Thread: Needing help with Ref. planes baiscs

I have two basic questions regarding Ref. planes:

1 - Ref. planes are always perpendicular to a chosen Elevation, but in the case of the picture I ended up needing a Plane that wasn't perpendicular to any of my existing Elevations. So I did the following:
- I created an extra wall perpendicular to my future Ref. plane
- Then I created an extra Elevation with this Wall.
- Finally I created the Ref. Plane that I wanted, sketching a line in the extra Elevation

Does anyone have an alternate way of doing this? As you can notice, this is just a workaround, and may not be the best way, even though I don't see any other way of doing it.


2 - In the picture you can see some Walls and my new Ref. plane. I want to cut those walls exactly where my Ref. plane is passing and make a roof. Can anyone help me with this one?


Thanks!!!

This is more or less what I would do.

Now, attach wall tops to reference plane, if I understood you well.

1. Am I being totally stupid when I ask: why not sketch the refplane in Plan View?
2. Name the refplane (in the properties), set Workplane to the refplane, create Roof, attach walls to Roof.

Originally Posted by mdradvies

1. Am I being totally stupid when I ask: why not sketch the refplane in Plan View?
2. Name the refplane (in the properties), set Workplane to the refplane, create Roof, attach walls to Roof.

1. My thoughts exactly.
2. As far as I know, you can't draw a roof on a RP, only a level. Is that not correct?
If so, you'd create the roof on the top most level, set a vertical offset to lower the eave to where you need it. Then, on the lower edge of your roof sketch, you'd define the slope. Attach the walls and you're done.

Or am I way off base here??

It's kind of hard to see from that close-cropped View, but is the Reference Plane parallel to the ground?
Looks to me like it slopes up to the right.

Originally Posted by mdradvies

1. Am I being totally stupid when I ask: why not sketch the refplane in Plan View?

I'm not sure. Refplanes are always perpendicular to the Plan or Elevation you're using, as you define them by only drawing one line. So I guess you mean sketching a Refplane in Plan view instead of sketching a Wall as I did, and then finally draw my final Refplane?

I guess the picture is not clear enough, so I'm posting a few more. You'll notice (I hope) that the highlighted Refplane is not perpendicular to any facade of the volume, so first I had to create an auxiliary plane (or Wall, that passed through the bright green line, creating an extra elevation) to do this. The last picture shows this extra elevation, and the dark green dashed line is finally the Refplane seen in all the pictures.



Thanks!

Originally Posted by DaveP

It's kind of hard to see from that close-cropped View, but is the Reference Plane parallel to the ground?
Looks to me like it slopes up to the right.

No, as you can see now it's not parallel to the ground. =)

Originally Posted by dzatto

2. As far as I know, you can't draw a roof on a RP, only a level. Is that not correct?
If so, you'd create the roof on the top most level, set a vertical offset to lower the eave to where you need it. Then, on the lower edge of your roof sketch, you'd define the slope. Attach the walls and you're done.

Or am I way off base here??

Again, I'm not sure. I tried doing something like this, but failed completely. I guess the very angled position of my Refplane makes thins difficult, but I'll try again using extra auxiliary Refplanes to my desired Refplane as I did before.

Something like this??

If so, it's waay easier than you think. Forget about the RP. Just sketch a roof using the pick wall tool. Pick all of your walls.
Select all of you sketch lines and uncheck the "defines roof slope" box.

Now, in the ribbon, use a slope arrow. Start in one corner and slope it to the opposite corner. You can do several things in the properties of the slope arrow. I chose "slope" under specify. You can set the offset height and the slope. Hit finish and attach the walls.

PS, there's 2 pictures attached, but you can see that. Hit the "next" button when you are viewing the first picture.

YUP! Haha!


Much easier with Mass, of course...I didn't I think of that...

But the thing is that I already have my Walls and stuff, so now I need to slice them and put a Roof. =/