Basic Building Modelling

Hi, in this video, I’ll be giving you a brief introduction on how to model basic buildings in Autodesk Revit, which will then used to perform the sun and shadow analysis. And you can also use this model to import into the wind simulation software later on. So to create just the very basic building shapes in the architecture tab, under components, choose model in place. And you can select the generic models category for this new model we’re making. And you can also give this building a name so you can recognize it more easily later on.

So here at the top, you’ve got a few different tools to help you create your models, and the extrusions one is the most common one that we use. So when you click that, you get access to a number of different drawing tools here so you can draw lines, rectangles, circles and so on. And what you do is that you simply draw out the footprint of the building that you are trying to model. Can be any shape you want, as long as it makes a full circle in the end. And then here on the depth, you can indicate how tall the building should be. This is in millimeters, so six thousand will give me a six metre tall building.

And then you simply click the green check mark twice to finish your work. To see how this looks in 3D under the View tab, you can create a new 3D view which will also show up in the list in the bottom left here. And here you can hold shift and the middle mouse button to look at your model from different sites. You can also select your model here and you’ll see these little arrows show up that will allow you to make quick modifications without going back into the drawing mode again, so you can just repeat this as often as you like for the different buildings.

Sometimes it is also handy to draw your extrusion not from the ground up, but from the face of a building. If you want to do that You will once again create a new model in place like we did before.

And then we first need to adjust to plane that we are working in, so you click on the set work play button here, then the pick a plain option and then you can pick both the floor plan that we were using before, but you can also pick the sides of the building. Once you’ve done that, you can simply create your extrusion, as you did before, but you will notice that now the lines are being drawn on the side of the building rather than on the ground as they were before. So you can draw that shape, you got any form you want and specify the depth that extrusion should have.

And again, you simply click the green check mark twice to finish that. And the upside of doing it this way is that we are now sure that there won’t be any gap between the two parts of this building. If there was a small gap, there would probably cause some issues in the wind simulation later on. That is how you make your basic building models in Revit. Revit has a whole lot of functions to design buildings in much more detail than this. But to analyze just what is happening with the Sun, the shadow in the Windsor and the buildings. Just these basic building blocks are all we need.

In the next video I’ll show you how to do the sun and shadow analysis in Revit.