On the Building menu, click Floors, and then type in a name for the floor. You can call it whatever you want with very little in the way of restrictions, e.g. Basement, First Floor, 1st Floor, Plenum, Roof. The names will have to be unique which means you can't have two or more "Basement" floors, etc. It won't stop you having one floor named "Basement" and another one named "basement" so you should watch out for this because it will only cause confusion later on.
The point of this dialog is to allow you to create successive floor levels in order to draw the different areas and aspects of the building plan. A default ground floor will always be included, the name of which you can change if you want to. You can just start drawing the ground floor walls straight away of course, before actually adding more floors or renaming this one.
Floor levels are measured from the ground level at datum 0.0m, as opposed to sea level. Two or more floors are able to occupy the same level, which can be either positive or negative. A negative floor level can be set up, say, if you want to model a basement floor or an underground car park.
You can add and remove new floors whenever you like. Different floors of the building, e.g. ground, 1st, 2nd, etc. would typically occupy a new floor level in the software. So a basement floor, ground floor, first floor, and a roof space would normally be drawn by setting up 4 floor levels. Sometimes it is necessary to add a new floor level just to make it easier to draw in complex geometry and avoid having too many construction lines crisscrossing all over the place. You might decide to use different floor levels to model the occupied spaces (for example first and second floors), and then have more floor levels for some of the unoccupied spaces (for example plenums, ceiling voids, etc.), or just to help you model some other design aspect more easily. This means new floors can be used to draw sloped photovoltaic or solar hot water panels, perimeter walls of buildings which are close by and might shade your building, or anything else for that matter. As mentioned, you can create a floor to help you draw in complex geometry, perhaps a roof that's been designed with lots of sloping surfaces, dormer windows, and intersecting planes.
You will define a global wall height for every floor level by entering a value in the "Default Wall Height" box (3 metres is the default). Heights for the same can also be edited individually on the building plan.
| Colour | The wall colour that will be displayed on 2D views.
Click on the block of colour on the dialog to select a different one. Windows and shades will have their own colour scheme. |
| Name | The name of the floor, e.g. ground floor, first floor, 2nd
floor, basement floor.
The name will be displayed on the Floors sidebar. |
| Floor Level | The height of the unfinished floor measured with respect to
the ground level at 0.0m. The value can be positive or negative.
You will need to tick the "Ground Floor" box to model a floor with a level below 0.0m. The software will then add a ground floor building element to the floor surface so it isn't exposed to the external climate, and it will prevent solar gain falling on the outside of the surface. |
| Default Wall Height | Measured from below the floor finish to below the floor finish
of the upper level.
And if there's a constant width between different levels means that the height will actually be the distance between the finished floor to the finished floor of the level above, i.e., floor-to-floor height. |
| Ground Floor | The software will apply a ground floor building element to
these floor surfaces to make sure they're not exposed to the outside.
These elements will not have any solar gain falling on their outside
surfaces.
Provided the "Ground" checkbox is ticked on the Building Elements dialog for the "Ground Floor" construction type, the surface will be in contact with the ground, and the surface type will be set to "Ground" in the TBD. |
| Used (checkbox) | This box will be ticked when a floor level has had walls drawn on it, and it will be empty where the floor level doesn't have any walls drawn on it. |
| New | Adds a new floor using the default wall height and level of the selected floor. |
| New Above | Adds a new floor using the default wall height of the selected floor. The level of the new floor will be the sum of the floor level and the wall height of the floor that's selected on the dialog. |
| Delete | Deletes the selected floor, removes it from the sidebar on the side of the screen and deletes any of the walls, spaces, windows, and shades that were drawn in. |
Add Walls |
First create a new floor by clicking "New" or "New
Above", and then click "Add Walls".
On the "Add Walls to Floor" dialog, choose whether you want to copy all walls or just the perimeter walls. Copying perimeter walls will allow you to add a perpendicular offset to each wall. Copying perimeter walls with or without an offset will allow you to merge walls where a wall divide exists between common construction types. Copy all areas and building elements, including walls, spaces, windows, and shades. |