Adding walls - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] Walls are the most basic element of any building, so let's take some time here in this video to kind of get acquainted with the basic functions of the Wall tool. So you can find the Wall tool in the Architecture tab, of course, and you can also use the keyboard shortcut W + A. So I'll go ahead and click that tool. Several things change on the screen, so let's kind of point out each of those areas. So first we have over here on the Modify tab the Draw panel and there are several different shapes of wall that we can draw. Now beneath the ribbon, across the screen we have the options bar. And this has some settings that we can change for the various walls that we're about to draw. And some of those are repeated on the Properties palette, but there are also several properties on the Properties palette that are not shown in the options bar, so you really want to be looking at locations. And then finally, some times there'll be a message at the bottom of the screen on the status bar that will pertain to the walls that you're drawing, so it's a good idea to pay attention to that as well. Like, for instance, right now it says click to enter wall start point. So if you weren't sure what to do with your Wall tool that's giving you some clue as to what to do next. So let's accept all the default options for the first click here and we're drawing with a straight line, for example, and I'll click that start point. And now notice the prompt on the status bar says enter wall end point and space flips orientation. Now I can't really show you the space right now for this simple wall, but that'll come in the future. But anyway, notice that I could start to draw at any angle that I want and at any length that I want. So what I'm going to do is just kind of draw a little angled wall right there and click to place that second point. Now notice that Revit assumes you want to create another wall and it stays connected to the end point of the first wall. So this is convenient in most cases, because it's going to be easier to do a complex layout if you don't have to keep setting that same point over again. Revit refers to this as chain. So you'll notice there's a Chain checkbox on the options bar that controls this. So this is what chain looks like. As I click points on-screen you'll see that I'm creating this series of walls connected end point to end point. Now if you wanted to break the chain you might think that the way you had to do that was to uncheck the Chain checkbox. Now that would, of course, work. Notice that the next point I click does break the chain. And then if I start drawing walls they're just individual walls that are not connected to the previous ones. And, of course, I would have to check the Chain box again if I wanted to start an entirely new chain and make it go in sequence. So you are certainly welcome to check and uncheck the box if you like, but I never do that. Because it turns out that all you have to do is press the Escape key one time and that will break the chain without you're having to uncheck the box. So notice that I can now start a new chain and I stay in the command. So the trick here is to always press Escape a single time. If you press it two or more times it'll cancel all the way out of the command, you'll have to start over. If all you want to do is break the chain one Escape will do the trick. All right, so let's look at some of the other shapes that are here. Here's the Rectangle shape. So I can click two opposite corners to create a rectangular shape. Next to that we have a couple different options for polygon. They both work the same way. You select the polygon, you input the number of sides that you want, and then you drag out the shape. You can change the number of sides and draw another one. You've got a Circle option. Drag out your radius. And you've got a series of arcs. Now I'm not going to go through every arc, but I will show you this first one, which is the start end radius arc. And sometimes folks get confused with this and think that you're drawing three points along the curve, in fact, what you're doing is drawing the first point, which is an end point, the second end point, and then coming back and setting the radius, which you can either type in numerically using any number, or which you can do by eye, clicking your mouse. Now notice that the arcs can also be in chain. And if you wanted to break the chain you would simple press Escape and then start a new chain. Now another nice thing about these arcs is if you pay attention on-screen notice that it tries to snap to things that it considers to be logical. So here it's snapping to a tangent arc and that makes a nice, smooth curve. So if you just sort of pay attention to those on-screen cues that can be a very handy way to get some nice compound shapes. Now I'm going to press Escape to break that chain and then I'll switch to this Ellipse tool next. The way the Ellipse works is you draw out one half of the axis in one direction and one half of the axis in the opposite direction and that will create your ellipse. Now the elliptical arc is similar, except that here you're going to draw out the full axis in one direction and then half the axis in the other direction and this will actually work in chain as well. You can create as many different elliptical arcs as necessary. Now I pressed double Escape that time to cancel all the way out. And if you don't want the full half ellipse what you do is come back and select it and then use the little grip controls here to change the shape of that ellipse and we can make it longer or we could make it shorter by just dragging those grip points. Now I should point out that even the full ellipse is actually two elliptical arcs touching end point to end point, as is the circle. That's two arc circles touching end point to end point. All right, so now that we have the basics of just drawing the various wall shapes I want to actually delete all of this stuff and talk about some of the other properties. So what I'm going to do is make a nice big window selection here around all of the walls, but be careful, if you press Delete here notice that you might get a message telling you that several elevations will also be deleted. So I'm going to cancel that and what I want to do is deselect these elevation symbols that I inadvertently selected. So I'll go to the Filter button here, check None, make sure I'm picking Walls only, and click OK. So when you get one of those warnings it's a good idea to heed that, otherwise you might end up deleting more than you intended. And I'll go ahead and press the Delete key. So now I'm going to go back to the Wall command, I'll stick with the straight line again, and this time I want to focus on the Height parameters here. Now there's two places you can set the height of the wall. You can do it right there on the options bar, or notice that that also is available here on the Properties palette. Now I'm going to try just any old value there. I put in 18 feet in imperial. If you're working in metric then try about 7,000 millimeters. Now I'm going to go ahead and draw a little straight horizontal line there, press Escape once to cancel. I'll change the Height here to a different value, I'm going to try 15 feet or you could try about 6,000 millimeters, maybe 5,000 millimeters, something like that, draw out a second segment, and press Escape. Now while it's certainly possible for you to keep changing the height manually that way, you do have another option. Notice that the Height option here as a drop-down right in the middle that allows you to associate the heights of the walls to the levels. So I'm going to change this next wall to Level two and draw it, press Escape once. Try Level three, press Escape once. And then you could also do it here, really it's phrased slightly differently, but it's the same idea, Up to Roof, and draw a final one right there. So it doesn't really matter whether you use the options bar for this or the Properties palette for this, you're setting the same property. Now let's draw one more wall here, but this one I'm going to draw off to the side running perpendicular to the ones I've drawn previously, and then let's click the Modify tool to cancel all the way out of the command. So this last wall here, the vertical one, I'm going to select that, come over here to the Properties palette, and notice that there's this Cross Section parameter right here. And it defaults to Vertical, but you can change that to Slanted. So when I do that that will make an Angle from Vertical parameter available and if you wait for the tool tip you can see that you can put in either a positive or a negative angle here and it will determine which way it slants. So I'll just try about 10 degrees and apply that by moving my mouse back into the drawing window. Now all of those changes we sort of see a subtle change there on the slanted wall, but all of those changes really aren't very evident in a floor plan. So what I want to do now is switch to an elevation view where we can actually see what we've done. So I'm going to use the South Elevation right here, which is looking right at all of that stuff. You can double-click South here on the Project Browser, or double-click this little triangle right here to open up that view. And now you can see very clearly the effect of what we've done. So if I select one of these first walls that we created on the left-hand side they were set to Unconnected height right here. So you can easily go in and change that Unconnected height and the height of that wall will change directly on-screen. However, these walls over here, the three in the middle, were associated with one of the levels, so notice that the Unconnected height is now grayed out. So the way you would change those heights is actually moving the level. Now if I took one of these unconnected walls and connected it to that same level it will jump up and inherit that height. And now if I move the height again I'm changing the height of both of those walls at the same time. So if you think about your typical project where you're going to have dozens or hundreds of walls, if you associate those to a logical level this is going to be a much more efficient way to change the height of many walls all in one step. And as far as our slanted wall goes, well, you can see what it looks like here in Elevation and its slant parameter, and of course, you could change that parameter to anything you like to adjust the amount of slant and the direction that it slants in just by modifying that Angle from Vertical. So I encourage you to experiment further in this file. Try creating other walls, playing around with the various parameters, you just want to get comfortable with the various settings on the options bar and the Properties palette for the Wall tool and make sure you've tried each of the tools in that toolbox, so that you have a level of comfort when using the Wall tool.