Enhancing Furniture Plan Sheets with Interior 3D Views and Custom View Templates in Revit

Now what I want to do is I want to take a look at our furniture plan sheet and specifically the way that we're displaying the information and then also how we're communicating the different elements on that sheet. And so when we look at it, what we have here is the plan, which looks good. We can see everything pretty clearly on here, but we don't have a 3D view or anything that's really showing the elements that we have within our project.

And so I'd like to create a series of views that we can then put on to the plan here. And that'll be three different 3D views that we add. And this is pretty straightforward.

I'm just going to go into, let's start with the living room here. And then from the view tab, if we pick on the bottom side of the 3D view here, we can go to camera. And then I'll just pick a starting point kind of from this door roughly, somewhere in this area.

And then I'll just drag my 3D view out to maybe this corner. I want to definitely make sure it extends past the walls here, because if I stop at this point, I won't see anything beyond. And so from there, I'll go ahead and click to place it.

And it doesn't take much to decide here, but this view looks pretty terrible. We need to make a few adjustments and kind of stretch it out so we can see more of the elements within the view. A little bit of the ceiling here, maybe, and kind of spread it a little.

But you may be looking at it and saying, man, there is a lot of stuff missing here. And there are. And that's because if I were to go into my visibility graphic overrides and look at my work set, you can see my finishes and my furniture elements are not shown.

If I change them both to visible, to show, they'll start to show up here. And now the view looks a lot more dynamic and I can see much more of the elements. So the other thing I'm going to look at here is we've got our eye elevation and our target elevation.

And a lot of times what we can do is if we lower this down, our eye elevation down, we can start to see more of the pieces of furniture in here. And if you want to have a true two point perspective, meaning these lines right here are going to be perfectly vertical, you want to make sure you keep these two exactly the same. And so if I make that four feet now, it kind of tightens it up a bit.

And then you can make the adjustments to show more of those items in there. And so we're pretty much on our way to setting up the view template for this. But the only thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to change my visual style, which is this cube right here from shaded.

And we've got a few different options here, but I'm going to go with consistent colors, see what that looks like and looks pretty good. And then I can change it also to realistic. And that'll start to render this a little bit.

And it'll actually use the images from the materials that were placed on here to create the view. And so depending on the computer that you have, this could be bad news or it could be good news for you. So I did forget to say one thing before we did that, and that's to make sure you hit save just in case anything happens.

If you were following along and something happened there, I deeply apologize, but be sure to go through and hit save before you do anything like that on your view. And sometimes these are really worth it to have the textures and showing like some of the different variation and the wall finishes and stuff. But a lot of times you really do just get away with either textures like this or consistent colors.

And I'm going to go with textures because that's kind of the in between of the two different versions of that. And so we'll stick with this one. And so this will be our view template for the different elements on here.

And I'll go ahead and set that up right now. If I go to my view tab, which we happen to already be on here, I can create template from current view. And I'm going to go ahead and give this a name.

And this will be interior 3D view. And I'm going to go and let everything kind of stick with it. So I'll hit OK here.

And now I can go ahead and jump over to my ID 102 sheet. I'm going to double click because that view is activated. And if I go to my 3D views in the project browser all the way up here, we've got 3D view one.

I'm assuming that's the right one here. It's got to be right. And that looks pretty good.

And so if you look at it and you're like, it's kind of small. It doesn't seem like it works the way that I want it to. We can always make an adjustment with this size crop here.

And when you do this, what I always like to do is make sure that I'm on this scale option. And so you can see my width is 10 inches and my height is 7 and 3 16ths. And so if I wanted to make an adjustment to that, I definitely could.

So let's say I wanted to scale the proportions here and then make that 12 inches. The height is going to go proportionately with it. And you can see the view got a little bit bigger.

And I think that still works out pretty well because we're only putting three right here. And so as long as they all kind of stay within that same point, then we shouldn't have any issues. And so I'll go in and adjust this because this is going to be our living room, right? Not 3D view one.

And then I'll repeat the same process for our bedroom and the study. So same thing here. I'm going to jump into the view and I guess we'll do the bedroom next.

We'll do 3D view camera. And then I'll take it from maybe somewhere around here. And look across.

And we're going to end up with the same issues we had before. But I can go ahead and I can apply that view template that we just created, which is the interior 3D view. And it gives me a head start, right? Gets it all set up with the right work sets so I can see what I'm looking at.

And then I'll just stretch it out so I can see all the different furniture elements within our room. And this is pretty subjective here. You can kind of make these adjustments however you want.

I feel like the two tips I gave about, you know, reducing the eye level and kind of stretching this out a certain way seems to help quite a bit. And then I can also do that size crop from this view. I don't have to do it necessarily from the sheet.

And you can see this thing's about 12 × 10 already. If I were to adjust it, knowing our sheet is 30 × 42, I'm not going to get three 12 inch high items. So I need to make sure these are 10 or lower, each of them.

Plus, you know, space in between and all that. So I'm going to go ahead and reduce this one down a little bit. But it'll keep the same view.

Again, it just makes it smaller. We don't even notice it in this view. But I'll rename it here to bedroom and then put it on a sheet.

And so this is a bedroom view. It's quite a bit of this dresser and the foreground. So I'm going to adjust this a little bit to give us a view that shows more of the interior space and less of just the surface of a piece of furniture.

And that looks pretty good. And one of the things I could do is I could just check this one, see that that width is at 12 inches. And this one here, the width is at 11 and a half and seven.

If I were to make this one 12, then they'll be the same width. And that makes me happy. Which I'm sure you've guessed already by all the other strict requirements I've given.

But this looks pretty good. So I'll line those things up. And then we'll do the same thing for the study.

And this one, the viewing angle is kind of up to you. Again, it's a tight space. We'll see what we can come up with here.

So I'll do the 3D view, camera, maybe somewhere from like right here, looking into the room. Looks great. It's just the wall.

So I'll go ahead and set the view template so we can kind of start seeing what's going on in there. Again, just looking straight through the wall. And as I stretch it out, you can see it gets really crazy because we're at five and a half feet looking down on this thing.

And so if I put it down at four, you can see it starts to flatten out a little bit. Doing the same thing, four and four. And we start to get, you know, kind of the edge of the bookshelf peeking through into the hallway and seeing the door and different crown molding and stuff.

And we've got, of course, the cool Eames chairs in here to show it off. And I can start to stretch this out, but you can see it gets really crazy when you do that. So you want to definitely keep that in mind as you're setting these up.

And so this looks pretty good. I'm going to check the size crop because we know the other one was about 12 inches wide. This one's more of a square.

We might want to adjust that a little bit. I'll set it so that they're all the same at 12 inches wide. And then we'll keep our fingers crossed that this is actually going to fit on the sheet.

And so same process, we're going to drag this one over. And it's going to be way too tall, of course. Just going to save because that popped up.

Just good practice there. And then we'll have to make a couple adjustments, I think, just to make sure these fit. And then I'm going to double check the height on the size crop of these here, which is at anywhere from 7 to 8 inches, I think is what we've got.

7 to 9 on that one. And so we'll probably have a little bit less space to deal with here. And so I'm going to go ahead and activate the view and sort of crop things down a little bit so that we can get it to fit.

And then if I do the size crop for the height, I think we were looking at 7 inches with the scale locked. Maybe we'll be in a good spot there. And looks like it.

So I'll go ahead and place this guy so it's sort of lined up. And then just line up my view title with the other ones. And then obviously, we'll go ahead and change this name to study to match the other ones that we did.

And now we've got our view here with the different renderings and then the furniture set on the plan. And so now that we've got everything set up for the next step here, we're going to go ahead and print to PDF.