple join geometry. Now you can do this in the section view for the two walls that we're cutting through. So I'm going to go to my modified tab, click the join geometry command, and I will select the ceiling and then the wall and then the ceiling and then the wall. And you could do this wall beyond here, but you can also do it here in the floor plan. Now, in order to do that, we have to reset our temporary hide, and then I'll click the ceiling and then the wall and then the ceiling and then the wall. And that completes our joins and completes our lightwell, and it's a very nice effect. So, there are some 3D views here in the file that show this. So there's one called Axon Cutaway at Lobby, and you can open that up and spin it around and kind of get a better look at the final result there. Maybe zoom in and touch and sort of see our lightwell all complete. So, that's an example of using a sloped wall. There's lots of other potential uses for them so, I encourage you to experiment further on your own.