Creating floors - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we'll add some floor elements to our model. Now the floor tool is right here on the architecture tab. It is a drop-down button. So there is a default, which is Floor Architectural, you can see that here. And then several other options are in the drop-down. So either way, you click this portion of the button or click the first option here on the drop-down Floor Architectural and that's what we want to look at here to get started. Now this takes us into what we call sketch mode. Now I can tell that I'm in sketch mode in a few ways. The drawing window is grayed out in its halftone. I've got the modify create boundary tab active and it's in green tinted color. And the easiest way to tell I'm in sketch mode is the mode panel. And it's got that giant red x and the giant green checkbox, which we're going to use to get out of this mode. So the red x cancels and the green checkbox finishes. The best advice I can give you about sketch mode is stay focused. It takes you to the modify tab that's the right place to be. Don't click any of the other tabs, because they're all grayed out anyway, right. So if I start clicking on any of these other tabs, everything is grayed out. So you want to stay right here on the modify create floor boundary tab to get going. Now, there are several defaults that came in automatically when we ran the command. The first is boundary line, notice that's lit up already. The second is pick walls, notice that's lit up already. With boundary line, we're going to be creating the sketch, which is natural, right? We need to draw the shape we want our floor to have. You can draw your floor using any of the draw tools but pick walls is going to be the quickest and most efficient way for most projects. Because all you need to do is touch a wall with the pick walls active and it will create a sketch line that matches the length of that wall. Now, on the options bar, there is this extend into wall to core checkbox. So to understand that, let's zoom in a little bit here, near the top of the plan here. And when I click the wall, you can see that it actually went to the edge of the core. Now you might have to really zoom in to see it here, because notice it's not actually out on the far outside edge of the wall. It's inside just a little bit from that, because it saw where the core is. Now there is a little flip grid right here and I want to click that, because I actually want to use the outside face of the core, not the inside face. So if you clicked yours and it's doing the inside face, then go ahead and flip it before we continue. Now I'm going to go ahead and pick a few more of the walls that I can see here, the exterior walls. And they will match that configuration, so it's going to go to the outside faces of the core. And notice that they're all going to join up nicely with one another, which is really handy. So that's what makes the pick walls tool such a simple way to create these floor elements. So I want to pick a few more of these walls and across the front here there are two walls and I only want you to pick one of them. Now it's not wrong to pick both as long as you create an enclosed shape that Revit calls a continuous loop. It will work. So if you've got two lines touching endpoint to endpoint, it'll work just fine, Revit will be happy. I personally just think it's cleaner to have one continuous line there across the front rather than two. So, let me show you what happens if you try and finish prematurely. So if we click the big green checkbox, what will happen is, you'll get this error message down at the bottom of the screen, and it tells you that the lines must be in closed loops. Now quit will cancel all the way out the command, don't do that. But you can click continue here to dismiss the warning and finish your sketch, right. So it's going to give you the opportunity to fix the problem. So what I'm going to do is use my trim and extended corner tool here and trim these two to one another to close up that loop. So once again, you can do pick walls and have two lines there, I like to have one line all the way across. All right, so now I click finish and Revit will be happy this time and it will move on to the next step. And the next step is asking me what I would like to do about the walls that come up to the same level as the floor. So what I'm going to do for now is just to ask you to click don't attach and we'll talk about what that means a little bit later. So notice that the floor gets created, it's still selected on screen and at this point you could just deselect it or if you didn't like the shape, you could modify it. So let's we didn't like the shape and we want to modify it, how would we do that? Well there is an edit boundary button right here, you simply click that, that takes you back into the sketch, you could make some modifications, click finish and it would complete it. Or if you change your mind, you click the red x to cancel. It's going to confirm, are you sure? I'm going to say yes, and it takes me back. So if I'm satisfied with this, I just click away from it to deselect. So let's go to level two, and add a floor up here as well. So back to architecture, I'll click the Floor button again again you want floor architectural. All the same options boundary lines, pick walls, extend into core and I'm going to do this wall, the exterior one here, the one at the bottom and the one right here. So I just want those four because this portion is going to be open to below. So it's like a double-volume space there. So I'll go to trim and extend, I'll pick this line right here and I want to extend that all the way up to the other one. Now remember that with trim and extend you have to pick the side you want to keep. So don't pick the right-hand side of this line, that will give you the wrong thing. Let me undo that with Control + Z. Instead, you want to make sure you're picking somewhere over here to the left and that will create an enclosed shape. Now we could click finish and Revit will be satisfied, but if I zoom up here to the top of the plan, I don't think the occupants of the building will be too happy. Because when they come up these stairs, they'd have nowhere to go. So I'm going to use the line command right here and I'll start right at the endpoint of the stair, pull it back to this line, go right back to that same point, pull it up here somewhere. And you can go too long, it doesn't matter. Because the final step is to use trim and extend again and clean that up, and trim and extend again and clean that up. So again, remembering to pick the side you want to keep. Once I've done that, I can click finish. And we'll get that same message again that we got a moment ago. We did don't attach last time, this time I want you to choose attach and I'll show you what the difference is between those two in just a moment. But meanwhile, we get a second question this time, which is highlighting the perimeter walls that we chose and asking if we want to join that geometry together. So let's answer yes there. So we got a lot of questions there that we kind of left hanging. So let's zoom out a little bit, deselect the floor by clicking an empty space, and I want to show you what those questions were asking about. So to do that, the easiest way to describe that is to be in a section view. So let's create a new section. So you can go to the view tab, the section button is right here, and I'll start outside of the window here to the left, pull it straight across horizontally, click again to the right. Notice you get this little dash box here, that's going to be the extents of the section and it was smart enough to see where the back wall of the building was. Click anywhere to deselect it and then double click the section head to open that view up. Finally I'll zoom in over here on this bay to the left and let's talk about what those questions were asking. So the first question asked about attaching to the underside of the floor. So here is our second floor and here is a wall that is attached to it. So when you select a wall, there are two buttons on the modify ribbon. Attach top and base and detach top and base. So if I did Detach and pick the floor, that's what it would have looked like had I answered don't attach in the second dialogue. I chose to attach however, and it ends up looking like that. So the wall attached itself to the underside of the floor. Now the reason I say don't attach on the first floor is because it was talking about this wall. And had we done attach and pick this floor, we'll get this little notch here on the outside of the building, and I don't think that's what we wanted. So I'm going to detach that instead, right? So that's not what we wanted there. However, the second question said, do you want to join the geometry? And that gave us this really nice condition right here. So notice that the floor joined itself really nicely into the wall and made a nice clean intersection. That command is on the modify tab, and you could see here that there's a few different options. There's join, there is unjoin, there is switch join order. If I did unjoin, this is what it would've looked like if I'd said no, okay. And I don't think that looks so good. So that's why we say yes when it offered to join because that looks much nicer. Now I'm still in join and look what happens if I take this floor and join it to that wall. I think that looks a lot nicer too, so why don't we go with that? So what Revit is doing with those two questions is just trying to simplify things for you and make it a little easier. So it's asking you about these two conditions that you can do easily manually. Attaching the walls to the underside of the floors and joining the geometry along the perimeter. Even if you answer yes or no in either of those questions, you can always come back later and modify it as the design needs dictate. So don't feel like you have to get that question right and that it's really important if you don't. Because you can always come back into an appropriate view like a section and modify things to suit your needs. I encourage you to explore a little bit further with the floor tool. Maybe do some custom sketches and get some comfort level building floors.