Understanding how to navigate and manipulate views in a drafting project can greatly improve your efficiency and precision. This article delves into the details of managing multiple views, the function of the 'close hidden windows' option, and how to create and adjust view ranges in a floor plan.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to manage multiple views in a drafting project, highlighting the importance of regularly using the 'close hidden windows' option to maintain a clean and efficient workspace.
- An in-depth understanding of how views are created in a floor plan is provided, specifically, a horizontal slice of a building at a certain level which influences the visibility of different elements in the project.
- Finally, the article goes into detail about adjusting the view range in a floor plan, emphasizing the importance of keeping values within the top and bottom of the primary range and the view depth to avoid errors.
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Speaking of views, you can see in our project browser, we have level one, level two, and roof under floor plans, and then we have the same thing under ceiling plans, and then we have a few elevations. If I were to go in and, say, open up the east elevation, you can see that I've got level one and east from that project, and then I have from our previous lesson here, we've got our template project, which I can simply close. It's going to ask me if I want to save it, but I'll just say no because it was just used for an example.
And you can see here I've got these two views open. If I were to open up level two, I've got the different tab views open here, and I can even open up, say, another elevation or maybe the roof plan. And at this point, you're starting to see that we have a lot of different views open.
Well, this can be problematic because I've seen a lot of people where they just open up so many views that you can't even see them on this tab anymore. And so what you'll want to do is, as you go through, you're going to want to use this close hidden windows option. And this is great because it'll actually close all the windows that are behind it, but it won't close the project.
If I were to hit the X here with no other windows open, that would then close the project. If I were to hit the X here on the top right, that'll close the entire program down. So you can have multiple projects open at the same time, but if you do go ahead and close the application, it'll close all those projects at the same time.
Since we're on a floor plan view, I think it's appropriate to take a look at how this view is actually created. It's not as straightforward as, say, sections or elevations, which we'll look at a little bit later here, but it is important to understand because it has a good impact on the way your view looks. So I'm going to jump to level two because that'll give us a little bit more to look at when we make some adjustments here.
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And one of the things that we want to see is how the cut is established on a floor plan. So typically you'd be looking at creating a horizontal slice through a building. If I were to jump and look at the 3D view real quick, you can see here's our building here.
And essentially what we're doing is we're creating a horizontal slice through the building at about four to five feet above the level line of level two. And that's what's going to give us this view here. But you did notice here there was a canopy that we're not seeing, and that's just below the level line.
So there's some things that are happening here that are controlling the visibility of this view. If I were to click in the white space or just hit escape a few times, you can see that the properties palette and the type selector are showing floor plan and it's saying floor plan level two here. That means these properties are going to be associated with floor plan level two.
If I were to scroll down, then we can see our view range. Our view range is going to be an element that's going to determine how each one of these levels are being shown. And so the associated level for this view here is going to be level two.
And in level two, if I were to adjust, say, the cut plane to seven foot six, and I'm using 7.5, so that's seven and a half feet, because these units are going to be in feet. If you wanted to type seven foot six, you could do seven space six. So feet space inches, or you can simply do 7.5 like I did here.
Same result. If I were to hit okay, you can see that it's going to cut above most of our doors here. This one must be eight feet.
And they go away because they're no longer part of our view. They're down below it. So I'm going undo that.
And the same thing starts to happen if we adjust our bottom and our view depth. But the most important thing here when you're dealing with view range is you want to make sure that you keep your values within the top and the bottom, and then ultimately within the view depth. So I could not set my bottom within the primary range here.
I could not set that below view depth without getting an error. But if I did want to look below, I could say instead of saying level two here, I could change that to level one. And when I hit okay, you can see that that canopy starts to show up within the view.
In the next video, we're going to take a look at creating some new views, and we're also going to see what some of our actions have on making modifications to different elements within the model.
