Learn how to enhance your zoning plan by adding annotative elements with this comprehensive guide. The article offers step-by-step instructions on how to add, adjust and label zones on a CAD plan.
Key Insights
- The guide instructs on how to turn on zones in your design plan using 'visibility and graphics overrides'. Turning on the zones allows for the adjusting and tagging of the designated areas.
- Through the article, the reader is trained on how to accurately adjust lines to match the borders of zones. The step-by-step guide demonstrates how to select and edit multiple lines at once, to ensure that they are correctly aligned with the zone borders.
- Adding tags to the zones can help identify which VAVs they correspond with. The tutorial also includes instruction on how to adjust and move these tags for an optimal visualization of the zoning plan.
Welcome back to the CAD Teacher/VDCI video course content for the BIM 322 course. In the previous video, we went ahead and created our actual zones for our zoning plan. We want to go ahead and add some annotative elements to those zones now.
So what I want to go ahead and do is let's actually turn the zones on. The reason why the zone boundaries weren't really showing up was because they're actually turned off in our Visibility and Graphics Overrides. So go ahead and hit VV.
And what's going to happen is I'm going to go ahead and scroll down until I see HVAC Zones. So I'm going to go ahead and check that box, hit Apply, and hit OK. And as you can see, we now have an actual selectable area for our actual zones.
Let's go ahead and zoom in on this Conference Room 108 real quick. As you can see, our lines didn't match up exactly with the border of the zone. So let's go ahead and adjust that real quick.
All I'm going to do is I'm going to click both this line and hold Control and click this line. Because these share a coincident end point, since I have both of them selected, I'll edit both of them at once. So I'm going to go ahead, zoom in, click, and I'm going to drag them until they're centered over that line.
I'm going to click on this line over here. I'm going to hold Control, click on the line above, and then pull this down to here. Great.
We've got that adjusted. What I want to go ahead and do now is I want to go ahead and add some tags to these zones so we know which VAVs they correspond with. So what I want to go ahead and do is I'm going to go Tag by Category.
I'm going to hover over the border of the zone. I have Leader in there. I'm going to hover over the border of the zone and pick.
There it is. Go to the next one. Make sure I'm on the border of the zone, pick.
The weird thing about these tags is sometimes even though the preview does not show up, if I still have it highlighted and I click, it's still going to show up. I'm going to go ahead here, here, here, here, here, and here. Now as you notice, some of these came out a little funky.
We don't necessarily, because of what we have going on here, need to always have an angled line. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Escape to say I'm done placing tags. I'm going to go ahead and adjust a couple of these.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go here, pull this guy down, just to make sure that they're straight, and again they'll snap to a straight point, perfect. And what I want to also go ahead and do is I want to go ahead and place these kind of around the area where the actual VAV is. So what I'm going to do is I need to go ahead and select all these tags to change them from an Attached End to a Free End.
So what I'll do is I'm going to just hold Control and select all the different VAV tags. And I've selected all the different VAV tags, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go up here to Attached End and I'm going to change it to a Free End. And I've got to go back and do a little bit more manual adjustment, but that's perfectly fine.
I want to go ahead and place the end points of these guys kind of around the location where the actual VAV is. So it doesn't need to be exact, but we want to approximate. So this guy is about right here or so, this guy is approximately about here, this guy is approximately about here.
One nice thing about this also is it does get our tags out of the way of the actual room tags. And it goes there. And again, I'm just kind of adjusting the leaders as I go.
All these offices are roughly the same. So again, just moving these into the approximate location of the actual tags. And then this guy here, the VAV for this one is about here.
I'm actually going to go ahead and move this entire tag so it's just straight up and down and place it there. And there we go. Now, I'm going to go ahead and Zoom Extents by hitting ZE, Control-S, save the file.
And one thing that I want to do is I don't really want these big borders of these zones on. I just really want these lines to show up. So what I'm going to do is now that I've already tagged them, I'm going to go ahead and turn back off the borders of the zones so we don't actually see the borders of the zones.
So I'm going to go ahead, go back into VV. If this pops up, every single time this pops up, just go ahead and synchronize that central file. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back into my Model Categories here.
I'm going to scroll down, uncheck HVAC Zones, hit Apply, and hit OK. But what do you notice happened? Our actual tags went away also. So what we need to go ahead and do is let's go back into VV for a second.
And let's scroll back down and let's check back on HVAC Zones. But do you notice that it has a little plus mark here? Let's go ahead and push that plus mark and expand that out. And you notice that it has a Boundary, Color Fill, Interior Fill, Reference Lines.
Let's go ahead and uncheck Boundary. I'm going to hit Apply and hit OK. And as you can see, our zones are still visible in this view technically, but they don't have a boundary line.
We've just turned off the specific boundary line, which then makes our tags available to see, which is exactly what we wanted. So there we are. Let's Zoom Extents by hitting ZE, Control-S, save the file.
And we're going to go ahead and continue doing the same thing on the second floor. See you then.