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Michael Wilson/5 min read

Completing the Building Shell: Adding Floors, Ceilings, and Roofs

Building Shell Completion

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Now that we've finished almost all of the exterior shell of the building, it's time to fill in some of the voids, and I think you know what I mean by that.

Now that we've finished almost all of the exterior shell of the building, it's time to fill in some of the voids, and I think you know what I mean by that. When we look at our project right now, we have none of the horizontal assemblies. That means no floors, no ceilings, and no roofs.

So let's go ahead and add those. That should help complete this a little bit more, so it looks a little more realistic and not so much like a shoebox. The first thing we'll do is jump over to Level 1 and create the Level 1 floor slab.

This is going to be very similar to the process that we went through for editing the profile of the wall, except that we're going to be drawing all of those profiles from scratch. So similar to what we did in Project 1, we're going to go to the Architecture tab, go to floor, and we want to make sure we pick a floor type that works for our project, and I don't really see one here that works well, so we're going to Edit Type and duplicate, and like I've always said, you already knew that because if you need a new type, that's exactly what you have to do. So generic is kind of the material definition, so we'll say concrete, and then for slab on grade, we'll go with 5 inches.

I'm going to edit the structure to reflect that now, so the thickness here is going to be 5 inches, and the material we're going to add to this category here. If I click into that section and then click this browse button here, it'll take me to the material library, and from here, I can pick the material I want to use. So I can type into the search bar at the top.

If I just start typing concrete, it'll filter out the different types of concrete materials that we have already loaded into the project. So I can say Concrete Cast-in-Place Gray, and then I'm going to expand this out a little bit so we can see what we're looking at. We have a couple of things that we want to address.

First, the surface pattern. The surface pattern is set to sand, so that means anytime we look at this in elevation or look down at it directly, like in a floor plan, we're going to see that stipple pattern on the plan, and that's not a good thing. That'll be too busy for our plan, so we want to take that off.

So I'm going to click on where it says sand here, and then I'll scroll all the way up to the top and select no pattern and hit OK. That's going to take out the surface pattern. When we look at the cut pattern, we can see that it says concrete, and it's going to cut, and anytime we cut it in section, it's going to show us that pattern as the hatch for the concrete, and that's very appropriate for this use.

We'll go ahead and hit OK. Hit OK again one more time, and now we can draw the sketch. So at this point, we just want to determine the best way to draw the floor slab, and I think that's going to be using the Draw Lines tool.

And to do that, we'll just pick a starting point, so say this corner, going from endpoint to endpoint all the way around the building until we've created a closed loop, because we have the same rules that we have to follow for creating the sketch that we did when we were doing the edit profile on the wall. So you can see here I have my continuous loop. I don't have any intersecting lines, and I don't have any overlapping lines.

A lot of times I'll get the question about this symbol that you see here, and these extra lines on the side, what that represents is the span direction of the floor, and so that can always change depending on the type of flooring you're using. It doesn't matter for a solid concrete floor, but if we had like a metal deck built into this, or if we had bar joists or something like that, we could define which direction the span goes, and that's with this tool here. If I wanted to change it, I could use that tool, and then identify this line as our span direction, or change it back to the one that it was originally, which makes more sense for this grid system.

Once I've got it all set up here, I'll go ahead and click Finish Edit Mode, and then we'll just bounce back into our 3D view to check and make sure that it looks good, and it does. We're going to jump into our Level 2 floor plan, and we'll do the same thing, but slightly different method.