Explore the power of 3D views in design communication and coordination with this insightful article. Learn how to navigate the software, utilize 3D orbit, and employ the section box for effective visualization and collaboration.
Key Insights
- The default 3D view is an essential tool in design communication, useful for showcasing the model to clients, consultants, or even within your office.
- Enhance your navigation with 3D orbit, which allows rotation around any selected element, offering a more comprehensive view of the model.
- The section box is a powerful tool for clipping the building either horizontally or vertically, allowing for an in-depth examination of interstitial spaces and creating visually appealing floor plans.
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Before we create our 3D views, I'd like to take us back into what's called Tabbed Views instead of Tile Views. So from our View tab, instead of Tile Views, which is what we're in right now, we'll go back to Tab Views, and it puts everything back together at the top here. So I'm going to go to Level 1, and I don't need the section view open anymore, so I can just close that as well.
And we'll start by looking at our default 3D view, which will be your primary tool for looking at things in 3D. This is a great tool for communicating your design to clients, consultants, or even coordinating within your office to just look at the model and see what things are going to look like. To access this view, we're going to go to the default 3D view in the quick launch bar here, and our 3D view will pop up.
And so we have a few options here for how we can navigate this view. The same rules apply as before. I can also zoom in and zoom out with the wheel.
I can double-click the wheel to Zoom Extents, and I can also pan, but one thing that we have that's going to be new is we can now 3D orbit. If I hold the Shift key and move the wheel around, you can see I can orbit around the model now. What's great about this is if I were to select this door, I could zoom in on the door.
With the door selected, it becomes the new center of rotation, and I can do that with any element. So let's say I wanted to rotate around this window here. I could select the window, and I can 3D orbit around the window.
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So 3D views are awesome, and I use these all the time to help communicate the design or even to look at what I've created to make sure that it's matching with our design intent. One of the things I use quite a bit with 3D views is the section box. If I just hit Escape a couple of times to make sure I don't have anything selected, I can go into my properties palette, and I'm looking for Section Box.
With Section Box, I can check the box here, and it will create a box that will allow me to clip the building either horizontally or vertically. So I could say, let's see what it looks like if we cut it this way. And this is a great tool for looking at interstitial space, especially if you have a Revit model from a structural or mechanical engineer loaded in, because then you can see where the beams are going and how it relates to ductwork, and maybe even light fixtures and things like that, and you can clip it.
It also creates a very cool visual for being able to look at, say, the floor plan. So I'm just bringing this in a little closer. That was a little too close there.
A little closer so we can see what it looks like in plan view. If you weren't sure, if you have a client or need to show this to somebody who doesn't necessarily have the ability to visualize the 3D space very well, you can create a plan like this using the Section Box. And so we can do that throughout the different levels.
It's also useful, as mentioned before, for examining interstitial spaces. So this is the space between Level 1 and Level 2 here. And I can adjust it further to see what Level 1 looks like in 3D.
So it's just one of the many tools at our disposal. We can also adjust the visibility and graphic overrides here. So I could say, let's go to shaded, and it's going to show some of the colors and the materials of the different elements on the plan.
We can add shadows as well. There's a whole host of different things that we're going to do. And we'll explore that with our next 3D view type, which is going to be a perspective view.
