Creating Consistent Interior Elevation Views with View Templates and Graphic Overrides in Revit

I'm going to go ahead and jump over to Kitchen Elevation A, and we'll kind of use this as the elevation that we'll use to kind of set up all of our different views with the view template. And so what we can do is we can look at it and say, okay, there's a few things that we need to turn off here. So first thing is I'm not going to use the level lines because we kind of talked about this being the typical set for all of our different elevations.

So I'm going to go ahead, I can just right click, and I can do hide in view, and then category. And that's the same thing as going to VV annotation categories. And then levels, you can see it's unchecked here.

And then I want to do the same thing with grids. So I'll just pop back in there VV annotation categories, and I'll turn off grids. And then I'm going to jump back into VV here to go to the visibility graphic overrides.

And then I want to check my work sets. And so when I look at work sets here, I can see that the interiors, the architectural model are both set to on because those are typically visible, but the finishes and our FF&E are set to not visible. So in this case, I want to definitely show my finishes.

But we're going to leave it up for debate whether or not we want to show this. We're going to take a look at what it looks like here in a minute. But I want to go ahead and leave it to not visible for right now.

And I'll hit OK. And so you can see our finishes popped in on this one here. And then the last thing we need to do is we need to address the way that this looks here.

So you can see I've got a nice bold line all the way around, but then I get to a point like here where there's a weird overlap in there, and that does not look good. And so not having a consistent boundary around our elevations isn't going to work for us. And so I want to make sure I can achieve that.

One thing we can do is since we have our crop region in a good spot here, what I can do is I can right click. I can do override graphic and view by element, and I can change the line weight to this to be like line weight five and hit OK. And what that'll do is it'll give me a line weight of, like you can see here, five across.

And what we're seeing is if you look really closely here, that's our quarter inch floor finish that's sitting above. And so if I wanted to adjust that a little bit, I can go in and I can actually change my crop region to sit at the floor line, the finish line, the floor finish line instead of the finish floor line, which is the level line. Or we can take a look at it again.

I just hit control Z to undo. And if I were to override the graphics and view here by element and change this to say six to make it a little thicker, it'll start to flush out a little bit more. And that gives me that nice thick boundary.

There is a downside to this. And the one thing that we have to look at is if I pop back over to my finish plan sheet is if I leave this on my floor plan, that is going to print. And so we need to make sure that we are not leaving on our crop regions.

See it says crop region visible. I want to have that turned off because it will print since that's going to be the setting that we're going to set to have our elevations all look the same. And so when you look at these two side by side, you can see the difference is I've got that nice border all the way around.

Unfortunately, that is the setting that you have to do in each and every single view. It's not that big of a deal to go in and do that, but it is something that you do have to go through and do on each and every one of your views. So I'm going to go ahead and pop in to each one.

And this is pretty easy. I can just go ahead, double click and then jump in there on this one here. I'm seeing a little bit extra wall, so I'm going to go ahead and grab it over and just slam it against the wall here.

And if you remember before, if you're having a hard time doing that, we can always just double click on it and then modify the boundary to get to the same result. And so in this case here, I could use the align tool and align it to that face and then finish by hitting the green check mark there. But it's the same process.

So right click, override graphics and view by element, change the weight to six. And the key is just to make sure you do it the same on all of them. And so I like to leave the thin lines off here so that I know.

And then I can go through. Before we do that, though, what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select all my elevations, even the ones I didn't put on a sheet. And I'm doing that from the project browser.

So you can see I pick the first one, which is bathroom because it's alphabetical. And then if I were to scroll down, this is how I can apply the view template. But first, we need to go back in here and create that view template.

And so the order here is we go into our view, set up the view template in a way that we're pretty sure that's what we want it to be. There's obviously going to be changes to that as we go through the project, but we want to make sure it's set up in a way that it's pretty much ready to go for us here. So I'm going to go in, double click in this view.

I've made some changes. I hid some elements, brought some back so that we can see it all in all these views here. And then now I can go to the view tab and I can go to view templates and I can say create template from current view.

And then I'm going to call this one interior finish elevation. These are all the categories we're going to include. I'll hit OK, and then I'll double click just to deactivate the view.

And then I'll go to my interior elevations here. And I'll start with bathroom A all the way down to study D here, and I held shift. So click on bathroom A, single click on bathroom A, hold down shift, and then it'll select all these guys.

And then if I right click, I can say apply template properties. And then from here, I can pick my interior finish elevation. There's a lot of views in this view template structure here.

And so if you wanted to, to make this easier, you can go through and wipe out the ones that are not being used, just so you can see everything, because right now it's pretty hard to tell. And it would be really easy to pick the wrong thing. So it's just something to keep in mind.

I'll go ahead and hit OK. Notice the finishes started showing up, and then we lost the level lines and the grids, and now we can kind of just see the elevations that we have. But we do still have that one step where we need to go through in each view and do the select the crop region, right click, override graphics in view by element, and change that to six.

And I need to make sure I'm actually on the crop region. In this case, you can see here I was on the ceiling, and so I got a lot more options there. And to make sure that I'm on the crop region, I like to go to the side, and you can see that's in wall opening.

I hit TAB. I know I'm on the crop region for a couple of reasons. Number one, it says interior elevation here.

And then number two, you can see this dot and these little break lines. That's how you know. So I'll right click, override graphics in view by element, change it to six.

And I'm going to do that for the rest of our elevation views. Now I'm on the last one here, and I wanted to show you one more method for being able to create that continuous boundary. Some people like this one more than others.

Personally, I think the other way is a little bit easier to manage. But this allows us to use a masking region. And so if I were to go to my annotate tab, I can go to region here, and then I'll just pick masking region.

And what we're essentially going to do is we're going to draw two boxes. And so I'm going to draw a rectangle that is for my inner portion of this. And this helps to have the thin lines on so you can see where you're drawing it.

And so one rectangle. And this will represent the inside, like I said. And so sometimes, just like before, I'll stop it short, and then I'll use the align tool to make sure I get it just right.

And so this is my inner portion. And so these lines here, the four that I just created, I'm going to set those to wide lines, because I want that to be a heavy line. And then I'll draw another rectangle.

And this will be outside of my crop region. So I've got my inner, my inner boundary, my crop region here, and then I've got the outer portion. And so this is outside of the crop region here.

And what I do with this one is I'll set those four lines to be invisible lines. And that way, when I hit finish here, you can see it'll create the crop for me. But it uses the wide line as the boundary.

And then in this case, I would turn off the crop region so that you don't see it. Ultimately, when we do this, we get the same result. It's just done in a different manner.

And everybody kind of has their own way of doing it. And so this is one of those things where if you look at that, and you're like, Oh, you know, I kind of like that better than by all means, but they all work essentially the same way, where you have a boundary line that you could modify however you see fit. So this is just like that line on the field region that you could use to modify.

Okay, so now we've got all of our elevations set up, and the sheet's starting to look pretty good. We're going to go ahead and fine tune some things a little bit here.