Mastering Interior Elevations in Floor Plans with Precise View Depths and Naming Conventions

Let's go ahead and set up some interior elevations for our kitchen area here, because we're gonna add in a tile backsplash into this area. And that's just much easier to do from a elevation view. And so I'm gonna go to my View tab, Elevation, make sure I pick this elevation here.

And then you'll wanna make sure that you have set up the interior elevation type. And then I'll go ahead and just place this here. And I'm gonna do all four elevations.

If I pick the circle, you can see I get a little box on the sides I haven't selected yet. And so I'll go ahead and pick them, just going from the top down here. And the elevation that we're looking for to modify is this one right here.

So I'll double click on that to open the view. And you can see our interior elevation. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and squeeze this down to just be our portion of the kitchen here.

So I'll go to the level line, and then I'm gonna bring it across. And I want you to notice something here. We're kind of looking through that closet that is in the kitchen, the pantry there.

And so I'll just bring this down as well, and we'll modify that in a second. But that's really not where we want that view to go through. And this happens pretty often when you're drawing elevations.

You can't really tell where that line's gonna be from. So I'll just pop back over to my floor plan view. And if I click on the arrow that we're looking at here, which represents the elevation, you can see where it's being cut with this blue line.

And it's going through these walls and showing that door instead of showing the rest of the elevation here. And I can easily fix that by bringing my mouse over and clicking and dragging on that line. You can see it is something that's gonna kind of move around a little bit, so we might have to jump back in and make some adjustments.

But I just wanna make sure that it's showing the elevation from the point I want it to look at, and then also looking as deep as I want it to. Because say if I were to do this, you can see that the edge of my view or the depth of my view isn't gonna be as far as I want it to. But if I were to pop back over to my floor plan view and adjust it so it goes all the way to the wall, you can now see that it shows the whole kitchen elevation that we're looking at here.

And so it's important when you draw these interior elevations that you make sure that the line is set up where you want it to. So in this case, I can make a lot of the changes here in plan. So I can adjust it to be to the wall here.

And if I wanted to, I can go all the way to this point like that. And then if I look at where the starting point of the view is and I'm content with that, then it's fine. And so just working my way around, I could go through and say, okay, well, we want an elevation that shows the pantry or we want an elevation that shows what's going on in this vestibule here.

Those are things that you'll weigh out as you go through, or you could look at this view itself and say, that's not an elevation we're gonna need for this project. So I can just uncheck the box here and it'll delete that view. And so the same goes for this one, this guy here as well.

You can see it goes all the way across. But we don't need it to go that far, so we can bring it in. And then the view depth is gonna be important in something like this because we'll have elevations in this room and we don't necessarily wanna see everything going in that direction.

And so when I look at the view depth, if I set it up this way, I can avoid having duplicate information by looking all the way through say this corridor here into that other room. And so it's important when you're creating these interior elevations that you are paying attention to where they're starting from as we saw here, and then also what their extents are. And I do like to make the adjustments here in plan because I can do it really quickly.

The other thing we'll have to adjust is how tall they are, but that's something we have to do in the elevation view. We'll go ahead and do the same thing for our living room. And this one's gonna be all four views.

So I'll repeat that process. And so I'll do elevation, just pick one to start with, and then I can go through and then add the other three and do that exact same process where we go through and just tidy up the extents of the elevations here because it saves us a step once we get into that next area where we're modifying our interior elevations. And you can see this goes pretty quickly.

It even wants to snap on these walls here. Which is really nice. And so I'll just repeat the process for all these views, making sure I get them all.

And like I was saying before, view depth becomes important here as well because we don't necessarily wanna look down into everything that's in the kitchen and see that stuff twice. And so you just wanna double check and make sure where that's looking. The next one's gonna be our bathroom.

And this one gets a little trickier, but it's the same process. We'll do the elevation. It also helps that we're using a pretty large scale with 3 8ths equals a foot because all these tags will fit much easier in the small spaces here.

And so this one, a little simpler because it's kind of more straightforward with some of these views, but it's the same process, just going through, getting them set up here ahead of time because then we can focus on the actual elevation drawing when we get to that point. And it's just good setup, good practices here. And so for this one, I'm gonna go ahead and move it down because I wanna be able to see this tile wall at that point.

And actually the same thing here, I wanna make sure this is down at this point so I can see this wall here on that elevation. And then all the way to the door. And then this one will look all the way across here from top to bottom.

And so now I've got them all set up. And actually we got one more to do. This room here, we'll do all four in there.

And again, just adjusting the viewpoints and I kind of just work clockwise here as I go. And the beauty of this is once you have it set up, you're good to go. Especially with these little changes that we're making here we can easily pop in and make the edits as needed.

And so we've got the four interior elevations that we're gonna use for this project all set up. I'm gonna go ahead and save because that's a good practice to save after you've completed a setup there. And then the next thing we can do is if you look in your project browser, you can see that we've got all these different interior elevations that we've just created in here.

But you really have no way of knowing what any of these are. And so what I like to do is I'll go in and I like to name them appropriately. And so if I look at these elevations, I could use a setup with the naming of them so that I can identify them more quickly in the project browser.

And so for this one here, I'm looking at it and I have no idea which one it is within this setup here because this is all just named randomly. But if I look in my properties because I have this view selected, if I scroll down, I can see that it's elevation one dash B. And so what I could do is I can rename it kitchen and I can call it kitchen. And you wanna be consistent here with your naming.

So however I start, I'm gonna use the same setup for each of the different rooms. If I say kitchen and that's elevation A, then this top one in every single one of these rooms is gonna end up being elevation A. This would be B, C, and then D. And so you just wanna follow that same pattern on all of your different elevations. And so I'm gonna go through and name all of these and then we'll see what the project browser looks like and how much easier it is for us to work in our file and identify how to find these views.

Now that I've got all of them renamed, you can see it's very clear which elevations are which on this plan. And the reason I used A, B, C, and D instead of North, South, East, or West is because these are typical elevations for a floor plan that's within a building that could rotate and be oriented many, many different ways. And so we're just using a generic indicator to know that A is always gonna be on the top, B, C, and D, and that way you can find which views are which very quickly.