From the course: AutoCAD Architecture Essential Training

Creating ceiling grids - AutoCAD Architecture Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Architecture Essential Training

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Creating ceiling grids

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Architecture course, and what we're going to be looking at is reflected ceiling plans. Now, we've got a new drawing for you. It's called ceiling plan.dwg, and you can download it from the website as usual to follow along with the videos. You may recognize this part of the drawing as well. It's got the structural grid that we used in the previous chapter, but that's all it's got in here this time. There's no columns; there's no beams or anything like that. Now, the reason I've put that structural grid in there is there's a little quirk in AutoCAD Architecture that sometimes can throw you a little when you're placing a ceiling grid into your AutoCAD Architecture model. Now, to place a ceiling grid is very, very similar to placing a structural grid. The work flow, the process, is pretty much the same. However, when you place your ceiling grid, it goes in at the default plane, the z value, you might call it, the elevation value. So, let me show you what I mean when we place our ceiling grid. Now, to place a ceiling grid, you go to the home tab on the ribbon, into the build panel, and it's this little icon here. So, click on ceiling grid, and again the properties palate appears, and you can see the crosshair is available for you to place the grid. I'm just going to hold down the wheel and move the mouse and pan so that all of my grid is visible for you. You've obviously got a lot more screen real estate than me, so it's not as difficult for you. I've got kind-of a squished screen. Now, what we're going to do is place a very simple ceiling grid on top of our structural grid initially. Now, you'll notice on the properties palate, I can give it a description, like so. So, I'm going to click there, and we're going to call it partial ceiling grid. Like that, and just make sure you spell it right. You can put any description in there that you like, but I'm just going to call it partial ceiling grid for now and click on okay. Now, just like the structural grid, you've got your overall dimensions, and you can specify them on the screen if you wish. I'm going to leave them at x and y, where x is 1500, and y is 1200. That's millimeters, which will be 15 X 12 meters. Now, you'll notice the x axis and the y axis are set to repeat by default, just like your structural grid was, as well, and the actual bay sizes on the ceiling grid are 1200 by 600, which is a proprietary luminare size, so that you can then place your lighting and your fixtures into the ceiling grid. I'm going to leave all of that as it is, and I'm going to come into the drawing area. I'm going to use the bottom left corner there of the grid, not the bubble, but the grid, click there, and then as I move, can you see, I've got the opportunity there to specify the angle? Now, you'll see that it's the default of zero in the command line. Just press enter to accept, and then enter to finish, and we're done. We've placed our grid. Now, you might think, looking at the screen, that you haven't. You have. If you now go to something like your southwest isometric view, so I'll go to the dropdown here like so, and I'll go southwest isometric, there's my grid where I've placed it. So, if I just zoom out a tad now, you can see my grid is there. Now, the reason it's not showing up is purely because it's sitting on top of that structural grid at the ground level where z is zero. So, we need to change that elevation value. We need to change the z value of our ceiling grid. So, we select it, and as you can see, you've got various tools that pop up on the ribbon on the contextual tab. So you can see there that you can add a hole or remove a hole just like you can with a structural grid, and you've got the dimensioning and the add grid line and remove grid line and so on. So, that's all in place there if you need it. All I need to do is right click and go to properties, and I need to change the elevation value here to 3,000. Press enter, and you can now see it lifts up above our structural grid, which is on ground level. So, if I now close the properties palate by clicking on the cross, hitting escape to deselect, I now know that my ceiling grid is 3 meters above ground level, which is where it should be. Now, obviously, when you're setting out your drawings in your view ports, and your title blocks and things, you will make sure that all you can see is the ceiling grid in a ceiling drawing. You wouldn't show the structural grid, for example. But what you've done there now is you've placed your ceiling grid nice and neatly in your AutoCAD Architecture model, ready to be used and to add some light fixtures to should you need to when you're working in AutoCAD Architecture.

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