In this video,
we're going to take a look at using soffits to create a coffered ceiling,
how to use them for sloped ceilings, and also make them look like faux beams.
You'll find the soffit tool underneath our base cabinet tool.
And then on my menu, on the left-hand side, I'm going to select the soffit tool,
and I'm going to go ahead and place this in our 2D plan view. Then,
I'll go ahead and click on the edge of the soffit and pull it to the other end
of the room. At the other end of the room,
I'm using an invisible wall so you can easily see into the space.
Typically when I'm going to use these soffits inside of a space,
and I've already placed the electrical items such as the recessed lighting,
I like to turn that layer on so that I can determine where to best place these
soffits. Let me open up my layer display set,
and I'm going to come down and I'm going to search for electrical.
The layer that I have my electrical on is for the cans and ceilings.
I'll turn that layer on,
and then you can see where those electrical items are in a ceiling.
Let's take a look at moving that right over the top of the electrical,
and we'll zoom in just a little bit. And you can see,
as I refresh the view in here,
that that electrical automatically will
reset to the soffit height. This works in the case for flat soffits.
Let's go ahead and zoom back out. And what I want to do in this case,
is I want to slide that soffit against the wall and create a coffered
looking ceiling. I'll go ahead and close the active layer display set.
And then in the plan view, what I want to do is double-click on this soffit,
and let's go through and set some of the dimensions. For the width - six inches.
For the height - six inches. And as you press the tab key,
you'll see the preview update for your soffit. And if we close this,
you're going to see that the soffit is now floating in space.
You can click on this soffit in your 3D view,
and then you can bump that up against the ceiling.
You can also open up the soffit and there is a setting
to place this under the ceiling, and that will place it for you automatically.
Now let's come over into the 3D view.
I want this to look a little bit like a faux beam approach. So,
I'm going to use the eyedropper.
I'm just going to pick up the color off of the roof eave.
I'm going to apply it onto the soffit.
And then I'm going to go ahead and bump this over against the wall,
and we'll make multiple copies for it. So, in the plan view,
I'm going to click on it,
I'm going to slide it over until it snaps against the wall,
and then using the multiple copy tool,
I want to create a series of copies down the length of the room.
In my lower edit menu, I'm going to come down into the multiple copy,
and then I'm going to set the interval using the interval tool.
And I'm going to evenly distribute five copies of this soffit.
I'll go ahead and pull that down until we approach the other end of the room.
Now, I'm going to make a copy of the soffit that I have highlighted here.
Go ahead and make a copy of it. I'm going to slide it up just a little ways.
And then I'm going to use the rotate handle, slide it against the wall,
and let's go ahead and resize it. I'm going to slide out a little bit,
snap that into the corner, and I'm going to create a series of three copies.
So I'll change the interval back to three,
using evenly distribute, and I'm just going to pull that across the way.
And you can see as we maximize our 3D view,
that we have created a coffered ceiling using the soffit tool.
Now let me show you how to create a sloped soffit.
And I'm going to hit the undo button a couple of times to get rid of those
couple of soffits we just placed. If you want to have a sloped soffit,
you first need to have a vaulted or a shed style ceiling. To do that,
I'm going to come down, I'm going to click on the floor,
I'm going to open up this room, and to begin with,
I'm just going to come in and remove flat ceiling out of the room.
The structure for the ceiling is now being used by the roof,
and you can see that the soffits are cutting through that
ceiling structure since they are still a flat soffit.
The easiest way - let me just tile my screens - I'm going to press Shift+F6 on
my keyboard. In the plan view,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to use the soffit tool,
click on the cabinet tool, come down,
click on the soffit tool on the left-hand side of my menu,
I'm going to come over,
I'm going to hold my Shift key down while I'm in soffit mode,
and then I'm going to click my left mouse button and draw marquee around all of
the soffits. And then I'm going to use the open button,
and I'm going to come into the soffit and I'm going to use this option to place
under the roof.
Notice in the preview it updates and now that snaps onto the roof.
Now there may be conditions when you have a custom ceiling plane - maybe it
varies from the pitch of your roof - and you want those soffits to be underneath
the ceiling. Let's take a look at how that might work. So in the plan view,
I'm going to just use my ceiling tool here real quick.
And I'm going to create a custom ceiling plane.
We'll snap into the corner over here,
and then I'm just going to come up slope and place that ceiling plane.
You'll notice that the ceiling plane came in at a lower elevation to make room
for the roof truss or the roof framing member.
And now those soffits need to be adjusted since they are placed underneath of
the roof. Same approach as we did earlier.
Let's press our Spacebar to get out of selection mode, come over,
grab our soffit tool, and I'm gonna draw a marquee,
hold my Shift key down again, left-click drag around the soffits,
double-click to open them up.
And then I'm going to make sure that the sloped soffit is placed underneath the
ceiling in this case and regenerate those soffits.
So using these techniques for your soffits, you can create coffered ceilings.
You can create sloped soffits and make them
look like faux beams.