From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

Adding slanted walls - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2026: Essential Training for Architects

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Adding slanted walls

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- [Instructor] In this video, I want to introduce you to slanted walls. Slanted walls are property of walls. It's not actually a wall type or a wall family. And so any wall can be slanted. So what you do is you just simply go to the wall tool and then on the properties palette, you're going to scroll down and locate the cross section and change it from vertical to slanted. Once you've done that, you'll pick an angle, I'm going to do 10 degrees, and then you just start drawing your walls. Now I'm just going to draw a few segments and you can see that it kind of behaves like vertical walls do where everything kind of joins up at the corners. Let's click the modified tool to cancel out of there. And let me zoom in. And what you're seeing here is where we're slicing through the wall in bold. And then that third line that's a little bit lighter is the wall that's slanting away from us down to the floor. So I'm going to open up the default 3D view and we can kind of see it there as well that each of those walls is slanting now at that 10 degree angle. Now I'm going to go to the view tab and tile these two views. And the reason I'm going to do this is because as you're working with these slanted walls, sometimes an error will be generated in floor plan, but it's not exactly obvious why, and the 3D can sometimes illuminate that. So it's a good idea to have both views open. So let me continue here. Go back to architecture, click my wall tool, and I'm going to change the angle to maybe 20 degrees. And I want to continue where I left off right over here. So logically it seems like I would just want to snap to the end point, right? So I'm going to go ahead and click that, and you know, kind of pull this off and sometimes it will do exactly what I was expecting it to do and it will clean things up, but sometimes it won't. Well, let me go ahead and press escape one time to disconnect. And let me show you an alternative way to connect at the ends, which I find is a lot more foolproof than relying on the object snaps independently. Instead of this snap or this snap, if you kind of move around, what you're seeing here is this little dash box will appear relative to the slanted wall and it's almost like a work plane of sorts. If you snap to that, it almost always works more reliably and you're going to get a nicer joint condition. All right, so that's a little bit about just drawing the basics of slanted walls, but you also have all your different shapes. So I could draw a circle, and as you could see there in 3D, that's almost like a truncated cone that it created. Now you could do the same thing with an ellipse, but you're going to want to pay attention to the ellipse as you draw it out. Initially, it's going to look like it's not going to do it. It's got to get to a certain size before the ellipse will actually draw. And if I click and show it to you in 3D, hopefully it becomes evident why. If I made it too narrow where it was sloping to a point at the top, the ellipse was too narrow and it couldn't actually generate the geometry. So you'll see that reflected if it kind of doesn't look like it's drawing anything. The same is true for arcs. I mean, I could certainly draw an arc wall segment there. Okay, and then you can kind of see it here in 3D, right? But do you see what is starting to happen? Well, it's actually outside of my crop region there, so let me draw another one over here. Okay, that's a little better, right? You can kind of see it there and then watch what happens if I kind of come over here and draw this way. Just like we've seen with vertical walls, it'll snap to a tangent and that works pretty well. But this is what I wanted you to see. Here in floor plan, this looks like a pretty generous curve, but when you look at it here in 3D, notice that that curve gets pretty tight there near the top. And so if we change the angle of this slope wall even a little bit more, it will probably fail, because that top circle will close in on itself and you'll no longer be able to generate the geometry. So it really just comes down to math quite honestly. You know, these are just different angles that are being applied and you have to create valid geometry. All right, so I'm going to go back to wall one more time and I'm going to set it back to a vertical cross section. And what I want to do now is just show you what happens sometimes when you try to connect a wall to a slanted wall. You might do something like that or you might do something like that and nothing seems to happen. Well, what you want to do is look for that dash box again, and that is usually going to be the trick to getting you a proper intersection. Now if you cross all the way through it, usually it works, but not always. Sometimes you'll end up with that or that. And even on some of these straight walls, you might have something like that. So what's happening in cases like that is that the geometry, just for whatever reason, is not able to calculate the intersection initially. So what I want to do is show you what happens if, let's say I pull these two apart here, okay? How do I fix some of these conditions, right? Well, it turns out that the best tool that I've found to fix most of these conditions is trim and extend a corner. It's certainly going to be the case right here where I can use this one to rejoin that together, but it also turns out to be a really good solution for this situation over here. Now, I could take this wall and join it to this wall and it's going to of course generate a warning, 'cause it's disconnecting it from all the others. So let me just unjoin that, but now I could just sort of walk over here and reconnect all of these broken pieces. So it takes a little bit more effort, but you end up with some really nice joint conditions there. Now, sadly, if you try to do that with the other trim and extend, it looks like it's going to do something, but then it doesn't. So I'm not really sure why this one doesn't work. So what I do in this case is I first do that and then I take this and join it to that, and that solves the problem. Okay? So same thing here. I could take this, join it to that, going to unjoin, then I'm going to take this and join it to that. This one is being a little more problematic, so this angle might just be a little bit too acute. Okay? So definitely some little challenges that you sometimes run into. So play around with some of that. Now, in terms of some of the math that's taking place here, I've got a view called angles and dimensions. And if you open that up, it's got some different dimensions here with different angles that are being applied and the actual distance that you have between these objects as a consequence. And really that just comes down to basic triangle math. So if I open up this section, hopefully it becomes a little bit more clear. When you look at where this grid line occurs, yes, this grid line and this grid line are 10 feet apart in this view, but because one of these walls is sloping a little bit more than the other one, the actual distance between those two walls might vary. Now, another way to visualize that or a better way to visualize that is to also take into account the cut plane. So I've got this reference plane here representing where the cut plane occurs, and then hopefully that starts to make a little bit more sense than what you're seeing in this situation and in this situation. Now, feel free to explore further here, but if you really want to dig into the math and you want to understand more about the trigonometry possibilities and even formula possibilities, then I've got some other videos that I want to share with you. So in my weekly series here in the library, every week I release a new Revit video. I've covered slanted walls on a few different occasions. And so this one was a really fun one where I kind of built this futuristic space station using slanted and tapered walls. So you might want to check that one out just for the fun of that exercise. These two here and here, cover the more nuanced detail information about the angles and formulas that you might apply and how to calculate that using some trigonometry and so on. So if you're interested in all of that, you can dig more into it in either of those videos. And then finally, in our sample model that we've looked at on several occasions now, I just wanted to point out that there are some slanted walls here on the commercial part of the building. And not only are the walls slanted, but in front of those walls there are these curtain walls representing the solar panels, and those are slanted as well. So remember, slanted is a property of the wall tool, and curtain walls is part of the wall tool. So curtain walls can be slanted just as well as basic walls.

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