Adding Insulation Annotations in Section Views: A Detailed Guide

Now we're going to add those annotations, and we're going to start with a couple of symbols first. If we go to our Annotate tab, you can see there's this insulation symbol. And so I'll go ahead and start with the section here on the left-hand side, view number two.

And we can show how the insulation is going to be added to these walls. So it's like this jog and everything—there are a lot of interesting details here. But what we can do is we can show how the insulation is continuous all the way through by adding that insulation item into here.

And you can see we use this a little bit on our Wall Types legend, but it kind of works here as well. And so this wall itself has a stud size of six inches. And so what I can do is I can go ahead and set this width for this insulation to be at six inches.

And what it'll do is it'll fill in the gap for the stud. And so I can use that same parameter and fill it in for the rest of my walls to show it going across here. And then I can do the same thing for it to go through on our soffit.

And so I take that piece and kind of move it around. I can set it in to show that we have a continuous envelope from top all the way to bottom. And so that's something I can do in my section views to help communicate that envelope. And so you’ve got to make sure you have the View activated.

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And then you can move it around. And what it does is it'll let you draw it from a certain point. You can chain them together, which means it'll go from point to point to point until you’d press Escape. And then you can also say from far side or near side.

And if you're able to figure out how this works, you are better than me. But what I do is I typically just leave it on center because that's how we're placing them. But if I wanted it to be drawn from here, I can just quickly find which setting it is—whether far or near—and then draw across.

But like I said, I think center is going to be everybody's best option because it's typically being drawn within the stud cavity—whether it's in the soffit or roofing areas like we have shown here, or whether it's being drawn within the stud. Then it's easier to do it that way. And so I'll just draw this one across. And then we'll have this portion that comes through as well, which we still need to hop in and kind of clean up some of these details.

And so that would be how we can start to add some of the insulation into the views. We can do that on A701. In the same way, we can do that on A702.

And then we can jump in and do the same thing on A701 where appropriate. And so when you look here, the whole thing's curtain wall. We've got a little bit of wall here, which is just a small portion. We can draw it in.

So what I always do is I'll draw it in first, see if it fits. And it looks good to me. We'll go ahead and leave that.

And then we can start adding some of our curtain wall notes and material notes and keynotes and things like that in here. So what I like to do on wall sections and sections is add a couple of things. First, I like to make sure that I have my room tags shown correctly.

Next, I like to make sure I have keynotes shown in a way that I can describe what's shown on here. So first, I've got the skylight, which we've got a keynote for that one that we've been using. And that's going to be the E02.

And then we've got all of our curtain wall notes as well, which are part of our section. If we look at our section keynotes, you can see we don't quite have that section yet. We’ve got to get the detailed or the section keynotes in.

And then we have some of the other ones—the material keynotes—that we can use to describe things on here as well. So what we'll do is go ahead and add a set of keynotes here. You can see we've got our site floor plan, roof plan, elevation materials.

And so we'll add another one in here, which will be section. And for this one, I'm going to use D for detail as the designator. So D01 tab, I'm going to just start typing in a few of these.

So single ply roofing membrane, because that's going to define our roofing. And just like before, when we add these, we need to make sure we're hitting Tab to go to the next one—just kind of describing our roof going down. And here's that mythical Tab that we were talking about earlier.

And we've got tapered insulation, batt insulation, metal soffit panel, and then concrete slab on grade per structural. Item number six here is going to be some of the other items we have, like a guardrail that's going to show up in some of these sections that we want to annotate.

And I think that'll be good for now. So those are the ones that we want to add to use to annotate our wall sections. And so we'll do our trick here where we hit save, then leave that file open.

If you're working with many people, you don't want to do that. But then we can use our keyboard shortcut to reload the keynotes. And so now we can start working by adding keynotes kind of all over this thing here.

So the first thing that we'll do is add some of our glass notes, which will be our material notes, which we can make sure we have annotated here. And then we also have the ability to add all those things in here. So the one thing that we can do is pick our low-hanging fruit here.

And so, you know, using that user keynote, I can grab this element here. And then I can add my section keynotes for metal guardrail. I can use one of my elevation keynotes to note that this is the storefront.

I've got the structural slab note from my section here. And then we've got just a general note to call out a curtain wall mullion in our section. Since there are many different ones in here that we could use to add.

If you just have kind of a generic note in here, you can certainly go through the process of adding more specific notes to it. You just want to make sure you're calling out the right stuff. And then we've got the ability to add our notes here, which would be for the roofing one.

So I can use the user keynotes to call out the roofing, which in this case would be our single ply roofing. And then the next note that I'll use here—if you use a user keynote, and you've got two elements that are part of the same host—you have to hit Escape and start over again.

Because we're calling out the insulation, which is part of the roof here. And so we've got both of those. I'll pull these a little further away from the section here so they look nice. And then I can add some combination of our material notes and also some of our elevation notes that call out some of these different mullion sizes.

So I can use my element keynote here, which you can see it recognizes already, which is nice. This is what I was talking about in the previous video where, you know, this is a benefit to the project to be able to do that. But it can also be a downside because I could change many elements that I didn’t intend to.

And then with our material keynote, I can easily call out the different glass types, noting that as a spandrel type. And then again, using the element keynote to note this element here. And the material keynote to note the concrete piece in the back there.

And so we're easily able to add a handful of notes to this drawing because the designations have already been made within the model. And here you can see I moved it and missed the glazing tag—I kind of accidentally pulled it off and it turned into a question mark.

So that's always a good indicator for you as you're going through if those things aren’t showing up correctly. Now I’ll go ahead and add the notes for the concrete slab here, which we used a user keynote for. And now we've got a handful of keynotes for A701.

And we'll go ahead and repeat the same process for A702.