From the course: Revit 2025: Essential Training for Architecture
Adding walls - Revit Tutorial
From the course: Revit 2025: Essential Training for Architecture
Adding walls
- [Instructor] Perhaps the most common element of any building is walls. So in this video, I'd like to introduce you to the wall tool, and we're going to focus mainly on the basic mechanics of drawing walls. So you can find the wall tool on the architecture tab, it's right here, or you can use the keyboard shortcut WA. Now your interface will change that takes you into wall creation mode. The most obvious thing that you see is the modify place wall tab is now tinted in this greenish color. Next, right beneath that you will see a series of shapes and controls. These are the shape of the walls that you're drawing, more in that in a few moments. Beneath the ribbon, you will see that the options bar has populated with lots of settings starting with height and unconnected and location line and so on. And so we'll talk about a few of those. And then the last part of the interface that changes is on the properties palette. You can see that at the top of the properties palette, it says that we are currently drawing a basic wall, and it might say generic 8 inch if you're working in imperial or generic 200 if you're working in metric. So for this first example, we are not going to change anything. However, I do want to just point out these two buttons right here, auto join and auto join and lock. For this example, I want to make sure that neither of those is selected. Now you can tell if it's selected because when you click on it, it will change to this blue tinted color there. So you can see that only one of those can be selected at a time, but if you want neither of them to be selected, just click it again. So just make sure that neither of those is selected. Otherwise the behavior on screen will be different than what I am showing. And that's a more advanced feature that we're not going to get into right now. Okay, so how do you draw a wall? Well, it's really like just sketching lines. Okay? So every wall has two ends, and all you need to do is click a start point and click an end point, and you've created a wall. Now the next thing you'll notice is that it's trying to create a second wall that starts where the first wall ended up, and you could click a third point or a fourth point or a fifth point. That sequence of walls is referred to in Revit as a chain. Now there's two ways you can control the chain behavior in wall creation mode. One is with this checkbox right here. Notice that it is selected. If I deselect that, the next point I click will break the chain. I'm still in the wall tool, but now each time I create a wall, they're going to be completely independent. They won't be connected to the original. I never do that. I always leave chain turned on because if I want to draw a chain, I can easily do it. And if I want to break the chain, what you do instead is pressure escape key once on your keyboard. Notice that that serves the same function. It disconnects me from the end of this wall, allows me to start creating a new chain and I didn't have to check or uncheck the box in order to do it. So yes, you can uncheck the box, but I recommend just using the escape key. If you press escape twice, that takes you all the way out of the command. Okay, so keep in mind that if you're just trying to break the chain, only press the escape key one time, multiple times will take you out of the command. So I'm going to go back into the wall tool and now let's just look at some of the other shapes here. Most of these are self-explanatory. You could draw a rectangle, it's just two opposite corners. You could draw a polygon that starts from the center and then you're dragging out the shape of that polygon. The number of sides of the polygon would be indicated right here. So if I wanted to do an octagon, I could change that number. You can draw that polygon either to the vertex or to the side. So it just depends on which one of those you choose. Inscribed or circumscribed. You can draw circles. There's arcs and ellipses. There's a variety of different shapes. Now I'm going to go to this one here. Start and radius arc. This one kind of works in a combination of drawing a straight line and drawing a curve because you're going to draw the two end points of the arc first and then set the amount of curvature. And you do that either with the mouse on screen or by typing in a number. But what I wanted you to see is that you can actually draw these in chain as well. So when you're doing this, it'll even try to snap tangent if you pay attention to the little onscreen cues. Now you're not required to draw a tangent. You could draw any shape you want there and they will still be in chain. They just won't be a tangent necessarily. Okay, I'm going to click the modify tool to cancel out of there, feel free to try any of the other shapes that you'd like to try. And I think most of them are pretty self-explanatory in terms of just following the kind of onscreen cues and so forth to be able to draw those different shapes. Now I want to get rid of all these walls that we've drawn and draw some a little bit differently. And so that means that what I'm going to do is start out here in empty space. I'm going to click and start dragging a box until I've surrounded all of the walls. Now you will notice that it's selecting more than just the walls. So you want to be careful here. Don't press delete yet. There's a filter button here on the ribbon. We're going to click that. We're going to click the check none button here, and then make sure you only select the walls checkbox, I've got 44. Your quantity will be different depending on how many walls you drew. When I click okay, only the 44 walls are selected for me. Now I'll press delete and I won't lose any of the other items that were on screen. So it's kind of important if you're getting error messages about deleting views and other things like that, then you want to cancel that or undo because you have too much selected. So sure you're just deleting the walls. All right, so let me zoom back out here so that I can see the full screen. Go back to my wall tool. And now what I want to do is I want to draw some walls that are just simple straight lines. So I'm going to draw one here that is maybe about 25 feet long in imperial. If this is metric, then that's going to be about 6,000, 7,000 millimeters, somewhere in that range. And then press escape once and then draw it again from here to here, escape once from here to here, and let's continue that and create five separate walls here. And then let's draw one more over here that's in the opposite direction. And then let's click the modify tool to get out of there. Now what I want to focus on with these walls is the heights. Now we're not seeing the heights here from a floor plan. So we're going to set those heights first here in the floor plan, and then we're going to look at a different view to understand how they're configured. So this first one and this second one here on the screen, I'm going to leave those largely the way they are. The first one, I'm going to leave it alone entirely. The second one, I just want to come down here and you can put in a different value for the property called unconnected height. Okay, so it's currently 20 feet in the imperial file, 6,000 millimeters in the metric file. And what I want to do is change that to 15 feet imperial or 4,500 millimeters if you're working in metric. So that's one way that you can set the height of the walls. You can just explicitly type it into that unconnected height property. Here's another way, I'm going to select this wall, the third one over. And instead of the top constraint being left at unconnected, notice that that's a dropdown menu and there are other choices there. So we could make this third wall over go up to level 2. Now notice that the unconnected height is now grayed out at a fixed value. That fixed value is the distance between level 1 and level 2. Now I'm going to repeat that for the fourth wall over. Make that one go up to L3. And the final one, make that one go up to L4. Okay, so I've now got these five horizontal walls each set to a different height. Let's take a look at those directly, and we can do that by opening up this section view right here. Now, we've been in this view in previous videos, but the way you open it is to just simply select it, right click and choose go to view. So now you can see that we've got our four levels, and if you watch the video on levels, then you understand how those were put together. And then we've got our five walls here, and then our perpendicular one there, which we're going to look at in just a few moments. So let's start with these two on the left. These were both left set to unconnected. So you could now come over here and type in a different value and go ahead and just put in any value you like and notice that the height of that wall will change and it only affects that one wall that you have selected. Now contrast that to the behavior of these walls over here, the ones in the middle and the right. If I select L2 to the second level, and I start to move that, notice that it adjusts the height of the wall that is attached to it. If I came in and selected another wall and also assigned that to L2, and then I move that level, you're going to see that both of those walls are adjusting. So being able to set the height of the walls relative to a level above is a very efficient way for you to control the heights of lots of walls in your project without having to select them one at a time and manually make those adjustments. So that's a design decision that you get to make with each wall that you place in your project. Okay, in addition to the heights, you can set offsets above and below those heights. So this one goes up to L3, but I could add, say, a 2 foot height offset or 600 millimeters in the metric file. Just zoom in just to touch here so you can see it a little better. And it's still being controlled by the height of L3. It's just that now it's also maintaining that additional offset above that level. You can do negative offsets as well, so it doesn't have to be a positive number. Now for this final wall, I just want to show you one more feature that walls have. Their cross section does not have to be vertical, that's the default, but you can choose also to make them slanted or even tapered. Now we're going to talk about tapered walls later in the course, but for now, let's just do a quick slanted example. So for the cross-section property here, I'm going to change it from vertical to slanted. That gives us an angle from vertical parameter. And if I let the tool tip expand, you can see that that angle can be either positive or negative. So just simply type in the number of degrees that you want that wall to slope, and you'll see that it now slants along that angle. You can couple this with the height parameter that we just talked about, and so that wall could jump up to level 3 and notice it will still maintain the angle, or we could drop it back down to level 2 and it will maintain that angle. And in fact, we can even introduce top and base offsets and it will still maintain the angle. So feel free to experiment further in this file with any of those walls or any additional walls that you'd like to sketch. And using any of those settings, really the goal is to just get comfortable with the basic function of the wall tool and the various settings that you can quickly manipulate on those wall properties.
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Contents
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Adding walls11m 39s
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(Locked)
Wall properties and types14m 17s
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(Locked)
Using snaps7m 49s
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(Locked)
Configuring a working view4m 55s
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(Locked)
Locating walls10m 13s
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(Locked)
Using the Modify tools10m 12s
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(Locked)
Adding doors and windows10m 24s
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(Locked)
Adding plumbing fixtures and other components12m 44s
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(Locked)
Wall joins5m 23s
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(Locked)
Using constraints12m 6s
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