Adding walls - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to look at the basics of the wall tool. And to help us do that, I've got a really simple exercise file here that just has a few levels in it that we will use shortly. So to get started, I'm working in the level one floor plan and I'm going to go to the wall tool here on the architecture tab. If you prefer, you can type the keyboard shortcut of w + a. Now a number of things of changed in the interface when you click this tool. So let me point out each of those to you. So the first is here on the ribbon. We've got a series of shapes that we can use to draw walls with. And we'll look at several of those in just a moment. Next on the options bar, which runs across the top of the screen here. We've got several options that we can configure while we're drawing the walls and that will affect the walls that you're about to draw. Now, some of those options are repeated here on the properties pallet, but there's also additional settings that are available here as well. So you really want to be looking in both places for the walls as you're creating them. And then finally down at the bottom of the screen here, we have the status bar, which is giving us messages along the way. So these can be little clues to what you do next. And right now it's telling me to click to enter a wall start point which is exactly what I'm going to do. So I'm just going to click anywhere on screen to start drawing my wall. Notice that I can draw at any direction that I want in any length that I want. And the status bar is saying, enter wall end point. So that's what I'll do next. And I'll just pull it out at a slight angle here and click to place my first wall. Now, the next thing you'll notice is that we're still in the wall tool and I'm able to draw additional segments of wall each time the prompt is saying, enter wall end point. So you can just click additional points like I'm doing there. Now, this is referred to in Revit as chain. Now there is a chain checkbox right here on the properties pallet that controls this behavior. And at first you might be thinking if I didn't want the chain, if I wanted to break the chain let's say, that I would need to uncheck that. Now I do need to finish this last chain here. So I'll just sort of click anywhere to finish that up and notice that I'm still in the wall tool but now I'm no longer connected back to that original wall which means I could draw a completely independent wall here, or here or here. So each time I draw another wall these are completely independent. I'm required to do both the start point and the end point. Now, if I check chain again it just puts me back in the chain behavior. And then I'm back to creating a new chain of walls. However, it's really not necessary to check and uncheck chain each time, you can simply use the escape key instead. So notice what happens if I press the escape key one time, that will break the chain, but it will stay in the wall tool and I'm able to create another new chain. So yes, it's possible to uncheck chain but I just prefer to use escape instead. And that will easily break the chain. If you press escape two times that takes you all the way out of the wall tool. So that gets you all the way out. So one escape breaks the chain, two escapes gets you all the way out of the command. Let's go back in. You can either click the button or type w + a and now let's consider some of the other shapes that we have available here. So there's the rectangle shape right here. And all that requires is to click on two opposite corners. Then next to that, we have a series of polygons. So we can circumscribed or inscribed. The only real difference is whether you're drawing to the vertex or whether you're drawing to the midpoint of the face, right? So here I'm drawing to the vertex and I can kind of pull that out and you could see that it was sort of inscribing it within a circle. So really what you're doing is drawing the radius of a circle and it makes the polygon fit that shape. Now I'll do the circumscribed next just to show you the difference. And you can even come here on the options bar and change the quantity of sides. So I'll switch to five sides and I'll draw in another one. And now you can see I'm drawing to the face instead of the vertex. And I only have five sides now instead of six. So those are a couple of the polygons. We have a circle, click and draw out a radius once again, and you'll get a circular form. There is a variety of arc tools. I'm not going to show each one but I will demonstrate this first one. Start and radius because sometimes when you first use this you think you're drawing three points along the curve, in fact, what you're drawing is the start point. Then the end point, and then you're drawing the amount of curvature by indicating the radius. Now you could indicate the radius on screen by just simply clicking, or you could type in a value. So in this case, I'm going to type in a value of 10 here in the Imperial file. If you're working in metric, use 3000 millimeters. Now, as I said, you don't need to type it in. You could just simply eyeball it like so, and notice that with arcs, they continue to work in chain as well. So chain is not limited to just straight lines. You can use it on other forms. If you pay attention, sometimes Revit will offer to snap to useful relationships for you such as this tangent relationship here. And that'll give me a nice smooth curve. Now I'm going to go ahead and escape once to break the chain but stay in the wall command. We also have an ellipse. Now, the way the ellipse works is you start at the center, you draw half the axis in one direction and then half the axis in the opposite direction. And then that creates that elliptical form. There's an elliptical arc. It works a little differently. You're going to drag out the entire axis in the first direction and then only half the axis in the alternate direction. This does support chain as well. So you can draw as many elliptical arcs in sequence as you need to. Now I'm going to go ahead and double escape this time to cancel all the way out of the tool and show you that regardless of what shape we used, each segment of wall is independent. So notice that even though I did this as a pentagon individually the same is true with these edges of this hexagon. They are independent edges or this rectangle or even the circle in the ellipse which in both cases is made up of two separate arcs that are touching end to end. So even though you use the circle tool, what you're really getting is two round arcs. Now, when you select one of these walls later they have grips that either end. And so, even though the elliptical arc was drawing half an ellipse, you could come back later and make it more of an ellipse in this case or less than half in this case, the same is true with the circular arcs or even the straight line walls. So you can always come back and modify these forms later very easily, directly on screen. So feel free to experiment a little bit further with these doodled sketched shapes that we've done here. And then when you're satisfied with the basic behavior there, I want you to select all of them, which I'm going to do by doing a crossing selection. So I'm starting at the right dragging to the left and then I'll press my delete key. But be careful because this is going to warn me that it's about to delete all of my elevations as well. Now I don't really want that. So instead of clicking, okay, I'm going to click cancel. Then I'll come up here to filter and I will remove the elevations and views from the selection leaving me with just the walls. I'll click OK. And now it's safe to delete and I'll only be deleting those walls. So now I want to direct your attention to the options bar and the height settings of the walls. So I'm going to go back to the wall tool, w + a, and before I start to draw, I'm going to stick with a straight line shape here. I'm going to draw it relative to the height and then it defaults to unconnected. I'm going to accept that. And then right here, I can type in the desired height. So I'm going to put in a 18 in Imperial. If you're working in metric, put in 7,000 millimeters and then we're going to click anywhere here I'm going to click my start point and just sort of drag that out a little bit and click my endpoint, like so. I'm going to press escape once, change the height of this to 15 or 6,000 millimeters, draw a second one right next to it, press escape once. So that's one way that you could set the height is just by typing in a value in the unconnected height. But another option is to use the dropdown where it says unconnected and instead reference the height of the wall to one of your other levels. So I'm going to to the level two first and draw a wall, press escape once, change it to level three, draw one more, press escape, level four, draw one more. And then finally escape one more time. I'll draw one perpendicular and this time I will double escape all the way out. So now I'd like to show you the result of all those height changes that we made 'cause it's a little difficult to see them here in a floor plan. So we preserved our elevations around when we were deleting earlier. And that's important because we want to open one of those elevations now. So I've got the south elevation here, which is looking right at those walls down at the bottom of the screen. I'm going to double click that little triangle and that's going to open up that south elevation for me. And now you can very clearly see all of those heights that we established. So this very first wall over here on the left is the one that I set at 18 feet. Well notice that the unconnected height is listed here on the properties pallet and you could change it to something else. So I could put in a slightly larger number or I could select one of these and put in a slightly smaller number. So the number that you use isn't as important as just the notion that you can change it. Now you can also change it with the grip right here. So if you'd rather do it on screen, you can just simply drag that height there. So those are some of the ways you can start to manipulate the height, but more importantly just because you started it unconnected doesn't mean you need to stay there. So you can click that dropdown menu and there's all the levels again. So I could take this wall that I have selected and make it go up to level three. Now what's the benefit? Why would I want to do that? Well now notice that the height is gray out. You can't change it directly. The way you change the height of these walls would be to move level three. So what I'm going to do is select level three here and just sort of drag it a little bit and notice that that changes the height of both this wall and this wall. Now that same would be true to any of these levels. This one is controlling the height of this wall. And this one here is controlling the height of these two walls here and here. So imagine in a project that has lots and lots of walls if you've got all those walls associated with the level you simply move the level and all the walls will change height. That's going to be a much more efficient way to deal with that. The last thing a want to point out to you here is this wall that I drew perpendicular to the viewing plane. I just wanted to show you one other property on the properties pallet. So if you scroll down here you'll notice that there's a cross section property and it's got three options, vertical, slanted, and tapered. I'm not going to look at tapered but I will briefly show you slanted. We'll talk about tapered in a future video but the angle from vertical can be any angle you want. So I could put in a positive number and it will slant off to the left. You can try 10 degrees. I could try five degrees. You can also put in a negative number. So that'll make it slant off to the right. Now the angle property is independent of the other properties. So after you've slanted it at whatever angle you like you've can change its height. So I could drop it down to level three. I could even set it to unconnected and then put in an explicit height and that will adjust that wall but it will still maintain that slanted angle. So that's really true of all these settings I've been showing you. Each one kind of operates independently. And so really what you do now is just continue to explore in this file. Feel free to try different combinations of settings and play around with the wall tool, just to get comfortable with it because after all, walls are the most fundamental element in any building model. So being really comfortable with them is going to go a long way towards your overall comfort with Revit in general