3.0 Creating Movement Space
Pathfinder is built on the idea of creating floor space on which occupants can walk. Every navigation component drawn in Pathfinder is some piece of flooring that can be travelled on, which can range from floors, to doorways, to stairs. Obstructions exist as holes in the floor.
The main egress components include rooms, which are empty floor spaces bounded by walls, doors, which connect rooms on the same level, and stairs, which connect rooms on different levels. Rooms can have any polygonal shape, and can never overlap on the same level. Doors can be either thick if they are occupying a doorway (the area between two rooms) or thin if they are simply connecting two touching rooms. Stairs are always rectangular and implicitly contain a thin door on each end to connect the adjacent rooms.
To organize egress components, Pathfinder provides the concept of floors, which group together components at different Z locations.
Floors
Floors are the primary method of organization in Pathfinder. At their most basic level, they are simply groups in which rooms, doors, stairs, exits, images, and imported 2D geometry can be placed, but they also control the drawing plane for most tools and filtering of imported 3D geometry. In every Pathfinder model, at least one floor must exist, and at any given time, there is one active floor. Whenever any navigation object is drawn, it will either be placed in the active floor or a subgroup of the active floor, depending on which is selected in the tool properties that created the object.
Creating floors
To create a new floor click on the floor drop-down box above the Navigation View, and select as shown in Figure 7. A dialog will open asking for the floor location. Enter the Z plane location or click on a snap point in the 3D or 2D view and click okay. This Z plane will be used to update the drawing tools’ working Z location when this floor is made active. By default, the name of the floor is “Floor x” where x is the working plane of the floor. If “Set as active floor” is selected in the new floor dialog, the floor is set to be the active floor in the model.