This article guides you on how to create a 3D view to display your completed electrical work, and then place this view on the project's cover sheet. The step-by-step instructions start with opening the first floor plan and end with showcasing the 3D model on the cover sheet.
Key Insights
- The process starts with opening a first-floor plan and setting up a camera view from the L1 power plan. The camera is positioned to capture the building from the front, creating a 3D view.
- Adjustments are made to declutter the view by turning off several model categories like casework, doors, plumbing equipment, and fixtures. The view is also customized by making the roofs transparent and turning off the lines category.
- The final 3D model is placed on the cover sheet of the project. Any duplicate titles in the view are removed, and the view is adjusted to fit the cover sheet properly.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Let's create a fun 3D view to showcase all of the electrical work we've done. And then we'll place this view on our cover sheet. To get started, let's open up a first floor plan.
Let's go ahead to our project browser. We'll look for our floor plans, power plan, and open up our L1 power plan. We want to set up a camera from this view, but we need to zoom out a little bit to see the whole building.
So I'm gonna zoom out and move the building to the top of my screen. That way I can see the building and have room to place my camera in the front. To get a camera view, I want to go to view, 3D view, and select camera.
I'll click in front of the building and a little bit to the right one time. Then I'll aim towards that front door, go past it to the back of the building, and click a second time. Revit will think for a moment and create this 3D view for us.
That looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and make it bigger so that it will fit and fill into our cover sheet for this project. So with that border selected, we'll notice it turns blue with some four grip dots on the edges.
Learn Revit MEP
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
We can now click the size crop. And we want to change this to scale locked proportions. That will grow or shrink it at the same rate.
And so I want to change the width to 20 inches. And now because scale has already been selected, if I just click in the height box, it automatically updates the height. And so we'll go ahead and click okay.
And it looks like absolutely nothing happened, but it did. Our view is now 20 inches wide, 15 inches tall to fit on the page. Now I want to make this a little bit more of a landscape view.
We could do that by pulling these grips up or down, but I want to be more precise. So I'm gonna go back and click the size crop button again. This time I'll leave it field of view and just change the height to 10 inches and click okay.
And that crops it for us automatically. Now, if your view is a little bit off center like mine is, the top of my building is almost at the top of the screen and there's many blank space at the bottom, not a problem. I can go ahead and go to my navigation wheel and I'm looking for the pan tool.
I can hover over and click down on the pan tool. And while I'm holding it down, I can pull essentially the model down until it's centered in my view, or I can go up with it if I go down too far. All right, something like that can look pretty good.
Feel free to adjust the view how you'd like it. There's no perfect answer for this. We mostly want to look into our building.
If you've got a view looking at the building, you're probably in pretty good shape. Now we want to declutter this view. So to do that, we'll go back to our view tab and select visibility graphics or VV on the keyboard.
Let's start with the model categories. And we're going to turn off quite a few model categories to declutter this view. First off, we'll uncheck the box for casework.
Then we'll uncheck the box for doors and we'll keep on going down here. Our floors, we can keep those on. Of course, we'll keep our lighting.
We can turn off our plumbing equipment and plumbing fixtures. And our roofs, we want to keep those on, but we'll make them a little bit transparent. If we go across, we'll see the transparency column.
We'll click override and we can make them kind of between 80 and 90% transparent and click okay. Let's keep scrolling down. We can uncheck specialty equipment and scroll all the way down to walls.
We'll uncheck walls as well because we want to look into our building. Now let's go to the next tab, which is annotation categories. And there are some green lines currently in this view that we want to hide.
And those are the scope boxes. So let's go ahead and scroll down to our S's and we want to uncheck scope boxes. Okay, now we'll go all the way to the far right where it says Revit links.
And the background architectural, we'll swap that out until it says underlays. We'll just check the box for underlay and our HVAC model, we can uncheck it, completely turn it off. Now, one more adjustment we can make is to go back to the model categories, find our lines category, and we'll just turn that off for now.
We'll uncheck the box for lines. Let's go ahead and click okay now and see the result. Now we're looking into our building and we'll look and we can see here's our electrical room with all of our electrical equipment.
We've got all of our lights. We've got all of our little outlets here and wall switches. We've got those custom gym lights and the gymnasium.
We're showcasing all of that electrical work we've done. And that looks pretty good. Now let's look at our project browser to find this view.
It's called 3D view one. And if we scroll down through the views, we're looking for that 3D view one. So let's try to find it here.
It's not in our basic 3D views, but if we look in electrical, because we started with the electrical floor plan, we now see an electrical version of 3D views. We can click the plus sign there and it says 3D view one. We'll right click and rename this and we'll call it electrical 3D view.
Perfect. So it has a name, it's ready to go onto our sheet. And let's just zoom in one more time and take a look.
I think it's still a little bit jumbled and what I'm still seeing are the ceilings kind of floating in here. Let's go ahead and hide those as well. So back to visibility and graphics and uncheck the box for ceilings.
Perfect, that looks a little bit better. Now let's go ahead and open up that cover sheet. We'll scroll down and we want to go to our E001 electrical cover sheet, double click to open that.
And we want to place our view right in the top left corner. Go back to our electrical 3D views and drag and drop that electrical 3D view onto our cover sheet. It looks like it's going to fit really well right there.
And one last change to make, we noticed that it has a view title, but essentially we have this huge title right here. We don't need to double up on titles. We will just swap this property out from viewport title with line to no title.
And there it is, we've got a cool 3D view showing off all of that work we've done to create this electrical model.
