Explore the process of adding tags to elevations based on materials and keynotes used in architectural design. The article provides an in-depth tutorial on assigning keynotes to different materials, understanding the convenience of the plan method, and the importance of maintaining an organized and tagged plan.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to assign keynotes to different materials in architectural design. This process includes selecting a wall, identifying the material, and assigning a corresponding keynote from the material library or browser.
- While the material editor can be utilized for adding keynotes, the plan method proves to be significantly easier and quicker for most cases. This method allows the different material types to be recognized automatically when adding a keynote.
- The article emphasizes the importance of keeping tags lined up and the designations in order. It also highlights the convenience of using keyboard shortcuts for frequent tasks such as entering and exiting keynote settings, making the process of annotating the project more efficient.
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Now I'm going to hop back to A-401 and we can start adding our Tags to our Elevations based upon the materials and the Keynotes that we're using. So I'm going to jump in here. I'm going to start with the A-401 East Elevation here and I could do this a couple different ways.
If I were to say pick one of my walls and the material in it, so this is the one that has our plaster material, which is noted as PC1. So from my Material Library or Material Browser, I can go in and I can assign a Keynote to this. And now that Keynote has been assigned to this material.
And I can do the same thing for PC2, which isn't actually on this view, but might as well while we're here. And what's great about that is now once I exit out of all of these dialog boxes here, I can go in and if I add a Keynote using this Material Keynote option, it's going to recognize these different material types automatically. And so I can add that Keynote here and then you can see that it pops it into this portion.
Same thing for if I were to do it the opposite way. So this material here, which is our roof screen, has been applied the metal—Corrugated Metal Horizontal—and notice there's no Keynote assigned. But if I go back and do it this way, again adding a Material Keynote, then I can pick the correct one, which is going to be MP1.
See how it says MP1 here? And if I work my way back through into that material property, you can see MP1 was added. So you can do it both ways. You can add it through the Material Editor or you can do it through the plan.
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And in most cases, doing it in plan is going to be significantly easier and faster than going through and doing it in your Material Browser. The only way I can see it being really faster through the Material Browser is if you had it set up with the designations and in an order that was easy to find things. Because otherwise, there are hundreds of materials in there and it can be really hard to find the different materials.
So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and Keynote these. And so you can see here this one's not necessarily set up. And for the glazing and maybe even this Metal Panel here, the glazing is a little bit more straightforward, but the Metal Panel is harder to identify if it's being selected properly.
And so for the glass, I don't really have a problem going through this process and picking GL1. But for the Metal Panel, I think it's a little trickier to make sure that I'm on the right material. And the reason is because if you tag an element like we were doing here, Curtain Walls have so many different portions to them, you know, like the grids, the mullions, and the entire wall itself has its own parameters.
So for this case, I'd like to just grab the Curtain Wall Panel that we're trying to modify, which in this case is this guy here. And I'll do it for this one because it doesn't matter because they're all the same, right? So I'll go through until I can get this panel here, which is our Exterior Metal Panel. And then that material, I'm going to go ahead and assign the MP or the ACM1 material to.
And now I've got it set up so that I can easily grab that material. You can see it's automatically going to go and pick those different glass types, the plaster type, or the Metal Panel type right away, which is awesome. Just like all the Tags we've done in the past, you can see how everything kind of wants to be associated with the element that's adjacent to it.
We can easily line things up. You saw me do it up here and you saw me do it through this side. And it's really simple to be able to do those things.
So no excuse to not have our Tags all lined up to each other. Okay, so I'm going to go through and I'm going to add a few notes here and make sure that we've got everything all set up. And maybe even some Keynotes, just things to make sure that we get everything noted the way we want on here.
So it's going to be a combination of Material Notes and Keynotes within this schedule here. So I'm going to do Keynote, and remember if we use a User Keynote and I say I want to Keynote this column here, I can go to my Elevation Notes and I can see I've got Storefront and Skylight, but I'm missing the column. If I were to not pick anything in here, it's going to leave it with a question mark, but that's no problem because we can pop back into our Keynote file.
We can see Elevations 1 and 2 have those notes. So I can say add our next one, which will be E03 and I can say Metal Panel Column Wrap. And most importantly, I'll hit TAB and make sure it says Elevation.
Okay, and then the next one I can add here just so we can add a couple is we can have an E04 and that'll be Storefront Door Schedule. And even though this always tripped me up, you know, even though it's always showing two or three different spacings for the TABs, you can always click in one of the areas and using your D-pad on your keyboard. If it only takes one press of the left or the right, you know, it's been a TAB.
Or if you're just not sure, you can always backspace and hit TAB to make sure that it's locked in. So I'll hit Save here and I'll minimize that because we're most likely going to be jumping into that again. And when we go to Keynote, Keynote Settings, we can go ahead and reload our Keynotes.
And now we can add that Keynote, our Elevation Keynote, which is the Metal Panel Column Wrap into here after the fact. So since we'll be modifying these Keynote Settings over and over and over again, I figured it's appropriate to throw in a hot tip here. And so if you click into the workspace and hit KS on your keyboard, it'll pop up the Keyboard Shortcut Settings.
And what we can do is I can add a keyboard shortcut for something that we use a lot, like in this case, going in and out of the Keynote Settings seems like something we're going to do a lot. And so what I like to do is if I can, I'll use the same key twice just because it's faster. We can assign KK to the Keynote Settings and hit OK.
And so now every time I hit KK on the keyboard, it pops up the Keynote Settings. I can hit reload and then we can move on and keep rocking and rolling with our Keynote adding. So remember Create Similar is also a tool that we can use all the time, especially when we're using User Keynotes again.
And so this one will be Elevation Storefront Door per Schedule. And then let's say you had a Keynote where you're going to note something that's in the background, right? So like this here is the skylight that's beyond, but it's not really in the foreground, but we want to make sure that that's noted. So I can add this Keynote, which is going to be Elevation 02.
And if I wanted to add the modifier that just says "beyond, " it's as simple as it gets—just adding text using that TX keyboard shortcut or going to Annotate and picking Text. But that's it. We can just add those notes.
And so if I wanted to note like a material that was pretty far in the background, like this one here, I could do the same thing using again our Material Keynotes to call out the ACM1, which this one's not so bad. We don't really need to do that. And that gives us our Keynote setup.
And so yeah, I can use my Create Similar to grab my User Keynotes. I can use the Create Similar to grab my Material Keynotes, and it's going to know which one I used before. So I'm just going to add another one, just kind of calling this out as a Storefront.
And then now you can see here, we've added a few Keynotes to the East Elevation. And I can go in and I can say, okay, well, since I did add this gigantic ACM1 note, and now we're needing to make some adjustments, I'll have to go in here and kind of slide this over so that we have one full column in there. So it doesn't return to the next line, because that will be problematic.
Okay, so something to always check back in on—making sure that this looks the way that you want it to. And then as you're going through and adding more of those Keynotes, you can start to see how this is going to get modified. You know, if you add more, the list is going to get longer.
And so just keeping those things in mind as you're going through and annotating the project.
