Creating Interior Elevations with View Templates and Masking Regions in Revit

So I'm gonna use this women's east elevation as my guideline for my view template. And the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and hide in category my sections so that those no longer show up. And then I'm gonna go ahead and just make an adjustment just slightly here.

And we're gonna need to do this on all the views, unfortunately, but it'll pay off as we go through. And so I wanna make the crop region just a little bit larger than what we're seeing here. And so that doesn't really have a big impact on our view template settings, but it is something we're gonna have to do in every view.

So I figured while we're here, we might as well jump in and get that to look correct. So that's what we're looking for here. I'm not gonna need to see the level two tag, but I do wanna see the level one.

So I don't necessarily wanna hide that yet. And it could be something we remove, but I think we're gonna be okay with that staying in there for right now. So with the elevation, or I'm sorry, with the section tag hidden, we can go into view templates, and then we can create template from current view.

And we can call this one interior elevations. And that looks good there. And then we'll do the same thing we did before, where we'll go ahead and assign the view template to all the interior elevations.

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And then we'll also go into the type and assign it to the type so that any new views will have this applied. And then you can see here, they all kind of have the same setup now. And let's say I wanted to make a change like hiding the levels in category.

Then I can go into my view template where it says interior elevations. And then I can go into my annotation elements here. And I can go to levels.

And if I turn off levels and hit okay, since all these views have the same view template, you can see that they all no longer have the levels on. And so you can see the benefit to having the view template assigned to these views. And it's totally worth that minor inconvenience of not being able to quickly jump into visibility and graphic overrides.

Now I'm gonna show you the trick that I've been using for probably far too long because it feels like Autodesk should have come up with a better solution to this, but it keeps working. And so I see no reason to change. So what we'll do is we're gonna go to our annotate tab.

And then I wanna grab a masking region, not a filled region, because we don't want a pattern here, but a masking region. And I'm gonna draw two lines. So the first line is gonna represent the border of our elevation.

So this is gonna be our wide line here. And I'm just gonna use a rectangle in this case, but I'm gonna go from like our wall here all the way to the wall on the other side and then all the way down to the floor. And this line right here would represent our ceiling height.

And I'm just gonna call it nine feet since we haven't really drawn in any ceilings or anything like that yet. But that's what that's gonna represent here. And the next line I'm gonna draw is gonna be an invisible type.

So I'll change it to invisible lines and then I'll just draw a rectangle outside of that, kind of like you see here. And so this is essentially creating a little punch opening for us to see this portion of the elevation. So you'll see when I click finish the sketch, I now have this punched opening here with a bold line that shows my elevation.

Now, in this case, what I need to do is I need to go ahead and adjust my crop region so that we don't see all that other stuff there. But that's essentially what we're looking for when we do this type of elevation work. It gives us the ability to draw in the border of the elevation pretty quickly.

A couple of things to keep in mind, this is not a parametric element. If you make a change or move a wall or anything like that, you gotta go back and adjust your elevation. If for some reason you didn't use a nine foot ceiling and you ended up using a 10 foot ceiling, then you guessed it, you gotta go back and adjust your elevation.

But this looks significantly nicer already than this one here. So I think it's worth the effort. It's not really too bad.

And it's one of those things once you get on a roll, you really end up going pretty quickly. And so what I'll do is I'll just turn off my crop region now since I don't need to see that anymore. And I can get a pretty good look at what my interior elevation is gonna look like.

Also identify that, I've got a little bit more space to work with now so I can sort of adjust these more so I can maybe put some tags down below or whatever it may be. But I've given myself more space to work by making those adjustments. So I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing to all the other views, just using a nine foot line across the top for our ceilings.

And I'll go ahead and show you on one more and then we'll go ahead and pause the video and you can do the rest of them on your own as well. So same thing, I'm gonna activate the view. And remember, this is our crop region here.

So I'm just gonna pop it out a little bit all the way around so I can see everything in there. And then I'm gonna create that masking region starting with my first rectangle, which is just gonna be the large one on the outside. And the reason I'm doing that is because it's already set to invisible lines.

So I'll just draw the larger one here and then I'll change the type to wide lines and draw the interior one with that goes up to the nine foot ceiling in here like that. And so you can see just a couple of steps and we have it all set. And now obviously I need to adjust that crop region again.

And there we go. And I can turn off the crop region like we did on the other one as well. And then we can just rinse and repeat on the rest of the six elevations that we have to do.

Now that I'm on the last one here, you can see I've already gone through and set these up. I thought it would be fair enough now that you've suffered through the first part that I would show you the quick tip. And this doesn't always work, but it is something that you can do to get that crop region in.

So this is pretty much the same elevation, it's just reversed. So I can actually copy that filled region and I can just paste it randomly since it's not gonna line up cause they're not in the same orientation. But then I can move this annotation element to one of the bottom corners, like say right here.

And that gives me the crop region we're looking for. So instead of drawing it brand new every single time, you may get lucky enough with your view type that you can just copy it from view to view. The other thing I wanted to show you is if you didn't go through and turn off the crop regions together, you can go ahead and select, like see these are the four that I didn't turn it off in.

I can go ahead and I can turn off this crop region visible without activating each of the views individually and go through and have it set up that way. The last bit here is this one by pulling it further away, it ended up showing one of the grids. And so we know that by modifying the view template under the annotation and then grids, I can turn off grids in the elevation view if I wanted to and it would turn off in all the views.

And if for some reason a grid started showing up in another one, then we wouldn't have to worry about it. So the last thing I'm gonna do, just a minor graphics thing, but I'm just gonna bump up the women's restroom elevations from the bottom just a little bit so that we can see things better. And now we've gone through and we've got our enlarged plan and elevation sheet all blocked out and we're ready to start adding in our annotations, things like room tags and all that stuff.