Creating Realistic Roof Elements: Adding Slope and Drainage to Your Roof Plan

Now let's go ahead and jump over to our roof plan. And I just like to do this in a lot of our different videos because it really just helps reinforce the processes required to create a real-looking building. And one of those things that we do is we make sure that we have our actual roof elements modeled correctly.

And part of that is making sure that roofs aren't just dead flat. And so what we'll do is we're going to add some slope into this roof here. And we'll do that by adding the low points to the roof so that we know exactly where those exist.

And this is an easy one because it's a pretty good rectangle that we can work with here. And it'll make it pretty straightforward for us to go ahead and do that. And so the first thing we want to do is establish our ridge on this roof here.

And to do that, I'm going to go ahead and select my roof. And believe it or not, I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to redo this portion here. And this is a little cheat that I learned a few years ago, but it makes it so much easier for when you're creating this type of roof.

So I’ll go ahead and close that in as if that never existed. And then I'm going to go in and I'm going to use my Vertical Opening tool here to create that notch in the roof. So I'll go to Vertical.

And what this does is it actually doesn't give me points at these locations, and Revit will automatically determine the slope there. And so I grab this point here and bring it across. And that's the opening that I'm going to use to create that.

And when I look at it in 3D, you can see it looks no different. It actually looks exactly the same. But the only difference is the roof is drawn out to this point.

---

And so that gives us an equal point for our ridge to be down the middle. And then it gives us nice, clean lines going back through. So I'm going to jump over to my roof plan here again.

And then what I'll do is I'll draw a reference plane down the middle. And so these grids are 32 feet, so I want to make sure that's 16 feet here.

And now I can use that as my guideline for creating my ridge. Then I can go in and add my points for the rest of the slope. So to do that, we're just going to select our roof.

I’ll go to one of the edges here. And it's easy because we have a big difference in wall thickness there. And what I'll do is I'll add a split line.

And this will give me the point for my ridge here. And it's really important to make sure that you hit this reference plane and not necessarily the midpoint. We'll hit that reference plane and go all the way across the other side of the roof.

And that gives me my ridge. And then what I'll do is use my grid lines here. We'll use grids three and five.

---

For this, I'll place a vertical. And this is me just kind of breaking up the roof into these points that have our low points. So grid line three and then grid line five.

And now we have the ability to place drains. So I have one here in the center of each one of these portions. And we can keep going with this split line option.

And I can just draw in split lines. And now I have a point that I can drop down to create the slope of my roof. And so I'll just repeat that process for each one of these bays.

You do want to make sure that you're hitting those snaps—you can see them kind of point up to that point snap. Sometimes you have to zoom in to get it where you want it, but it's worth the effort for sure.

Now we could have gone in and just added points at those midpoints. But by doing it this way, we're drawing lines and we're actually establishing the point all at the same time. So it's kind of a one-stop shop here.

And this is the last one. And now we've got all of the points on our roof ready to be adjusted to establish our ridge and our low points for our drains.

---