Learn how to optimize and improve the quality of your building elevation graphics through adjusting the visual styles and graphic display options. Discover methods to create high contrast elevations, apply view templates, and adjust graphic overrides to suit the needs of each project view.
Key Insights
- Enhancing the visual quality of building elevations involves manipulating settings such as silhouettes and depth queuing to create heavier lines in the foreground and lighter lines in the background to create a sense of depth and contrast.
- View templates can be created from these adjusted settings to efficiently apply these graphic settings across all elevations. However, these templates control the view and override individual visibility and graphic settings.
- Despite the efficiency of view templates, certain settings, such as depth queuing, may need to be customized for individual elevation views depending on the specific requirements of each project. This customization can be achieved by unchecking the box for that setting in the view template, allowing for per view adjustments under graphic overrides.
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Now that we have them set up the way we want, we can go in and I can actually start to mess with the graphics a little bit. And so I'll go down into my visual styles and then graphic display options here. And I can make a couple of changes, and these are quick little changes that I can make to help with making my elevations look a little bit better.
So one of the ones that I like to do is I like to set silhouettes to wide lines, and this is going to give me a heavy line around the building here. And then the next thing I can do within that, and this is also located here as well, is I can set my depth queuing, which will give me the ability to have heavier lines in the front and lighter gray lines in the background. And so to get the most contrast out of this, what I can do is I can kind of adjust this fade limit.
If you have it all the way down to the lightest point here, it tends to fade out pretty quick. But what I'll do is I'll have the near, which means my darkest lines close to the far. So there'll be a quick fall off between the two.
If I set it to like 19, something like that, and every view is going to be different depending on where your elevation is located. But if I were to go ahead and hit apply, you can see it starts to fall off some of those things in the back. And if I make it even more extreme, it'll take it back even further.
And so each view is going to be maybe a little different. And so the trick is to find a setting that works well for all your views across the project to save you a little bit of time on that management end. And so I'll hit okay here.
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And then what I could do is I can, since this is essentially the graphics settings that I want for my view, other than having the crop region on, which isn't a huge deal, but I can go ahead and turn that off, is I can go ahead now and I can say for my east elevation, if I right click on it, I can say create view template from view. And then at this point, I can call it my elevations or architectural elevations. Actually, we'll call it building elevations because I think there's already one called architectural elevations and yep, there is C and making sure all these boxes are checked so that everything gets applied across all the elevations and I'll hit okay.
And then now I can apply that view template to these three views here. And I'll actually apply it to all four in this setting here. And when I do that, what's important to note now is that this view and all my elevation views are now controlled by the view template and not controlled by visibility and graphic override.
See how it's all grayed out. And that's because I need to go here and then to my visibility graphic overrides to make any changes. And that's a good thing and a bad thing.
Bad thing because you just get so used to doing that and then you see it and you go, oh, I got to go to the view template. But it's not that big of a deal and it definitely saves you a ton of time in the long run because when you look, now I've got these all set up. And so you can see here, this is a great example of how that graphic override for the depth queuing just did not work out for us.
And it works out pretty well on the East and West elevations, but the North and South, not so much because those elevations are much further away from the building than these two are. And so what we could do is going back to our elevation views, I can actually say if I go to the North elevation here, I can go into the view template and where it says depth queuing. I can uncheck this box, which is going to divorce this setting from the view template for our building elevations.
And then now I have the ability to go into the graphic overrides and depth queuing and have the settings however I want per view. And that's the way I recommend doing it because now we can customize it to work for each one of our elevation views. And so East and West look good.
It was just really North and South that needed a lot of help. And so we'll fix those. And again, this is tough to just give you a good setting that you want to use all the time because there's a lot of factors that go in to how that was created.
And so you want to make sure that you're just going in, double checking and making sure it looks the way you want it to. Now that we have all of the elevation views set up and ready to go, we're going to go ahead and create the sheets and put those views on sheets.
