We shall begin the My House Project by setting up the scene file. This is an often overlooked stage of the process, but can really help a project.
We shall start by creating a new project. File menu / New Project command.
We get an untitled project.
Untitled project created
Now we’ll save the project. I prefer to create folders for the projects, thus avoiding a lot of different scene files lying around. When saving, then, the My House Project folder was created, and the file named my house is saved inside.
Saving the project.
We now have a named project.
The saved project.
Setting Units
The project is in the default units that Strata Design 3D uses, that is, inches. Feet are a better unit for architectural projects, so we will configure the units.
To do this, we apply the Edit>Set Units… command, and set the units as feet, and the snap and nudge subdivisions to 12. This will enable us to have quick control in inches too.
The grid changes, as it is now displaying feet instead of inches.
The grid now shows feet.
We should enlarge the grid to accomodate the house. We do this with the grid tool.
When selecting the grid tool, we see four handles on the mid points of the sides of the grid. we can drag these handles to extend the grid.
Enlarging the grid. The right side handle has already been pulled.
To enlarge the grid, we’ll need to reduce the scale of our view. We can either do that pressing the spacebar and dragging the corners of the rectangle that appears, or using the View Zoom Tool +Alt or Opt key.
A very large grid.
There we are. The project file is ready to start working. Don’t forget to save.
