Finish flooring as separate slab or part of composite floor?

[paulmckean]

Hi,

We are one year into AC and tuning our template and drafting standards. When in light-wood framing, what does everyone do for showing the finish flooring? Is it a separate thin (3/4") slab or just part of the floor composite. If it is a part of the floor composite, is there a way to have the walls override the floor in section when they overlap the 3/4" (to properly show the studs sitting on the subfloor, not the finish floor)? Thanks.

[alemanda]

Actually it depends on what kind of design, drawings and documentation you have to produce and provide.
Using two slabs (one for structural element) and one for the finishing will give you much more flexibility in the three aspects mentioned before.

[Anonymous]

I always use separate slabs for finishes as it allows me to turn off finishes easily

Scott

[Tim Ball]

I always keep them separate so that you can change the finish for different rooms.

It can be useful to set up your composite during the early stages of a project with a generic finish with the slab located at the bottom of the finish component, then later you can delete that generic finish and replace with the actual, without the slab moving

[Erwin Edel]

Depends on the construction method. Typical sand-lime brick + concrete slab buildings I have the cement finish as part of the composite without many issues. With clever use of building material priorities and properly assigning core/finish/other to layers my model looks fine.

I do not model the actual floor finish (carpet, tiles, wood flooring etc), generally this is being laid down after the contractor is finished and falls outside the scope of our on site surveyance of the construction process. My level dimensions are all based on the cement finish.

[Jeff Griffin]

I also prefer to model the floor finish as separate slabs from the floor system composite for all of the same reasons listed above.

Since ceramic tile & slate floor finishes require stiffer floor framing below, I like to show these two finishes on floor framing plans so that structural engineers & floor system suppliers take this extra dead load into account when developing the design of the floor framing for minimal deflection in these areas (L/720). Graphic Overrides are used to give these particular floor finish slabs a simpler representation on floor framing plans only. On the architectural floor plans these finishes display as a grid matching the approximate size of the tile. On the structural framing plans, they display as a very light diagonal fill pattern, for legibility purposes. The GO's are also configured to change other (lighter) floor finishes, such as carpet, hardwood & vinyl to empty transparent fills so that they don't appear on the floor framing plans, since these floor finishes don't require such a high deflection criteria (L/480).

[Erwin Edel]

Just to add: the only 'downside' of having two slabs is having to model two slabs. The model will display fine in the various views.