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 up together on the top here. So I'm going to go to level one, and I don't need the section view open anymore, so I could just close that too.
And we're going to start off by looking at our default 3D view, which is pretty much going to be your workhorse for looking at things in 3D. This is a great tool for communicating your design to clients or to consultants or even coordinating within your office to just look at the model and see what things are going to look like. To get to 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 zoom in and zoom out with the wheel.
I can double-click the wheel to zoom extents, and I can pan, but one thing that we have that's going to be new is we can actually 3D orbit. If I hold the shift key and then press and move the wheel around, you can see I can orbit around the model now. And what's cool about that is if I were to say select this door, I could zoom in on the door.
With the door selected, that becomes the new center of my rotation, and I could 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. And so if I were to just hit escape a couple 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 really good tool for going in and say looking at interstitial space, especially if you have a Revit model from a structural engineer 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 that we can see what it looks like in plan. 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 could create a plan like this by using the section box. And so we can do that throughout the different levels.
It's also good, like I mentioned before, for looking at some of the interstitial space. So this is the space between level one and level two here. And I can take it down even further so that we can start seeing what level one looks like in 3D.
So it's just one of the many tools at our disposal. We can also go in and adjust some of the visibility and graphic overrides in 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. There's a whole host of different things that we're going to do. And we can take a look at that with our next 3D view type, which is going to be a perspective view.
