Discover how to enhance your architectural drafting skills by learning how to add notes and keynotes to your elevations. This tutorial offers practical instructions for documenting various materials, noting mullions, and understanding the impacts of adding certain materials like concrete.
Key Insights
- The tutorial provides a detailed method of adding material keynotes and user keynotes to elevations, which is essential in documenting different materials used in an architectural project.
- Adding keynotes for specific elements like mullions is also discussed in depth, with emphasis on careful execution to avoid potential errors.
- Particularly with materials like concrete, understanding the impacts of adding the material is important, as it can influence other elements of the project such as slabs on different levels. The tutorial suggests duplicating the material and assets to avoid unwanted fill patterns or surface patterns.
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Now I'm going to jump down to the north Elevation, which is the other view on sheet A401, and we're going to do some more of the same. So I can do my Material Keynotes, which we have pretty well set up for us already here, right? I can add a few of these. I can have them organized and oriented in however method that I am trying to, and you can see it can be a little frustrating here, trying to get these things to line up.
But all you got to do is move it closer, and then it'll cooperate a little bit more. And then we can add like, say, the ACM one here, and the Glazing notes as well. This is a Keynote for an element, so I have to hit ESCAPE a couple times, and I can say, go back to User Keynote to note that I'm column wrap there.
And then this portion is actually open. So just like we did on the Floor Plan, how we drew those detail lines and added that with, I think we used the overhead line style. We can do that same thing on the Elevation, because it does clearly note that there's not a new material there.
And then I can just drop that in, and we can see how that all works out. And so same kind of system here, I can use the GL1 note. I can add that Keynote for the other one, and then we can go over here, and there'll be more notes for the way that this gets annotated for the GL1 and GL2, which you can see this one didn't have GL2 set up for the glazing yet, but now that I've got it all set up, everything's all ready to go.
But the idea is that you're just going in and adding notes to document the different materials that we have. And so like this one is a concrete wall, so if I give it the Material Note for concrete, it'll set that up. And then I also noticed that the pattern's not necessarily set on that wall, because the concrete material probably doesn't have that set up.
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And it's important when you're doing something like this, especially with the concrete material, to understand the impacts of where if I just go in and graphics and add the material, you know, I really need to understand where this material is being used, because it's probably being used for like our slabs as well on Level One and Level Two, and if those don't have a finish applied on top of them, then we're going to end up in a situation where we're going to add a fill pattern or surface pattern where we don't necessarily want to. So I'm going to go ahead and right-click and duplicate the material and assets, and then I will note this as Cast in Place Gray for Walls. And I left it caps so that you can clearly see that this is for walls only, but I can still apply that surface pattern to it so that we can see it in Elevation.
And this is another one of those ones we can evaluate as we go down the line, but we might want to lower the color of that one, because it will be pretty dark and in your face on that one. So you can see where we have our concrete walls located, we now have that pattern on these two guys here for concrete. So back to the Elevations, just taking advantage of my tabbed browsing here, and I'm just going to add a few more notes.
So just making sure I'm getting everything kind of documented clearly here so you can see what's being noted. I'm obviously not going super crazy with it because that's just not necessary, but it is good to have one or two throughout so that it's clearly known and shown what materials are being used where. And so we'll do the same thing on A402, and like the amount of notes that you want to add, that's up to you. If you want to have a whole bunch of them or you don't want to have a bunch, then you can.
I'm just kind of cleaning up our ground line here a little bit, but you definitely want to make sure you're putting enough of these on here so that it's clearly communicated which materials are being used where. So I'll start with our Material Notes, kind of running across the top here. I've got my ACM material, we've got some notes for our glass here, and it looks like I'm missing a mullion there, which is odd, but popped it back in, no problem.
Using again our favorite tool that is Create Similar, and same thing here, this one might not have a mullion here, but getting those in there is important. It's kind of that QC-as-you-go sort of thing, where you're still checking and making sure everything is coming in correctly. And then we can continue on with the Material Note theme, and we've been using the leader, but you definitely don't have to.
You could use, like in these panels that are kind of in the middle here, I could go ahead and add these notes in. So in that case there, all I did was double-click on it on accident, and it took me to Edit the Family. We've used this process before a few times, but I was just trying to grab the move option here, so I could line those up.
And so you can see that's one way to note the glazing and get those lined up through there. So again, like I said, more of the same. We can use the Material Notes, or we could use the User Keynotes depending on which elements are being annotated.
And there's a couple of Keynotes that I want to go ahead and add here, since we haven't really been noting the Keynotes for our window mullions. We've got mullions here, we've got corner mullions, and so we can add those into our Elevation setup. And so we're going to add an EP05, and this will be Curtain Wall Mullion 2.5 inch by 8 inch.
And remember, always got to hit TAB and type that in. I don't think I can say that enough. E06 is going to be our smaller one that we use, and that's 1.5 inches by 2.5 inches.
And then E07 will be our standard one, which is 2.5 × 5 inch. So one thing you'll notice is this thing does not spell check for you, so you're going to want to be pretty careful as you go through and type these in. And then the last one I'm going to do is E08, Curtain Wall Mullion, and this will be our Curtain Wall Corner Mullions.
And then again, adding that reference back to the parent. So by adding all of those, I can just hit Save here. And then remember our new trick, hitting KK on the keyboard, hitting Reload, and then now we're ready to go.
So I can come in now, and I'm going to move this guy out of the way, or just down a little bit. But I can look at the different mullions I've used, like 2.5 × 5 rectangular. This one's clearly a corner mullion, so I can go in and I can, using a User Keynote, I can add Keynotes for those mullions here.
There's another way too that we can do this, and it does come with its downsides. You can see I missed one of them, which no big deal, we can go back and fix that. But we can add to the type here, which is this rectangular mullion. I can add what's called an Element Keynote.
And so just like we've done with the materials, we can add a Type Keynote or Element Keynote specifically to this one. If I were to go in and say that is actually Keynote E07, then I can get that one set up by using Element Keynote, and it does the same thing where I don't have to go in and add them. So it does help remove the element of human error, but it also does introduce it as well, because if I were to do Element Keynote and accidentally miss it, say here, right, and then I'm adding E07 to what is now this piece, then now my glass panels, or whichever thing I grabbed there, is now Keynote E07 when it really shouldn't be.
So that's just something to keep in mind when you're using Element Keynotes. I would always be a little cautious with that. It does have a lot of benefits for sure.
So like I'm using an Element Keynote, and I just have to make sure that when I go to place it, that I'm actually placing a Keynote on the element that I want it to be. So in this case, it's E08. And now that you've seen me open the Keynote dialog a handful of times and notice that that E06 was off kilter there, I'm gonna go ahead and fix it for you so we don't all have to suffer together anymore.
And it was really just a matter of not having an appropriate TAB. So I'll double-check them all, hit Save, and then go into my Reload Keynotes. And there we go.
Now we've got different Keynotes added for that. I can add a User Keynote for the skylight again. And we can add that "beyond" text so that it's known that that thing's way back there because it is pretty far in this case.
And that's, again, another Elevation that has been annotated. And we'll kind of repeat that same process with the same level of detail for our south Elevation.
