Explore the process of enhancing building elevations to make them more visually appealing at a schematic design level, using the east elevation as a prototype. The article provides step-by-step instructions on adjusting grid lines, level lines, and 3D extents, and introducing elements such as a heavy line across the bottom and changing visual styles for more color definition.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to make building elevations more visually appealing by adjusting grid lines and level lines and using the east elevation as a prototype.
- By adjusting the 3D extents based on crop region and transforming them into 2D extents, you can freely move them without affecting their changes throughout the model. A heavy line at the bottom can be added using a filled region for a bolder look.
- The visual style of the elevation can be changed from wireframe to shaded for better color representation, with the option to adjust respective colors for different materials used in the construction.
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Now we're going to shift our attention to our building elevations and see what we can do to make these look a little bit more presentable. And there's a few things that we can do to just make them look more graphically pleasing at this, you know, schematic design level. What I'll do is I'm going to use the east elevation as our prototype.
If I go to east elevation here, I can then start to adjust it a little bit. And so one of the things that I want to do first is I want to take my grid lines, and I'd like to move them up above the plan so they're not cutting through the view. And I want to do the same thing with my level lines.
But the problem I'm going to run into is that the 3D extent is set. And so if I were to move them up above, like I just did there, and go back to one of my floor plans, you can see my number grid lines are gone. And so that's not something I want to do immediately.
But what I would need to do is adjust them based on where my crop region is. So I'm going to show my crop region. And then I can move that up and tighter to the building a bit.
And you'll notice when I bring it past the extent of the level lines, or even if I drop the grid lines down below, then what I'll do is it'll change them to 2D extents. And then I can freely move them without being worried about those extents being changed throughout the model. And so I'll do the same thing across the top.
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And what I like to do here is I like to move them just enough so that I get the line type in here. And I think that looks pretty good. We'll do the same thing with the level line.
I can take that and I can move this across freely now. And that way we get a clear picture of our building elevation. The next thing I'm going to do here is I like to have a heavy line across the bottom.
And the easiest way to do that is going to be with a filled region. We could use a really big, heavy detail line. But when we do that, it's kind of bubbly on the ends and it doesn't look that great.
So the best way I think is to use a filled region. And that's going to be from our annotate tab, region, or filled region here. And I can use the solid black type.
If I go to my type selector here, I can pick solid black. And what I'll do is I'll leave this as thin lines and I'll just take a rectangle and I'll draw the rectangle across the bottom here. And this varies depending on what your taste is, but you can adjust this if you want it really thick or if you want it just kind of medium.
But I'll set it to about a foot. I think that'll be an adequately bold line here. If I finish that, you can see we now have the bold line across the bottom.
And so I'll bring in my crop region again just to kind of tighten things up. And the next thing I'll do is you can see we have our section tag here. So I'll move that up to be a little closer, but it does cut all the way through the building.
And we can do this in the floor plan as well. You see there's like a break symbol here. So I could take that and I can adjust it so that it's just kind of touching the bottom and the top of the plan so we can see that there is a section there.
And so we're just cleaning up the view a bit. And if we wanted to, we can also change our visual style, which is we've been messing with the detail level quite a bit, which we could advance to find because it gives us more info on the door. But we can also change our visual style from just wireframe to shaded.
And when we go to shaded, what that'll do is it'll change our colors of these objects here into what is called out into our materials. And so you can see the glass is a pretty aggressive blue color. And then the brick is also kind of a muted red-brown color.
We might want to consider changing those. Before we do that, though, we want to look at a couple of visual settings and kind of see how that pans out. And then we'll go ahead and make those color changes.
