Refining Graphics for Area Plans: Hiding Elements and Adding Color Fill

Now we're going to go ahead and refine the graphics a bit. So one of the things that we could do for area plans is we can hide a few elements. So it's not necessary to have things like sections and grid lines on here because really the point of this plan is to just highlight the area that we're calculating and also we want to be able to highlight what the boundary of that area is.

So it's kind of hard to tell that this is the boundary line but if we add a color fill to this plan based on the area then it'll be really easy to see. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to peel back some of the items that we don't need to see and we can do that a couple different ways. So one way is we can go up to an element like say grid lines, we don't want grid lines.

I can right click, hide in view and since I want to hide all of the grids I can say by category here. Remember if I do elements it'll only hide grid line C which is the one I right clicked on. We want to do hide in view by category and then it'll hide all of the grids.

So that's one way we could do it or we could go to our visibility graphic overrides which is keyboard shortcut VV and from here we can jump to our annotation categories and I can go through and say okay what do I not want to see here. So an example of that would be elevations. I can turn those off and another one that I see in our plan that we don't want is sections and I jumped quickly to the S section there just by hitting S on my keyboard and we'll turn that off and hit okay.

And so now we have the sections and the elevations removed. Next thing I can do here is I can go ahead and turn on my crop region and it looks pretty good already. I can probably tighten it up just a bit but this is pretty close to what we'll need.

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And the last part will be to apply the color fill and to do that we can either add the color fill legend or we can just assign a color scheme. So since we're only going to have one color here the legend doesn't make a lot of sense. We can go ahead and use the color scheme and I can assign gross building area the color as we know from previous lessons is completely customizable so we can make it whatever color we want.

I'll stick with the default one I have no issues with that but if you wanted to change it go right ahead and we'll hit okay. And now we have our color scheme. So a couple of things that we could do with this is right now it's set to the background so if I didn't want to see the furniture as prominent as it's shown right now I could change my color scheme from background to foreground and if I'm still having issues being able to see everything here you know kind of moving these guys around what I could do is I could go in and I can decide to halftone some of these elements so if I wanted to halftone furniture systems and furniture we could do that from visibility graphic overrides I think what we have here looks pretty good so we're going to go ahead and stick with that.

Now instead of going through all of those same processes that we just did on level two we can actually just apply a view template based on this view here. If I go to my view tab we have the view template options and what I could do is I can say create view template from current view and I'll give it a name and I can just say gross area we'll call it gross area plan and that way you know exactly what it's being used for. We'll hit okay gross area plan these are all the things that I want to include with it so we've made changes to visibility graphic overrides annotation categories and we also added a color scheme and adjusted the color scheme settings so those are things that we definitely want to include here as well as scale and detail level and you'll want to check it doesn't necessarily apply to this case but you'll definitely want to check these if they're not necessarily applicable to all the views but just one of them.

So I've had that happen sometimes with view scale if you have say wall sections or building sections that might be in a different scale or details for instance then you may not want to include the view scale in most cases you will though. So I'll hit okay now we have a view template that we can assign so I could do two things I can go ahead and first I can have it assigned to this specific view here by setting it to where it says view template I can go ahead and say gross area plan and so now the visibility graphic overrides and pretty much all the settings you see here will be controlled by the view template so when we look at the properties you can see everything is grayed out now and that's because the view template that we set here is going to control all of those visibility parameters. I can go to level two and do the same thing assigning it the gross area plan view template and you can see all the changes that we made before take place and we'll just do the last part here which is making sure our crop region is appropriate and it was pretty good already but we'll just tighten it up a little bit to make sure everything's good to go.

Now we have our gross area plan for level one and level two. Next thing we need to do is get the sheet ready and create our schedule.