Create a Floor Plan of Your House

In this lesson you will learn how architects create floor plans to build houses.

Instructions

1. Continue to the next step.

On the screen you see the house we will build. Let's explore how architects create their plan for building a house.

A floor plan two dimensional drawing or set of instructions an Architect creates to explain to builders the specific size, shape, and characteristics of a house they wish to build.

Typically, a floor plan is created before the house is built, but in our case we created a house first so we could use it to better explain where a floor plan comes from and what it represents. In the next lesson you will build this house on your own. If you search for floor plans on the internet you will find a wide variety of floor plans that range from simple to extremely complex.

A floor plan is created by looking straight down on a house, without the roof, to define where rooms, doors, and windows, among other things, are located within the building. In our case, a rough floor plan can be created by taking a thin slice of the house near the Workplane.

In the image below you can see the house and to the right of the house is the rough floor plan of the house, which we will build in the next step.

Instructions

1. Below is a floor plan of this house created in Autodesk Revit for reference.
   Note: Autodesk Revit is Autodesk's Professional Architecture product. It is used to create floor plans for houses that are automatically turn into 3D representation of the house.
   
2. Below is a slightly more complete version of the floor plan extended to show possible layout of internal rooms.
   
3. Continue to the next step.

In Tinkercad a rough floor plan slice can be created easily, by creating a large box that will encompass the entire house. Once the box is set to be a hole it can be lifted slightly, so only a sliver of the walls remain. This will create the Tinkercad slice that will represent the floor plan.

Instructions

1. Start by duplicating the house you just created by selecting the house, then selecting Duplicate from the menu bar.
2. Move a copy of the house to the side and we will use it to compare the floor plan slice to the 3D house.
   
3. Place a Box on the Workplane, make size it to 50mm long, 30mm wide, and 50mm tall.
   Note: The dimensions above do not need to be exact, the box only needs to be large enough to cover the entire house. If it were 100mm long, 50mm wide, and 100mm tall it would still meet the requirements for this action.
4. Change the Box from red to a hole and align the shapes vertically as seen in the image below.
   
5. Set your grid snap, found in the lower right corner of the screen, to 0.25mm and use the black arrow on top to lift the Box up off the Workplane .25 mm. This will leave a small sliver of house material on the workplane after all the shapes are grouped.
6. Group the house and Box hole into a single item to create the floor plan view.
   
7. Continue to the next lesson.