From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

Creating floors - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

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Creating floors

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- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to add some floor elements to a building model. And floors are objects that we use to represent horizontal planes like floor slabs, and we typically create those in a special mode called sketch mode. So let's get started here. On the Architecture tab, we've got a floor button and it's in two pieces. The button at the top is actually the one that we want, but it's also available on the dropdown portion called Floor Architectural. So either click the top half of the button or the menu and choose Floor Architectural. Either one will get you to the same place. That will put you in sketch mode. You can tell you're in sketch mode in a few ways. The most obvious thing that happens is the drawing window becomes this sort of halftone gray. You'll also notice that the ribbon has tinted in this greenish color, and probably the most noticeable indication that you're in a sketch mode is the presence of the giant red X and the giant green checkbox. And those are the only ways out of sketch mode. So the red X would cancel and the green checkbox would finish. So we'll see those two buttons in action in just a few moments. Now, there's lots of other settings that are enabled already that I want to just bring to your attention. We're going to accept all the defaults, but I want to show you what they are. So one of the defaults is that we're drawing boundary lines. Okay, so we want to leave that selected. Another default is that we're drawing those boundary lines based on the existing wall geometry. So Pick Walls is currently active. Okay, so we want to leave that. And then finally over here we've got Extend into wall core selected, and we want to accept that as well. So let me show you what all of that means. Using boundary lines in Pick Walls means that you literally come in to your floor plan and you click on one of the walls and it will trace over it with a sketch line. Now you're going to see that magenta line appear along the length of the wall. What about Extend into wall core? Well, if we zoom in here, what you'll see is that in this view that we're in, I've turned on medium level of detail so that we can see the layered assembly structure of the exterior wall. So we've got some brick and an air gap, but notice where the sketch line is. The sketch line is actually at the face of the wall's core, which is the stud portion of the wall, the metal studs that are being used in the structure of the wall. There's a little flip grip here, and if you flip that, it'll go to the other side of that metal stud layer, but notice it doesn't go all the way to the inside face of the wall. There's a little space there that allows for the dry wall. So when we say Extend into Core, it's looking at the inside or outside face of the core element of the wall. If you uncheck that, then it would go either to the inside face or the outside face of the overall wall. Now, I do want it to be on the outside face of the core, so I'm going to flip it back again. I'm going to zoom back out so that I can see the entire floor plan, and I want to touch some additional exterior walls here. This one, this one, and this one. Then back over here to the left, this one, this one, this one, and finally this one. Now, notice that right next to it is a second one. I don't want to click that one. You could if you wanted to, but I personally am not a fan of having two sketch lines touching one another at an end point. I'd rather do a more continuous sketch line. Now, it's really a matter of preference. There's nothing wrong with clicking this line and continuing, but let me show you what happens if I try to finish the sketch in its current state. So I'm going to come up here to this green checkbox and click it, and that will generate a warning that cannot be ignored. And it says that the lines must be enclosed loops, okay? Now, fortunately for us, it highlights on screen where the problem is, and that's showing us where we need to close up our loop. Now if you click Quit Sketching, it would cancel everything and you'd lose all your work, so don't do that. What you want to do is click Continue. That puts you back into the sketch and you can continue modifying. And if we use our Trim/Extend to Corner command, I can easily take this sketch line and extend it to this sketch line and close up the loop. So that's the way I prefer to do it. Now I can click Finish and it will complete the floor slab. Now, next it's going to ask us what we want to do about the walls that go up to the underside of this floor. Now you can't see them in this view, so I'm going to show them to you in a few moments, but for now, I'd like you to just simply click the Attach button and that completes the floor element. Now you can see its shape there on screen. If you notice something about it that you don't like, there's an Edit Boundary button. You could click that. It puts you right back in the sketch, and then you could make whatever modifications were appropriate. So if I wanted to make a change to the shape, I could do that, click Finish. Or if I change my mind, in this case, I'm going to click the red X to cancel. It's going to say, "Are you sure you want to cancel?" I'm going to say, "Yes." And it goes back to the original shape. So there's our first floor slab. So now I'd like to repeat the entire process on the second floor. So right here on the project browser, I'm going to double click L2-Working, and it's going to open up that view. And now we can go back to architecture, click the floor button again, and create another floor slab for the second floor. So I'm accepting all the same defaults. And I'll start with the top wall here, the left, the bottom, and then this one right here. And then I'm going to stop because next to the stairwell, I actually want to have an open double-volume space looking down into the lobby. So I'm going to switch to Trim/Extend a Corner. Select the vertical line here, and it does matter whether you click the right side or the left side of this sketch line up above. I want to pick the left side of it so that it will enclose that and create a closed loop. Now that is a valid sketch. You could click Finish, but if you zoom in here by the top of the stairwell, it might be a little difficult for folks coming up the stairs to get over to the landing. Therefore, what we're going to do is continue with this sketch. Just scroll up here in the little toolbox, find the Line tool, and I want to trace right along the top riser of the stair down to this endpoint. I'm going to kick to the left, type in 1 6 if you're working in imperial, or 450 if you're working in metric. Then I want to go at a 45 degree just a little bit there, and click the Modify tool to cancel. So now I'm going to use my Trim/Extend a Corner again and take the horizontal line and extend that to this vertical line. Take the 45 degree line and extend and trim that to the lower portion of this sketch line. So now we have a nice valid, enclosed sketch that is a more logical floor slab, and we can get off the stairwell easily to that landing now, and we'll click the Finish button here to complete. Once again, we're going to get this message. Let's click Attach again. And now you're going to see a second message that's going to highlight the exterior walls. So this one, it's a little bit more obvious what it's doing, but let's answer Yes here and now let me explain to you what we did in both of those cases, okay? The easiest way to explain to you what we did is to look at it in a section view. So there is a section running across the model right here. I'm going to select it, right click and choose Go to View, and then let's just zoom in a little bit and talk about what we've got there. So the first question in both cases asked about attaching the walls that go up to the level to the underside of the floor. Examples are this foundation wall here that is interacting with this floor slab here and then this one right here. If you select one of these walls, you've got Attach and Detach buttons here. If I said detach the top and base and then click the floor, that's what it would've looked like had we chosen not to attach. But because I said attach the top to this floor, it looks more like that, and I think that looks a little bit nicer, that's a nicer join condition. Likewise, if you select the exterior wall and then the floor slab, you can kind of see the way those two pieces of geometry are interacting with one another. Had you chosen not to join geometry, that was the question, do you want to join geometry? So if I said Unjoin, it would look like that, okay? Those two pieces of geometry would've just simply overlapped one another, but because we chose the Join Geometry command, we can join it together like that and again, it's a cleaner intersection. So both of those questions are optional. You're not required to do either one, but I think in a lot of cases they can be a nice feature to employ and so that's why I answered the way that I did. So feel free to experiment further in this model with the floor slabs that are here or create additional ones if you wish.

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