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Michael Wilson/6 min read

Creating Walls for a Model: Setting Constraints and Drawing Interior and Exterior Walls

Wall Setup Checklist

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Now we are ready to create our walls for this model and to do that what I want to do is I want to make sure that I have a few things set correctly and I know we went over this in a previous...

Now we are ready to create our walls for this model and to do that what I want to do is I want to make sure that I have a few things set correctly and I know we went over this in a previous video but it never hurts to double check. So before we start modeling I want to go ahead and check the phase that we're using because the phase that I have set here is the phase that the elements that I draw are going to take on. If I were to create a wall this wall here is phase created existing.

If the view had the phase of new construction the wall that I create now you can see has the phase created of new construction. So it's always important to make sure that you have that you have it set up ahead of time and it's not an end of the world thing because you can always change it after the fact but it just saves you a lot of time in the long run. So let's get started.

I'm going to first create the outline of the building and then we'll go in and pick up these interior walls and so first thing we want to do is go to our 'Wall' command and we're going to set it to the right type. We're going to use the Exterior—EIFS on Metal Stud and then I want to set my Top and my Base Constraint to make sure that they're set correctly. So Base Constraint is set to Level One.

My Top Constraint is going to be set to Top of Parapet and the reason we create the levels ahead of time is so that we can have an easy way of drawing our walls. It just helps us out a little bit. Location Line we're going to use Finished Face Exterior because we have a finished face exterior that we can work from and there's no reason to do anything other than create a rectangle because well the building is a simple rectangle.

So I will go in and I will grab this outer line here and you can see there's a lot of snap points intertwined within here so you want to make sure you zoom way in like I did. Grab that end point and then you can zoom back out zoom way in again and grab the other end point and you want to do that to make sure that we are creating the model that we're hoping to here. If I were to take a look at my 3D view you can see that I have those exterior walls that we were talking about.

So I'll go back to my Existing Level One and we can create the walls for our interior portion of the building and we have two different types of walls that we're going to have here. We have our stair walls that are going to go full height to the roof and then we have our other partition walls which are these guys here that are going to go up to the bottom of Level Two and so we can draw them all kind of at the same time or we can break it out into two different parts and I like to break it out just so I can kind of manage the walls that are being created. So I did WA to activate the wall keyboard shortcut tool and then I'm going to go ahead and change my wall type to Interior—4 7/8″ Partition and we're going to create the walls for our stairs and so we can use this Finished Face Exterior again because it just gives us a nice point to create from and our Base Constraint is going to be Level One and our Top Constraint is going to be Roof this time and so I'll go in and sometimes it's hard to tell which one it is so you might want to activate that 'Thin Lines' command to dial back the line weights and they don't make it any easier because yellow on white is not hard or it's not easy to see but we can kind of tell where it is because it gives us an end point and so I'll go ahead and draw it.

If for some reason your wall was flipped to the wrong side you can always hit 'Spacebar' and it'll flip it around and so I'm going to take this wall all the way down to this point here and then I'm going to turn the corner and take it all the way back to the exterior wall and that creates the stairwell. So you can see why we chose to leave the colors in place because it makes it really easy to see which elements are still left as we trace this. So I'll do the same thing on this side going through and just drawing this and you notice I'm really taking my time here and being careful make sure I hit the right point because there are a lot of snap points that I could be hitting and if I hit the wrong one it's just gonna make my life a little bit more difficult than it needs to be.

So I am taking my time I am going a little slower than I probably normally would but there is a reason behind that. Now we'll go ahead and draw the rest of these walls and so instead of up to roof we're gonna go to Level Two and I'm gonna set the Top Offset to minus one because now it'll just sit down below the floor of Level Two and we'll draw it the same way we're just going to kind of trace the boundary of these walls and again you know taking the extra couple seconds here to save us potential minutes in the future if we were to make a mistake and have to go back in and unwind stuff and there we go. Now we've got all of our walls created for our first floor and our exterior shell and you can see there's our stair and then we've got this space here so I'm going to go ahead and save and then we'll dive into the rest of the model as we continue on through the course.