Best Practices for Annotating Finish Plans and Managing Worksets in Architectural Design Workflows

For the annotations, I'm going to start with our finish plan here. And if I were to double click into the view, I can work on it just like anything else. And your work set might be come in play here.

So this is just habit that I have. If I'm working in a finish plan, I'm going to go ahead and make sure I change my work set to finishes. You never know what you might end up doing in here.

And so you just want to make sure you do that. The other thing is we got to hide and view the walls that we did in the equipment plan. And so I'm using keyboard shortcut EH, which is to hide element in view to hide those.

And then I'm going to be doing a little bit of finessing with some of my tags here to make sure that they're appropriate and not overlapped too much so that they're legible. And then what we'll do is we'll go in and we can add the rest of these rooms. So I don't think we added these rooms in here yet.

But we can do that. But if you recall, what we'll need to do is the walls that are bounding in here will need to be identified. And so what I'll do is I'll copy monitor a couple more of these so that we can have a plan that looks somewhat normal.

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And so I'll go to that collaborate tab, copy monitor, select link, and then we'll go ahead and click copy to start copying over some walls. And I'm just really going to try and grab the boundary elements here for this so that we can we could draw our, oh, I already got that one, so that we could draw our rooms in here. So you can see I've got most of these.

So I'll finish this and double check. And it looks like I've got enough to where if I wanted to add a room in here, which my rooms, if you look, you can always see what the work set is. So you want to double check that.

Like let's say it's been a while since we did this, which it has. You can always say, okay, I got to place my rooms now. Which work set should I use? Oh, interiors.

So I'll pop over, change my work set to interiors. And then I can go back to architecture room, and then I can add my, my rooms in here. So I could start, this is 120,121, and I'll just make this one 122.

And then this one 123. This is all kind of part of the same thing. And so this will be the men's locker room.

And this one will be the women's locker room. And so that gives me the rooms that I need for our schedule. And then it allows me to do some of the same things we did before, where we can add our annotation tags.

So I'm going to pop over to our, one of our fitness center, one of our living unit finish plans here. And we can see kind of the method we use to tag these elements. And so from here, you can see we've got the text for the, the tag here, floor tag that we use to tag the flooring.

And then we use some paint tags to designate the different paint elements that we have here. And we'll do the same thing with our fitness center. So I'll go ahead and close that.

And so what I could do is we can do this one of two different ways. And so we could add our generic annotation to this view, or I could use the floor tag. If I go to annotate, and I use tag by category, it's going to try and find the floor that we're using.

It's using a leader line right now. So it's kind of sticking itself to that. But if I do leader line, which is fine, and then I change this to free end, it'll give me a little bit more flexibility on where I can place these tags.

So you see how I'm able to kind of move this around a little bit more freely versus when this is on attached and it's going to pick a point on the tile that it wants to hit. To me, this is a bit cumbersome and hard to work with. So I like to change that to free end.

And then I even prefer to not have the leader line, but you can see that's going to automatically want to place it sort of in the middle of the element, which is fine in most cases. But when you get into like these areas where they have like a larger body, you can see how that tag can get kind of lost within the tile and the pattern of the tile and the room tag. And so you can move them around kind of after the fact.

But you know, this one just has more flooring than just say one room is getting one flooring type, where we have multiple flooring types within the one room. So it's like this tag works really well for when I can just place it, say in this room here, and then set it underneath the room tag, because then you kind of see how that's going to be situated. But we can also do it where we use that annotation tag that has a symbol.

We'll be consistent here and place our tags where we can see a floor change as we can see it here. And this looks pretty good. And so the next thing we need to do is we can add our paint tags for like our custom murals.

And so I'll go ahead and do the same thing. And so if we remember, what we did before is we took our generic annotation. And because this symbol allows us to add a leader on either side, we were able to do that and then adjust this value to be something different.

And so if I go in to my finish plan, then what I could do is I could do the same thing. And I can place the symbol with the generic annotation tag. And you can see these are all the different types that we've created.

And so we made it all the way to P3 here. And so what I'll do is I'll edit type, and then I'll duplicate that. And then I'll call it P4, even though it's not paint, but it's a, it's definitely kind of a paint product.

And then so color and finish, this is going to be a custom wall graphic. And then we can add the notes, and we'll say per elevation for the install notes. And then I'll just put a dash on the manufacturer and material type, and then we'll call it a vinyl graphic.

And so by entering all this information in now, it's going to help fill out our material schedule. And then I need to change my instance parameter tag to match so that everything's the same here. And then we can go ahead and place this.

I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees, and I'll go ahead and add my two leaders here. So there's one off one side, off the other, and then do the same thing we did before, where we kind of have the straight line sticking in the corner. And then we'll repeat that process for this side here.

So you may notice that I do a lot of selecting something, and then you might hear me type on the keyboard. I do a whole lot of create similar, which is keyboard shortcut CS. So especially when you're cranking on something, like let's say we added the tile floor tags, I can just pick one in CS instead of thinking, oh, I need to go to annotate tag by category.

I just know I need to recreate that particular element, and so it's really fast for me to just grab it and do the same thing. And so I'll add, again, we'll just continue on. I'll add these leaders here, and I like to try to get it as close as I can to the middle without creating a lot of graphic conflicts.

And then when we're at the corner like this, what I like to do is just put them kind of so they're both pointing to the edge like that. And then we've got one more wall here that will do the same thing too. So again, CS, and then we'll point to the extents of this one, and it's going to be from here to there.

You can kind of almost see it at that point right there. Bring this guy in a little tighter, and then I'll just point to its extents here and add the other one, and that looks kind of goofy. So I'm going to move it around a little bit to get it to sit where I want, and that looks good to me.

Okay, and one more little tweak, and there we go. Now we've got the annotations on our finished floor plan, and then we'll go ahead and do the same thing on our finished interior elevations.