Learn how to create effective floor plans by mastering the use of view templates and visibility settings in BIM software. This tutorial guides you through the steps of setting up a view template and applying it to your floor plans, enhancing the clarity and precision of your building design.
Key Insights
- The tutorial outlines the process of setting up floor plans in BIM, starting with checking the scale and setting up the graphic details to suit the project's needs. Critical elements include different wall types and other structural details.
- Efficiency is emphasized through the use of view templates. These allow the user to apply pre-set graphics settings to multiple views, eliminating the need for continual adjustments. This method also ensures consistency across different floor plans within the same project.
- The tutorial emphasizes the importance of visibility settings in maintaining a clean and uncluttered floor plan. Unnecessary elements, such as room separators and sections, can be hidden from view, allowing for a focused and efficient design process.
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I'm gonna use this first floor plan as my template for how I want this thing to look. So there's a few things that we're gonna do. Number one, we're gonna check the scale.
Scale looks good, we want it at quarter inch. Then we're just gonna kinda go down the line here. Our detail level, we're gonna set to medium.
So, you know, where we do have different wall types, we can start to see the different layers within those walls on this plan here. And then the third thing we'll do is evaluate what is showing on the view and make sure that's what we want to see. We're seeing our overall building sections here and I'm gonna go ahead and turn those off.
And so what I can do is I can just right click and I can say hide in view by category. And so any sections that get created from here on are not gonna show up in this view because the category is hidden. If you were to just hide by element, then if you went in and created another section, it would pop up and you'd just be chasing your tail constantly and over and over and over again.
And nobody wants to do that. So these are the graphic things that we're looking at. Another thing that I like to do with these kinds of things is I wanna see if there's anything else that we need to show on this view.
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And that's something that we'll kinda dive into a little bit later, but it might be nice to see like a dash line where the extents of the floor above exists. So right now it just kinda looks like the stairs just floating off into space. The other thing I'm seeing here is, from a hide by category standpoint is the room separators.
You can see they're both showing on level two and on level one, and we don't need to see those anymore. The rooms have already been established. We don't need to worry about that.
So I'm gonna go and right click and I'm gonna say hide in view by category. So same principle, it's hidden in view by category. We're not gonna be able to see it again.
And then the other part that we wanna make sure of is that we've got the grids and everything in the right location. And it's just a cleanup deal, right? It's not like it's gonna have an impact on all of our views, but it's always just something you wanna make sure you're doing as you're going through, because if you set it up now, you don't have to worry about it later. So all the elements that I just discussed seem to look correct for this view right now.
And at this point we can go in and we can create our view template. So just like we did for the wall sections, what I'll do is I'll go to view templates and then I'll click on view templates and create template from view. And using the same standard where we turn CapsLock on, I'm gonna say enlarged floor plans.
And I know that this is one that I created and I see I made a typo, but no big deal because we can just fix that. So enlarged floor plans. And like I said before, this is one that we created.
We want to put it in all caps so that when we go into that view template setup, we can see right away that that's one of ours. And then as you go through the project, you start to identify ones that aren't gonna be used by us and you can start clearing them out. So I'll go ahead and hit okay here cause we're gonna accept all the categories.
And then we can go in and we can assign the view template to these views. We can do that two different ways. We can assign it through the properties here or we can right click and we can say apply view template and we can pick it and hit okay.
And so what that does is it applies the settings to the view template. Now, if you want it to be permanently applied to it, then you can go into where it says view template, click on this guy right here where it says none, and then we can assign the view template to that view. Now, the other part to this, to make sure that we continuously use that view template is we can go into the enlarged floor plan type and then we can say the view template to apply to new views.
So then we can go ahead and assign it in here. And then if we make sure that it says new views are dependent upon that template, then going forward, they'll always be dependent on it and you'll see it in that view template setting under identity data. So this is one of those things that a lot of people will complain about just generally because before we're so used to just going into visibility graphic overrides to make changes and it doesn't let you do anything in here.
And that's because it's all controlled by the view template. And so you just have to get yourself into the habit of going to the view template, going into visibility graphic overrides here or any of the other categories and adjusting it from the template instead of doing it view specifically from each one of these views. And then that's assuming that the changes you're making are something that you want to have occur on all of the enlarged floor plans.
So keeping in mind that the view template was applied, but it's also going to impact other views that it's been applied to. And to double check that, to see how many views it's been applied to, we can go back to the view tab and we can go to manage view templates. And I can go to my enlarged floor plans.
And you can see here at the top, it says number of views this template is assigned and it's saying one. It's actually more than one. And we'll double check that to make sure it's two because it should be two.
But it'll be as many as we assign in that setup. And the same thing if I go to the wall sections, you can see it's set to zero because we didn't actually assign it to those, we just applied it. But that will show you if these are set up and applied to any views.
So our site plan is the one that we used in BIM 302. And we've got two views that are assigned to that one. So it's like as you go through, you can kind of see which ones, like our sections are being used.
And you can start to see which one of the templates are actually being used for this project. And so it's just kind of a cool way to be able to double check and see how templates are being used.
