Master the art of assessing and adjusting 3D models for printing with this instructional guide. Learn how to troubleshoot ghost lines, check dimensions, and ensure your print settings are correct for an optimum result.
Key Insights
- Before printing a 3D model, it's crucial to double-check for errors. Misalignments such as ghost lines and incorrect dimensions can occur. These can be corrected by adjusting the underlay view and using the tab function to correct measurements respectively.
- Careful attention should be given to print settings. Correct paper size, zoom, paper placement, and orientation can significantly impact the final output. The guide recommends using the arch E1 paper size (30 by 42), setting the zoom to 100, paper placement to center, and ensuring the orientation is set to landscape.
- Reviewing the final print is as important as checking the model. Sometimes, errors can be caught in the PDF review that might have been missed in the software. It's crucial to double-check all details and reprint if necessary before submission.
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So before we print, we want to just do a double check and make sure that everything looks the way we want it to. So I'm just going to go through and quickly kind of scan the model and make sure that we have everything looking the way we want. And as I'm coming over to level two, I can kind of see that we have some doors showing through here, and it looks like there's walls ghosted below.
We want to address that because that won't be a good look for our floor plan. So I'm going to double click to activate the view. And I'm going to go over into my view properties here.
And I can see underlay here that it's turned on to look down at level one. If I set this to none, and when I move my mouse over, you can see it removes those ghosted lines. And what was happening is we had the underlay set so that you can see down below to level one.
And so we want to make sure we make that adjustment. The other thing we want to do is we want to make sure the dimensions that we copied from level one to level two actually copied the way we want them to. So I'm going to go through and I can see already there's a couple that got a little weird.
So I can see that this is ninety-nine one and five-eighths instead of one hundred. And that's because it looks like the extent of both of these ended up going to the center of the wall instead of the outside face. So I can grab this dot here and I can drag it over and using tab, I can hit that point.
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I'll do the same thing with this one here, hitting tab and letting it go across. And so I can see now I now have a 100-foot dimension. Since we did the same for the roof, I'm going to go ahead and double-check that and make sure those all look good.
And they do. Now we are ready to print. So to print, if you remember, we'll go to file print.
And then I'm using the Adobe PDF because that happens to be the driver that I have. But if you have to use one of the ones from the resources tab, make sure that you do so you can print properly to scale, as the ones that come with Windows may not have the correct sheet size loaded. Next, we'll go ahead and set it up.
So I'll go into setup here and we want to set our paper size to be the arch E1 paper size. And if you don't have arch E1 on your paper size, it'll be 30" × 42, which is the size we're looking for, as that's the title block size we're using.
And then I'm going to set my zoom to 100, make sure paper placement is set to center. And then the last thing I would do is double-check that we're in landscape. Next, ensure that unreferenced view tags are hidden.
If you drew some sections or elevations throughout that didn't end up on the sheet, you're going to want to make sure that those are not showing up on your final print because they'll just clutter the view. So I'll click OK. Click Preview.
And it's going to automatically change to a raster print, which is fine since we're using shadows and a shaded view. So just hit close there and then it'll bring up your print preview. And this seems to look good.
I'm getting some weird colors here, but I think that's just the print driver. So I'll hit print. It opens the print window.
Then click OK and I'm going to save it into my folder. And so this is the BIM 101 Project 2 with my first and last name. It will process the print here.
And it opened up my PDF. And this is where I'll do my final check. So I'll make sure I've got my entire title block all filled out and that I've got all the information that I'm looking for.
So sometimes you catch things when you're reviewing it on the PDF that you don't necessarily when you're reviewing it in Revit. And so this will be the time you'll want to double-check and make sure everything looks good. If it's not looking good, then you'll want to reprint it and get it ready to be submitted.
